EMDR as it is… Sensing and Connecting
Installment #7 is the final post in this series on EMDR as it is… . By now we might wonder why I didn’t name the series, “EMDR as I see it…”. I would have said that makes sense and add that as I see it, it isn’t EMDR after all. AIP therapy is the Biopsychosocial-AIP model. It is what I believe to be a therapy informed by the ubiquity of information processing in all life. It is also informed by my understanding of what makes human lives different when it comes to information processing. It’s most defining principle is that, “Connection begets connection and disconnection begets disconnection”. AIP therapy is a trauma therapy if we define trauma as an absence. The absence of an experiencing self that can connect with other experiencing selves.
That is to say, a human trauma is a lack of our most human way of doing life. When we are able to flexibly direct our attention over time and notice that we are doing so, we are more likely to process information relevant to what we need in any given moment, situation, or time of life. We learn to do this when we have grown up within the context of relationships that allow for connection. Not unlike the tiger featured in this installment, we need others to interact with to learn and grow in our specific environment. According Encyclopedia Britannica’s online website, it is critical that a tiger cub receives education from it’s mother on how to hunt in the wild. Most cubs raised in captivity would not know how to hunt if released, despite having other needs met by humans.
I find this fact fascinating. As it turns out a tiger brain is shaped by experience over years of socialization just as humans are. Their brain is open to being shaped by the environment they are born into. They also learn best growing up in their umwelt with guidance from those animals who are equipped with the sensibilities they have. Despite our best intentions, we will never experience the world as a tiger does. That doesn’t make us more or less advanced, just different. As we learned in installment #1, even organisms without a nervous system process information to live. They just get there in their own way.
If there is no momma tiger there to connect with, all of the tiger ways of making sense of the world are not completely internalized. It’s not as bleak as with my cat Taj who we learned from last time. House cats have become domesticated over time which has allowed them to live well as interspecies collaborators. For most animals however, intraspecies living allows for the most optimal adjustment to the environment. Britannica describes how tigers maintain their solitary adult living space by using their voice, making signs in the dirt, scraping bark off of trees, leaving poop in strategic places, leaving scents from their facial glands on things, and showering areas with scent from their urine and anal glands. It makes sense that a cub might not get the picture from me demonstrating these behaviors!
“Love the one your with…”
Sensing and connecting can have it’s limits when we don’t share the same type of nervous system. To truly connect, our brain needs to generate information related to how life is going for us and communicate that information to others. Like the gorilla in the selective attention test video, what we pay attention to will drive what we experience and that includes our experience of our self. It’s not possible to truly connect with someone when we are not connected to ourselves. That means, while I might talk to you and focus on you, if I’m not sharing what life is like for me, you are not really getting the picture. Likewise, if you are not connected to yourself, no matter how connected I am to my experience, I won’t be able to connect with you fully.
For example, I have been both inspired and disheartened over the years by my client’s accounts of their loving relationships with their pets. On the one hand, pets can be the best friends and companions there are because of their ability to connect with us. Most of us have such amazing stories of real bonding and collaboration. At the same time there is no replacement for a loving, connected person to bond with. Specifically, someone who can walk through time with us and help us make sense of ourselves and the world we live in. Like in the film “Castaway”, when the actor Tom Hanks makes a human face on a volley ball to help him survive being ship wrecked. He might have drawn his pet cat’s face, but it matters to have a human face, voice, and body to connect with. No one puts it better than John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, when he describes the function of the attachment system as a monitor of all of the areas of life that provides species specific feedback on how life is going.
The apex of bonding is learning and teaching each other how to live well. That involves experiencing and understanding our social relationships. Our umwelt is the social environment. Understanding and compassion are two sides of the same coin. Information processing allows for compassion, awareness, and flexible behavior when we have a goal of collaboration. We need to understanding human lives, the relationships we have with each other, and how they are working to help us live well or undermining us. According to AIP therapy and the trauma as absence definition of trauma, we might say that experience and compassion are two sides of the same coin.
There is less knowledge of the self available to us if we are not experiencing life. Less awareness of our present past, present present, and present future. We loose are ability to be in time. According to Britannica’s online encyclopedia, in the 1900’s there were around 100,000 tigers on the planet. Despite a long history of hunting, they were thriving. As the year 2000 rang in, there were between 5,000 and 7,500. Currently, Britannica reports 3,200 are left and of those most of the tigers are kept in captivity. Changes in human activity account for the speedy demise of the tiger. How are they to teach their young how to be tigers when they are forced into an umwelt they are not adapted to? How do we account for the lack of understanding and compassion that allows us to participate in their extinction? What are we not experiencing that keeps the awareness of what we are doing to them at bay? A traditional trauma model can not explain this level and type of disconnection from ourselves and the organisms around us that account for such extreme effects of the anthropocene.
AIP therapy can. However, when we focus on the unique features of information processing found in humans we can, but that is for the next series. To conclude this series let’s take a look at a summary the examples of the ubiquity of information processing in all life, what makes up the Life Enhancing Information Processing (LEIP) perspective:
1. Information processing along with energy production and distribution allows all life to organize around meeting needs of each organism by supporting behavioral integration in their umwelt. AIP is going on amongst the cells of our body, between the neurobiological structures that give us self-experience, and between ourselves and others. There is also an exchange of information between levels. It’s all physical and it’s all more or less organized around goals for living well.
2. Sensory processing can not be removed from the experience of the present past, present present, or present future. We accomplish mental time travel first and foremost through an open exchange of information through our senses. Perception is at the heart of consciousness itself and coordinated vis a vis our senses. A robust psychotherapy needs to account for the role of sensory stimulation whether the focus is on processing memory or not, because all components of time are a matter of information processing.
3. Imagery is always inherently at play when it comes to our experience of ourselves and the world around us. Even the most simple life forms, insects, birds, and the like, are capable of processing information the generates mental imagery used for both individual goals and social communication.
4. Memory is a complex concept that defies simple, unidimensional descriptions and explanations. Despite the ease with which we find a Pavlovian account and memory and associations that can be conceptualized in a linear cause and effect way, there is more going on that we need to account for when we deal with memory in psychotherapy.
5. Attention is an information processing tool often unrecognized as the heart of AIP at work behind the sensory stimulation and social interactions between a client and therapist. It is also a primary relational tool at the heart of both self and other regulation and can be disrupted not only by stress but social training.
6. Biopsychosocial AIP is most compelling as a model that places the communication of how life is going for us in the center of our experience. We can see how integrated information processing is on sub-personal, personal, and interpersonal levels when we observe patterns of communication that are more or less connected to lived experience and day to day needs. It’s so ubiquitous and versatile we see the role of communication in AIP in our relationships with other life forms.
7. All learning, experiencing, and growth hinges on AIP. Each organism organism has a unique body with unique needs and functions that does requires support from intraspecies relating. We will get the most out of therapeutic relationships that are informed by what is unique about human AIP. In a concept, it is the capacity to mentally travel through time together to understand how our experience can inform our goals for living that is the innate healing system of AIP therapy. An account for the mechanisms of action that leave out consciousness and it’s role in social relationships (as EMDR traditionally does) will only describe and explain how AIP is useful for simple PTSD and stress related problems in our personal life. A focus on distinct neurological systems like working memory, sensory perception, and their effect on memory consolidation will leave the psychosocial factors that constrain all psychotherapy outcomes, unaccounted for.
