Clinical Notes

It is worth noticing how able a person is to live with uncertainty, and what takes place while they do so. I have often seen that when doubt appears, the person is already doing something quite unexpected, and often not deliberately, to test another’s behaviour. They hold back from saying anything (or feel unable to say something), yet they do not change their mind. The other person continues with what they are saying or doing long enough for their behaviour to become clear.

We often think of time as a sequence, but in ordinary life it happens more like an accumulation. Certain feelings gather and persist, while others fall away. We take on emotional traces from people around us because we are built to register and retain what affects us most. Over time, a feeling can become so familiar that it seems permanent. Guilt is a good example. It often signals that another feeling has been pushed aside. A person may feel guilty about being angry at how a parent treats them. The anger is present, but it conflicts with the belief that one should not feel it. “They did their best” becomes a way to block the anger, and the guilt remains. It is not guilt in isolation, but guilt about anger, and about the fact that the anger feels forbidden.

One thing above everything else. Learn every detail of the process - technically. Read Shapiro's book from cover to cover and take it all in. Then do what anyone would usually do after learning a skill (because EMDR is a skill): playing the piano, flying, playing cricket, speaking, walking, learning in your first five years of life how to be yourself (as Cristina Alberini writes - every EMDR practitioner should know Alberini as much as Shapiro; don't let EMDR become a professional silo). Get on with doing EMDR out of whatever you make of yourself.

There's a point at which it needs to stop being a technical exercise. It's the point at which you have taken in as much as one can know and begin doing all of that as yourself, rather than somebody else. What makes one bowler in cricket different from another? They all play to the same laws of cricket and do essentially the same thing ... throw a ball 22 yards. 

The best bowlers are receptive to what is happening. They can imagine what will happen accurately and seem to make that happen by staying close to their projection, because they have somehow taken in the state of the game, the state of the batter they are bowling to, the weather and goodness knows what else, as well as anybody else. At the same time they hold onto a relation ship with the standard (cricketing) protocol.

I always begin with the standard protocol and if I diverge at all I know its a divergence and I have a sense of why. 

Anything else, it's just not ... EMDR (cricket).

Okay. Having overcome my resistance, look at what Shane Warne says around 2:10 minutes into this clip. If you don't like cricket just see if you can understand why I think this, as much as anything else, describes how to do EMDR differently while still doing EMDR. 

Nobody writes more sharply about the pain of separation than Hélène Cixous. In her novel, Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, she writes of why Jewish people did not leave Germany even before the war that started in 1938 when, already, the country had grown so hostile to them.  The profound imminent pain of separating from yourself, of relinquishing your identity, of being forced to relinquish it, is unimaginable unless you have experienced it. It is as intense as the panic an infant begns to feel when separated from its parents.

She writes: 

"The perspective of becoming another is a torment that no candidate escapes, that is to say, to disinvest from one day to the next the (German) becoming in which one had installed one’s habits of being, one’s language, one’s memory since the beginning of one’s memory, with the familiar characters of one’s memory, from the Kaiser to Liebknecht, Brüning, the whole Goethian fashioning of all points of view, in order to leap into a totally unknown mental combination, and thus to feel the particular pain that accompanies every metamorphosis, makes more than one vacillate and even shrivel up. It’s like drinking an alchemical potion and undergoing an operation of grieving for the whole person, a horror, for one was attached to oneself."

(Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, pp96-7)

Reading this novel other truths come to mind.

For instance, how much writing is a 'thing'. Ideas are not simply written up in a novel; of course not. Writing happens as much as painting does for somebody working on a canvas. Too often people imagine writing as one might a catalogue photograph of a finished painting - the relationship is very similar. Writing ceases to be a thing in istelf but merely a record of thoughts, of information, of facts, of details. The narrative takes over - transmission gives way to transition.

Cixous's shifts between and withinin scenes, from one character's thoughts to another, can feel dislocating. Life is dislocating. Her transitions occur in how someobody does something rather than why, or at least the common psychological why.  The excerpt I have included above is a description of what happens, how something happens, not why something happens. Why would you need to know any more? Cixous' intensity makes her work sometimes almost unreadable. She writes almost unchecked, as rawly as a child feeling, but with more experience and intelligence than any other living author I have found.

Many people seem to imagine themselves as writers, now or in the future. How much more to imagine oneself a reader? Readers have already begun writing without realising it. You read and then you write. If you don't read, you will never write.