EMDR as it is… Sensing and Attending
It is not uncommon to read about the profound bonding that takes place between a mother and infant during moments of gazing at one another. The “gaze transactions” involved in human attachment have been studied considerably and highlighted as central to our development in the field of interpersonal neurobiology. At the heart of these exchanges is information processing. However, our relationships with our pets can be the most convincing of teachers of why the relationship is the healing system involved in EMDR therapy. Everyday experiences provide observable models for an information rich relationship. In this fifth installment of EMDR as it is… we will move forward from EMDR to AIP therapy, and a turtle will be our guide.
The featured turtle images are provided by my pet turtle Alfred, a red-eared slider adopted from a friend. I’ve learned a lot from caring for Alfred and watching how he interacts with me and my pet cat Taj. So much so that I began suggesting my clients pay attention to their pets for examples of what we do in EMDR. What is the same? What is different? What can we infer based on how we all navigate our different umwelten? As we discussed in the last post the concept of the Triune Brain no longer stands up to the scientific data and casting our brain hierarchically as reptilian, mammalian, and human belies the truth about the biopsychosocial intelligence of all organisms.
The adaptive cognitive and emotional life of reptiles is enhanced by attention. By observing turtles, we can begin to imagine why our innate AIP system is grounded in social cognition. As author Sy Montgomery and illustrator Matt Patterson detail in their compelling book, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell, the bonding behavior of turtles can be interspecies; a major information processing resource for bonding is their attention:
“But of all of them, Matt’s and my favorite is Fire Chief. We always look in on this huge, ancient snapper in his giant tank on its high shelf. For me, it’s a little disconcerting, Matt has no trouble peering in because he’s six feet tall, and both Alexxia and Natasha are tall as well. But I’m only five foot five, and with Fire Chief’s tank up so high, to see him at all I ahve to put my face inches from his - a position from which he could, as we saw when he grabbed a banana, lurch from the water like a croc. But he never does. ‘In a whole room of turtles, he’s special,’ Matt observes. That is saying a lot. What makes Fire Chief so distinctive? Fire Chief gazes back up at us. His eyes track us when we move. He is interested. … Fire Chief deigns to favor us with his attention.”
The relationship between bonding and attention can not be understated in psychotherapy. They are brought together by the information processing that takes place when we attend to our physical and social environment. We can only infer so much about what a turtle mind is like. However, when it comes to bonding, reptilian is not the antithesis of human. In the example above Sy shows us how the relationship between attention and bonding can be expressed through interest. Mutual interest is how we make sense of one another and communicate about our needs. Turtles may be slow, but as Sy will show you, there is a lot going on:
“‘There’s something about the way a turtle looks at you,’ says Matt. ‘I think it’s the eyes’ says Clint. Natasha, Alexxia, and Michaela had said the same thing. ‘Turtle eyes are really special,’ agrees John. ‘I see what you mean,’ I say. When a turtle looks at you, even briefly, it feels like more than a glance. ‘I think,’ I offer, ‘it’s the intensity of their focus.’ Such focus is rare in the human world. Attention is fragmented, our focus atomized. A study of UK’s telecom regulator, Ofcom, found that their customers stopped whatever they were doing to check their phones on average every twelve minutes of the waking day; an earlier study found the typical American worker faced some kind of interruption every eight minutes.”
EMDR as it is, is a therapy that promotes bonding. Its objective is to strengthen connection within and connection between us. I like to make the goal of EMDR, biopsychosocial connectivity. Turtles help us understand just how fundamental information processing is to the biological, psychological, and social systems that help us collaborate around meeting our needs. In the examples above, the turtle observers are noticing the focused eye contact they can have with them. Underneath the mutual gazing however, are systems for attention. Attention does not always track with where eyes go, however, it is one observable indicator we use to guess at what someone is paying attention to. For more on that, check my earlier post. For now, let’s return to Sy’s colleagues story of a turtle name Pizza Man:
“While most people like turtles, many, even biologists, for years dismissed the reptiles’ intellect as little more sophisticated than a pet rock’s… ‘Turtles don’t need intelligence,’ one filed biologist, Alex Netherton, asserted in an online forum, ‘so they don’t waste energy on it.’ Because turtles are famously slow, and spend considerable amounts of time stock-still, it’s easy to get the impression they don’t think or feel or know much - or do much of anything at all. But clearly, Pizza Man is giving me a signal. It feels like a welcome. ‘This turtle really loves attention.’ Alexxia explains.”
