Hearing baby's unspoken story: Interweaving EMDR, ego state and somatic therapies in the repair of very early trauma

Trauma in the attachment period causes profound disruption in development of affect regulation, attachment and state switching capacity. Working in this time period is possible by interweaving old and new methods: 1) Ego state therapy deconflictualizes the self system and the introjected perpetrator point of view; 2) Somatic therapy both resources and grounds the patient, and develops the capacity for moment to moment tracking, to help the patient to tolerate the sensation and emotion that will come as trauma is metabolized, and to pendulate between resourced states and sympathetic arousal or collapsed states; 4) EMDR catalyzes sequestered trauma to process it to an adaptive resolution, but is modified when working preverbally by targeting time segments rather than images from explicit memory and by using imaginal repair; 5) Stabilization efforts includere setting the Pankseppian affective circuits with object cathexis; 6) The therapist's attention to mirror neuronal information enables radical attunement to the patient even in a wordless state, to discern unspoken elements of the narrative.

Conference

English

Sandra Paulsen

Paulsen, S. (2014, October). Hearing baby's unspoken story: Interweaving EMDR, ego state and somatic therapies in the repair of very early trauma. Presentation at the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation 31th Annual International Conference, Long Beach, CA