Use and consumption of the traumatic experience as a defence from pain: EMDR and defence mechanisms

Objective: to illustrate the EMDR usefulness within the psycho-dynamical therapy. Foreword: a type of pain exists that’s nameless and inenarrable. During our psycho-dynamical practice as EMDR specialists, we met various defensive modalities adopted by patients presenting diverse pathologies to elude grief associated to that type of pain left segregated within the emotional portion of the brain. In particular, we take into account patients keen to coactively repeat the traumatic experience either directly in-person or through using others. The presumption is that the traumatic experience, when too early, too invasive or reiterated, may render it impossible to be expressed verbally (by use of the cortex), leading to express it either through the body or through reiterated use of the traumatic experience itself (coactions to repeat). This last point, within our clinical experience, seems being linked to ambivalent feelings vs. the very resolution of the experience itself (healing). Patients living this type of situation may namely be entangled by two conflicting wishes to either wish a real improvement of their condition or to seek maintaining that pathology in the fear of loosing the sense of security inspired them by the type of fake identity they built around the trauma. Benefits: using the technique of bilateral sensorial stimuli strives breaking off that defensive mood that feeds pathological coactions to reiterate the experience as the means to tolerate the grief. Namely its purpose is to penetrate through those defensive modalities and to successfully aid patients to abandon them thanks to a low structured context adequately freed by internal or external conditioning (ambivalence, judgement, rationalization, etc.).

Conference

English

Ponzano, R. A., & Gozzano, E. (2008, June). Use and consumption of the traumatic experience as a defence from pain: EMDR and defence mechanisms. Poster presented at the 9th EMDR Europe Association Conference, London, England