Looking for connection
We would be on solid ground to say that EMDR as it is, is AIP therapy. That is, adaptive information processing therapy. The sensory stimulation aspect of EMDR has been misrepresented with a focus on eye movements and out of the context of the role of attention. Attention is at the heart of information processing and involves all of our senses. Ask a giant snapping turtle, Fire Chief, who loves to be touched:
“Among the newest discoveries is that humans have special nerve ending called c-tactile fibers, which respond only to gentle touch. But these kinds of nerve endings had been discovered in other animals in 1939. They are now understood to be “caress detectors”. That we and our fellow animals have evolved nerves that hunger for gentle touch is a powerful testament to how important it is to all of us. Across taxa, scientists have found that gentle stroking activates the natural opioid system, the body’s chemical pleasure palace. The bright expression in Fire Chief’s eye changes to a dreamy look, as if he is diverting attention form what he sees and wants to dwell instead on the tactile. He obviously enjoys the interaction. We primates, addicted to the visual, only rarely concentrate on our other senses. But we close our eyes sometimes when we are savoring a delicious taste. We close our eyes while we kiss, and also when we pray. Cognitive scientists tell us this frees our brains to focus on the other, non-visual aspects of the experience. I think we also do it because it makes us more vulnerable - and thus more open to our most ancient shared languages, to touch and to trust.”
Before we turn our attention to ourselves and our complex system of attention, let’s appreciate some more amazing examples of intelligence and life enhancing skills smaller organisms exhibit. In particular let’s look a little closer and when sensory experience and attention are important to information processing. In our AIP therapy there is a focus not only on trauma memories or even memory, but also on the information processing that involves sensing and attending. Why? The answer lies in the biopsychosocial-AIP focus on mental time travel vs memory or the past (memory consolidation) per se. Our ability to sense we are present (whether we are processing a trauma memory or not) is an objective of AIP therapy. In the second and fourth posts of this series I feature an insect and bird that have helped us imagine the relationship between time and perception. Likewise, Sy describes this connection in the smallest of organisms:
“Insects can process far more images per second than we. A dragon-fly watching TV would see over two hundred separate still images each second. Until high-definition TV, dogs, too, would see on the screen a series of still images separated by blackness, while we would see a smooth flow of action. The maximum speed at which a creature can see flashes of light before the light source is perceived as constant is called flicker fusion frequency, and it is one measure of how we and other animals experience time. A housefly’s flicker fusion frequency is 250 flashes per second. A pigeon’s, 100. A dog’s, 80. A human’s, 60. A sea turtle’s - the on ly kind of turtle tested - is 15. Based on the results of flicker fusion rates of thirty species of animals, an international collaboration led by scientists from Trinity College in Dublin concludes that the ability to perceive time is linked to the general pace of life… creature with small bodies and fast metabolic rates perceive more information in a unit of time - and experience time more slowly - than animals with slow metabolic rates. Along with the senses of touch, smell, hearing, and sight, we may have a sense of time and special cells to detect and measure it.”
On any given day, anything we sense and feel might be important to be aware of and communicate to others. Attention is the focusing, prioritizing, and highlighting of information crucial to meeting our needs. It is the most critical adaptation and is the “A” in AIP. When we are in our EMDR therapist’s office, we can develop our case formulation collaboratively and take our time, like a turtle. There is a whole lot of AIP going on when we share attention with our therapist. Imagine our brains like a turtle’s brain or a fruit fly’s brain. Much of what needs to be processed can be, without any fancy techniques. Our willingness to learn to pay attention and communicate what we notice will take us far.
EMDR as it is, is AIP therapy. That is, Biopsychosocial-AIP therapy. Let’s keep all life in mind as we continue to explore how and why information processing is adaptive and can be, life enhancing. In AIP therapy the innate system of healing is the relationship between the therapist and client. Our collective resources for paying attention are what we rely on for positive outcomes. Turtles teach us that we can trust both our senses and attention to guide us to what is important. If a turtle can do it, so can we!
