How Is EMDR Therapy Used To Treat Dissociative Disorders?
Dissociative disorders are part of the most complex and counterintuitive psychopathologies.
This is because they are capable of generating psychological alterations not only of a quantitative nature, as occurs for example with generalized anxiety, but they also act by introducing qualitative imbalances in the functioning of the mind. In fact, there are cases in which they radically fragment the functioning of memory and consciousness: the most striking case is that of Dissociative Identity Disorder, popularly known as multiple personality.
Fortunately, there are currently forms of psychological intervention that allow treating this type of alterations. Here we will focus on one of them and see How EMDR therapy is used to treat dissociative disorders.
Dissociative disorders present an interesting diversity in their way of expressing themselves, but they all have in common that appear through psychological trauma. Trauma is made up of memories and experiences associated with experiences that can make us suffer emotionally and that threaten to alter our emotional balance even years after the event that triggered it occurred.
Faced with this, dissociation appears as a containment dam that stops the direct influence of trauma on our consciousness in terms of its capacity to make us suffer, but at the price of altering the functioning of the latter.
Two of the aspects that help to better understand dissociative disorders is their relationship with avoidant traits, on the one hand, and the compartmentalization of memories and psychological processes, on the other.
Dissociation receives that name because it contains a series of containment barriers that “dissociate” psychological processes and mental elements such as the contents of autobiographical memory, composed of memories of what has happened to us throughout our lives. This allows us to prevent the mental contents that generate a lot of anxiety, and specifically those linked to psychological trauma, from being associated with the rest of the mental processes and “infecting” them with that emotional charge.
Thus, dissociative disorders are generally triggered by traumatization, and constitute a dysfunctional way of dealing with that painful emotional mark that has remained in our memory.
These retaining walls that keep separate contents present in the human mind are expressed among other ways through amnestic barriers in dissociative disorders, that is, memory gaps that go hand in hand with situations in which there is an altered state of consciousness: both phenomena complement each other.
For example, Van der Hart’s theory of structural dissociation points out that dissociation has two axes in terms of states of consciousness: one vertical and the other horizontal. In dissociative disorders in which horizontal splits predominate in the state of consciousness, a quantitative change occurs in it, narrowing or reducing (as in the case of depersonalization), while where one or more vertical splits occur, changes appear. qualitative in the state of consciousness, with several states of consciousness that occur in parallel, each one under its own operating logic: this is the case of Dissociative Identity Disorder. In both cases it is reflected that there are certain mental contents that remain “quarantined”, being repressed (quantitatively) to prevent us from being fully aware of them, or being separated from the roots of the rest of the elements that come to our consciousness.
Thus, some authors who have dedicated themselves to specifically studying dissociative disorders point out that in traumatization processes there is a whole range of more or less complex psychopathological alterations: in the simplest ones we would find Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and in the most complex ones we would find dissociative disorders and complex post-traumatic stress.
2. Avoidance
As we have seen, dissociation obeys the logic of avoidance of that which produces immediate discomfortand that in the case of normal post-traumatic stress (in which there is no dissociation) it is expressed in moments of flashbacks and a high rise in the level of anxiety when the memory of the traumatic event comes to mind.
Thus, dissociative disorders can be understood as a series of avoidance patterns that we have internalized, to the point that this is not expressed so much through our interaction with the environment as through our interaction with our own thoughts and memories.
What is EMDR therapy and how is it used for dissociative disorders?
EMDR therapy is a form of psychotherapeutic intervention that seeks to produce a persistent change in the connectivity between specific areas of the brain involved above all in the preservation and evocation of memories. It was developed in the late 1980s by researcher Francine Shapiro as a way to treat patients with psychological trauma, although over the years it has been shown to be effective against other psychopathologies.
EMDR seeks to ensure that, through the memory evocation system, we can intervene in the management of these traumatic memories, to allow them to be addressed as content that is not necessarily problematic and susceptible to being managed through our capacity for acceptance. and resilience. In this sense, it is similar to the systematic desensitization often used to overcome phobias.
If you want professional help to overcome psychological problems related or not to trauma, contact us. In Psychotools We have been offering psychotherapeutic support to people of all ages for years. You can find us both in our psychology center located in Barcelona (Vallcarca) and in our online therapy sessions by video call. Our contact information is on this page.
