Rebecca Saunders (00:03.887)
Hello and welcome to the EMDR Doctor podcast. This is a podcast for clients where I share and explore information about all things EMDR. My name is Dr. Caroline Lloyd. I'm a mental health GP and an EMDR practitioner. And my goal is to demystify EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help you on your EMDR journey.
EMDR is a powerful therapy which helps to reduce the distress from difficult memories and my goal is to make it accessible to everyone. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm coming to you from Wurundjeri land and I'd like to pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging. Today I'm going to talk about imagination.
And this might seem a little bit woo for those of you who like the science of EMDR, but imagination plays a huge part in my therapy. I really enjoy using the imagination as it is a little bit playful and a little bit creative. And the addition of a little bit of play and irreverence to my work with trauma and heavy, difficult memories is really helpful.
So what we know by research is that each time we retrieve a memory from its storage in the brain, the memory changes a little bit. Police and lawyers know this, and this is why the original statement to the police in crime scenarios is so vitally important. So this fact that a memory degrades or changes in even minuscule ways with each retrieval is part of the
basis of EMDR 2.0 which is an advanced strategy for dealing with very difficult memories. We retrieve the memory, we divert the attention, we retrieve the memory, divert the attention and keep going like that and this helps the memory resolve into something different and less threatening or less sad and we can further corrupt a memory by deliberately changing the details of the memory.
Rebecca Saunders (02:17.342)
using imagination and I'll give you a little bit more of an example of that in a moment. So part of the theory behind doing this is the idea that the event from the past is not happening now and therefore it only exists in memory and I want to be really clear here that I do know that that bad event happened and that I believe you and that I
hold those memories with the greatest respect. I am absolutely not trying to deny or justify or in any way minimise the importance of that event. So that said, what I am doing is minimising the effect of that event on a person's current life. So while we acknowledge the trauma, we also destabilise the memory of the trauma and we
disintegrate it using imagination so that the traumatic memory loses its impact in the current day. If you can think about how much other people's imagination can affect your emotions, it puts things in a bit of a different light. For example, when we watch a movie, we know that it is entirely made up. We know enough about the construct of movies, that the actors are pretending that there are special effects.
that the relationships between the actors are not real, that the story is fictional. But when we watch a good movie, we can be transported into another world. We feel the pain or the joy or the embarrassment of the characters. We delight in their relationships. Or if it's a horror movie, we are frozen in fear or horrified or shocked. We know that the movie is not real.
but the emotions we experience as a result of watching the not real movie are real. We laugh, we cry, we agonize, we shout at the screen, we experience real emotions in response to an unreal movie because our imagination is allowing that scenario to be real for us. So in the past, I have actually done EMDR on myself because I watched a horror film.
Rebecca Saunders (04:40.456)
I usually have a rule that I don't pollute my brain with horror or suspense movies, but during the COVID lockdowns one Saturday night, I was bored and frustrated and I watched a horror movie called A Quiet Place. Some of you may have seen it. If you haven't, don't. I really shouldn't have because from then on, all I could think about was what I would have done in that situation. I was consumed with planning and safety and how I would survive in that scenario.
I was really on high alert and fear followed me around, especially at night. So I did a little bit of EMDR on myself to break that cycle and to relieve that vicarious imagined trauma of those fictional characters that had imprinted on my brain. Their fictional trauma was giving me real distress and I had to settle it down with a little bit of EMDR.
So I have a very vivid imagination and I tend to absorb a lot of the images and situations that I see. So I think in the future, I will definitely be staying away from horror movies. So a better way to use imagination is with some of the resources that we use with EMDR. The Calm Place resource, for example, I have about five different calm places that I personally will imagine.
If I'm, say for example, having trouble sleeping or if I'm a little bit upset about something, imagining myself in a calm place or in one of my calm places just settles my nervous system enough just to get myself back on track. And I often use this with clients to get practice in feeling good or feeling calm, feeling relaxed.
Other imaginal resources that we use can be resources like a loving figure, a protector, a wise advisor, things like that. And that just expands our repertoire of good images so that we can more easily access the good feelings that come with those imaginings. So we know that memory and imagination are closely intertwined and they can significantly impact our perception of the past.
Rebecca Saunders (07:00.459)
One interesting finding is that the mere act of imagining an event can create false memories that can feel just as real as actual memories, a bit like me in the movie. So memory is impacted by imagination and imagination depends on memory in that it's hard to imagine things that aren't at least made up of elements that you know.
Memory provides the building blocks for things to be imagined. Memories of things that have happened before also provide the building blocks of imagining possible futures, which we can see happening very clearly with anxiety about the future based upon our experience of the past. Like, for example, if I was scared by a dog in the past, I may be fearful of seeing dogs in the future.
and we can translate memories from one context into another. For example, we may have felt safe at our grandma's house. We have a memory and a felt sense of being loved and safe from that time. We can translate that memory and that feeling into other contexts. So say for example, if we have a memory of
being told off at school by a cranky teacher and that memory is filled with shame and fear. So we can imagine grandma being at school with us and translate the love and the safety from grandma into that unpleasant school memory. And then we can change that memory by using the resource of our remembered memory of love. So we can
also translates someone else's experience within our imagination into our own experience. So a bit like I did with the horror movie, but we can flip that into a good experience. Say if we watch a movie where someone in the movie is falling in love, we can take that good feeling of being safe and loved, a feeling that somebody else experienced,
Rebecca Saunders (09:22.806)
and we can imagine it and translate it into our not so pleasant memories or into our expectations and imaginings about the future. So we can use somebody else's, like it's a memory, but of somebody else's experience and use that to help ourselves. So I promised to give you an example about how I use imagination within an EMDR session and I've outlined a few things above, but
I'd like to share with you a little piece of a session that I did the other day and I'm sharing this with the consent of the client. So this happened in real time the other day. So we were working on a childhood memory that involved a robbery and an adult with a gun. Very scary. We'd done a fair bit of work, but we had come to a little bit of a slower point when the memory wasn't shifting very quickly.
So I asked my client what an eight-year-old would want or need at that moment if they could have anything in the world that they wanted or could imagine. And there was a long pause. And then they looked at me and they said, teenage mutant ninja turtles. Perfect. So that was so good. So we let that happen. And the mutant ninja turtles somersaulted into the memory.
They tied up the bad guy. They left him squirming on the floor and they carried my young client out and went to get pizza. So this little intervention just resolved the memory really thoroughly and really delightfully. And from now on, I can pretty much guarantee that every time my client thinks of that event, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be there protecting them.
So I do know that many other EMDR therapists use similar techniques and it's quite well known within the EMDR community how to use these techniques. So it may well be that if you access EMDR through another therapist, not me, you may well come across something similar. And the use of imagination is not restricted to EMDR therapy. So Gestalt and Schema Therapy, IFS, which stands for
Rebecca Saunders (11:45.07)
for internal family systems therapy, all use related techniques and they harness the superpower of our imagination to resolve trauma and alleviate fear or rage or disgust or whatever else is held with those difficult memories. And they replace it with some delight, some mischievousness, some little pixie dust of imagination to create safety and love.
and a little bit of irreverence. So I hope this has been interesting for you. I will chat to you again next week. Have a great week. Bye for now.
