The Client Who Said EMDR Did Not Work for Her

A client came to me a few years ago who had spent eight months in EMDR with another therapist before she landed in my chair. She was convinced EMDR was a scam.

She was a smart, educated person who had read a few of the books. And she had reached the kind of conclusion smart people reach when they cannot figure out why the thing that helps everyone else does not seem to help them. The conclusion was that the modality was overhyped, and probably so was the therapist, and probably so was the whole field.

The thing is, EMDR was not the problem.

What I learned in our first three sessions was that her previous therapist had taken her into reprocessing protocol before she had a therapeutic relationship strong enough to hold what came up. She had complex developmental trauma, and her attachment system did not yet trust the person sitting across from her. When the bilateral stimulation started pulling up the early material, there was no relational scaffolding underneath her, no felt sense of safety, no trust that the room she was in was a different room than the one her body remembered.

So her system did exactly what it was built to do. It shut down. The body dissociated through the sessions, surfaced for the closing twenty minutes, and went home and felt worse than when she had walked in.

That is not a failure of EMDR. It is a failure of sequence.

I see this constantly, and not just with EMDR. The same thing shows up with parts work that gets opened up before the protector parts feel acknowledged, and with somatic interventions that drop a client into their body before they have any tolerance for being there. The intervention itself was sound. Timing was off by months, sometimes years.

When a client tells me a previous therapy did not work, I have learned to not take their conclusion at face value. The conclusion they reached is almost always logical given what they experienced. But what they experienced was rarely the modality failing. It was the modality landing before the relationship was ready to hold it.

The most important question you can ask, before reaching for any technique, is whether the foundation underneath this client can carry the weight of what you are about to do. If the foundation is not there yet, the technique is going to do harm even when you are using it correctly.

Warmly,

Esther

P.S. If building a strong therapeutic foundation is something you want to work on with your complex trauma cases, I’m here to help!

The Trauma Mastery Program was built for situations like this! The program was designed to teach strong foundational skills and to bring together a focused cohort of strong clinicians to provide high-level consultation and support. Interested? Let’s connect.