Bainbridge Institute for Integrative Psychology
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Sandra Paulsen has authored and illustrated a book to enable clinicians and clients alike to understand and discuss dissociation and ego state work. It is intended also to facilitate communication between therapist and client about trauma and dissociation, and the phases of therapy for individuals with complex trauma history. The book is now available through Amazon.com.
This book uses over 100 original cartoons that Sandra created to illustrate key concepts from healing that uses both EMDR and ego state therapy for helping clients with complex trauma histories and dissociation. The book is organized around two acronyms: ACT-AS-IF are the phases of therapy, and ARCHITECTS are the steps of an EMDR session for a complex dissociative trauma. ACT-AS-IF phases include: the following; those phases take months or even years or therapy, but the work is typically shorter then talk therapy would be.
A - Assessment - careful history, assess strengths, weakness, goals
C - Containment & Stabilization - resourcing, strengthening, containing
T - Trauma Accessing - getting the lay of the land, trauma history
A - Abreactive Synthesis (EMDR) - processing memories to resolution
S - Skills Strengthening - preparing for life without dissociation
I - Integration - removing unneeded walls, rearranging furniture
F - Follow Up - wrapping up or decreasing frequency of work
ARCHITECTS refers to a sequence of steps in one or more EMDR sessions on a specific traumatic memory or category of memories. The steps include: Accessing the parts of self, Refining the planned work and target, refreshing the Consent to the work and the roles of different parts during the work, Hypnosis or Imagery to put in place the various resources needed to do the work, Titration to chunk the work into manageable pieces, to avoid overwhelm, and to variously step on the brake and/or accelerator as the work proceeds, EMDR to desensitization the selected piece, Containment of memory and parts at the end of the session, whether the work is complete or not, Tranquility Technology for self soothing between sessions, and Synthesis for consolidating the deep shifts in bodily held trauma material following the work and before resuming trauma processing. The book explains much more about these procedures.
The work is complex and should never be attempted without the practitioner being trained both in EMDR and dissociative disorders. Since dissociative clients use trance as a coping strategy, training in hypnosis is advised.
A - Assessment - careful history, assess strengths, weakness, goals C - Containment & Stabilization - resourcing, strengthening, containingT - Trauma Accessing - getting the lay of the land, trauma historyA - Abreactive Synthesis (EMDR) - processing memories to resolutionS - Skills Strengthening - preparing for life without dissociation I - Integration - removing unneeded walls, rearranging furniture F - Follow Up - wrapping up or decreasing frequency of work ARCHITECTS refers to a sequence of steps in one or more EMDR sessions on a specific traumatic memory or category of memories. The steps include: Accessing the parts of self, Refining the planned work and target, refreshing the Consent to the work and the roles of different parts during the work, Hypnosis or Imagery to put in place the various resources needed to do the work, Titration to chunk the work into manageable pieces, to avoid overwhelm, and to variously step on the brake and/or accelerator as the work proceeds, EMDR to desensitization the selected piece, Containment of memory and parts at the end of the session, whether the work is complete or not, Tranquility Technology for self soothing between sessions, and Synthesis for consolidating the deep shifts in bodily held trauma material following the work and before resuming trauma processing. The book explains much more about these procedures.
The work is complex and should never be attempted without the practitioner being trained both in EMDR and dissociative disorders. Since dissociative clients use trance as a coping strategy, training in hypnosis is advised.
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Copyright 2009 Bainbridge Institute for Integrative Psychology: Specializing in EMDR.
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