The Preverbal Wound: When Clients Stay Stuck

I want to tell you about a client I'll call Mr. Kaplan.

On the outside... excellent teacher. A giver. The kind of person who never stopped showing up for everyone around him.

But the second he walked through his front door... loving wife, kids, a good life by any measure... he'd reach for the wine.

He couldn't figure out why being nurtured felt activating. Why family connection felt like something to escape from.

For a long time, I was working with the part of him that was drinking. And yes, there was something there... a numb feeling, a hollowness he couldn't quite name.

But it wasn't until I realized I was working with the wrong state.

There was a preverbal infant inside him who remembered reaching for a mother who was too numb with her own pain to meet him. Again and again. Until his nervous system stopped expecting warmth and started organizing around absence.

Coming home didn't mean love to that part. It meant emptiness. It meant being dropped.

So he did what made sense... he became a performer. A giver. Always busy, always doing. Because the real sign of health... being present when it's quiet, just being with your kids without needing to do anything... that requires a template he never had.

Once I stopped working with the drinking and started offering presence to the preverbal state that was holding the wounding... things shifted. We used the loving eyes protocol. Some somatic work directly with the part. Not processing a memory, because there was no memory. Just finally meeting the pain that had been engraved in his body for decades.

That's what I mean when I talk about working underneath the floorboards.

Not the 50-year-old in front of you. The state underneath him. The part that's actually running the show.

I’ve written about this before, the preverbal wound, why EMDR gets stuck when there's no memory to target, and what it actually looks like to work with a client whose insight is intact but nothing is shifting.

If you've ever sat with someone like Mr. Clapin... brilliant, self-aware, genuinely trying... I think you'll find something useful in it.

It's a part of what I’ll be going over in my workshop, Working with Preverbal Trauma and EMDR Stuckpoints. If you want to learn with other clinicians in a similar boat, or want to learn on your own time, I’d love to have you be a part of it.

Warmly,

Esther