EMDR as it is… Sensing and Perceiving
In the second installment of EMDR as it is… we will take a look at a day in the life of a fruit fly. In part one we met the single celled Euglena who taught us about the role information processing has in coordinating our sensory experience with movement. We asked, “What might the fact that it has direct contact with its environment teach us about how we might imagine the innate healing system found in EMDR?”
We as a whole organism are embedded in our environment and experience it directly and indirectly ( mental modeling). Like the Euglena though, we retain the ability for direct contact via molecular and neural based functions that go on without us. On the inside, as described by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, unmyelinated neural circuits of the brain stem and spinal cord have direct contact with molecules in the body proper. On the outside, neuroscientist, Michael Graziano, has studied peripersonal neurons that sense what is beyond our body to help us move in the dark without running into things. All this information processing we don’t know is going on is part of what we access in EMDR.
When we talk of the robustness of EMDR therapy, we are talking about the way that causal properties at every level play a role in positive outcomes. How these causal properties work within each level and between levels. You may already know that EMDR involves bilateral sensory stimulation (BLS). As the name (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) suggests, eye movements are part of the therapy. In recent decades tactile and auditory bilateral sensory stimulation have also been used. However, the bulk of the outcome studies have involved eye movements. There are many studies to consider from the EMDR literature and beyond to account for why sensory stimulation is related to memory consolidation. None are conclusive as to why sensory stimulation is a primary feature of EMDR methods. However, I would like to see what the fruit fly might teach us.
Drosophila melangaster
What can a fruit fly teach us about the role sensing and perceiving has in EMDR? We all need to connect to our environment to meet our needs for living. The concept of an umwelt captures how each organism does this uniquely given its structure and functions. We sense and move towards what is good for by making meaning out of our experience. You may think of meaning making as reserved for humans. Or something separate and above our day to day bodily experiences. However, our ability to gather information and organize it into perceptions we can use to guide or behavior is a meaning making process. We do this through subjective information processing system. It is key to understanding how trauma, learning, and cultural accommodation (all things that contribute to disconnection) create context dependent features we work on in therapy. That is, what matters to us depends on what our umwelt looks like. Since our lives are so complex, I like to break some of it down by imagining drosophila’s life.
In Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown’s text “Did my neurons make me do it?”, they describe the research of neurobiologist and geneticist, Martin Heisenberg, that focused on the body saccades of fruit flies. As a fruit fly darts back an forth their eyes quickly shift where they are focused. This allows the fly to take samples (gather information) of 3 important things, 1. what is out there, 2. where is the fly, 3. how is the flies behavior getting closer or further away from it’s goal. We can see at a much smaller scale in the fruit fly, how control of our sense organs and attention comprise information gathering resources. They call this “trying on behavior”. As if the fly is 1. constantly in motion 2. sensing and perceiving 3. evaluating how it’s doing meeting it’s needs in life.
It’s important to notice that the ability to sense and perceive isn’t happening in the absence of meaning-making. In other words, the fly gathers information to use in determining how life is going in the context of its own umwelt. In this way, “trying out behavior” becomes, “How am I doing in life behavior” or “How’s life going” behavior. I like to imagine the fruit fly is saying, “How’s life going” with each saccade, over and over. When doing EMDR with my clients and engaging them in BLS of the eyes, ears, or hands I tell them they are simulating a life experience and doing the same sort of processing. Just as a pilot uses their senses and perceptions to practice flying in a flight simulator, so too do my clients. They travel through time in their mind evaluating how life is going. All the while allowing their brain time to re-calibrate within the the present context of safety in therapy.
It can be easy to minimize the role of BLS in EMDR when we don’t recognize that 1. our sense organs only collect information and our brain does the processing; and 2. what we pay attention to may or may not correspond to where we direct our eyes, ear, nose, skin, and tongue! Sensing and perceiving requires focused attention and a flow of information between our body and brain that we can control and let go of. In order to let our brain do what it needs to do (describe, monitor, and evaluate), I like to teach my clients how to engage in “catch and release fishing” with the contents of their mind. That is, to focus their attention on their body and 5 senses, identify what seems most salient in the moment, and then let their mind wander.
Our brain, like the fruit fly’s (which is the size of a grain of salt) is also always very active and trying things out. I like to say to my clients that, “Our brains are like a butler or maid that is on alert for what we desire it to sort out. All we have to do is direct it and then get out of the way, it will go downstairs, where there is always extensive activity we don’t notice, and do it’s work for us. It will send up what we need. We just wait for a reply.” The more we analyze, interpret, categorize, judge, or classify (basically talk/intellectualize), the more we get in the way of what it needs to do. We also distract ourselves from the reply we are waiting for.
Speaking of flies. A fly on the wall during the formal trauma processing of a target in an EMDR therapist’s office might wonder, “What are they doing down there without any fancy interpretations or logical predictions about what will happen next?” A good case formulation provides a hypothesis for how the past is getting in the way of the client’s ability to simulate in time on any given day. However, much of the progress is made when the pair maintains what I call an “information rich interpersonal relationship”. A relationship that is open and can tolerate mind wandering so that we can notice what needs in the client’s life are being thwarted by certain by the traumas we work on. The case formulation along with trauma processing is an active process of updating what is going. Once my client and I actually begin controlled simulations (processing past, present, and future targets) we learn from the client’s brain where to focus next by sensing and perceiving, just like the fruit fly!
