EMDR Processing and Time

One thing I’ve noticed when doing EMDR processing is that it sucks time out of the equation. When I was talking with Karen Carr, doing the podcast with her about her EMDR experience as a client, she said that she had an EMDR session in which it seems that all of her trauma experiences “collapsed” into one thing and then resolved. Also, in that process, she gained a new understanding of her life and how her different experiences fit into it.

So, time and how it plays out in trauma is a factor. On the one hand, the thinking mind is suspended – goes offline – during a trauma experience making it a “timeless” experience, and on the other hand, the trauma memories (pictures, emotions, and body sensations) are stuck in time, as time recreating experiences.     

The term, “Trauma Time,” is a way to understand how mental images, emotional feelings, and body sensations related to a trauma become stuck or frozen in the limbic brain and, in that way, keep reoccurring over and over. When someone is in trauma time, it means these memories keep reoccurring under the level of consciousness and in that way bring in “time” from the past and through its reactivation, thereby impacting the present. These memories change the ”felt sense” of what is happening in the present moment when maladaptive neural networks are activated or triggered. That is to say, it’s not just “my unfair boss I’m experiencing”, it’s that and all of the unmetabolized child memories being unconsciously activated.

When trauma memories are formed, big T or little t, they are linked together in neural networks. The linkage is through the resonance of the frequency that the neurons are connecting with or clustering around. And, because the thinking mind is offline, the networked memories are linked together without regard to time or space (that is, the location of where the experience occurred).

So, with EMDR therapy processing, which is stimulating activated maladaptive neural networks with bilateral stimulation, two things happen. One is that the stuck or frozen memories are metabolized or digested so that the neural charge dissipates and they are no longer stuck in time. The other thing is that time and place are added back into the experience with the realization that the experience happened in the past and somewhere else – that is, it is not happening now.  

When that happens, the maladaptive networks become adaptive. They lose their intensity, in that the picture dims, emotions and body sensations no longer have a “felt sense” (or ego identification) and the memories collapse into one experience that is no longer separated by time. Essentially, time has been sucked out of the equation.