- EMDR can be useful for treating dissociative disorders.
- Dissociation is a healthy adaptive defence used almost universally by people in response to overwhelming stress or life threatening danger.
- However most people experience mild dissociative symptoms at times when their lives are not in immediate danger.
- Dissociation can be viewed as running along a continuum; such as losing track of time when you’re immersed in a good novel to avoiding distress completely by not letting anyone or anything affect you or cause you to feel your feelings.
- A questionnaire is usually given at the start of therapy to screen for dissociative disorders.
- People with dissociative disorders don’t feel integrated but instead feel somewhat fragmented because they have memories, feelings, thoughts and behaviours that are experienced as uncharacteristic and foreign.
- These divided senses of self and response patterns are called dissociative parts of the personality.
- People who have suffered trauma, especially when it occurs in childhood, are more likely to experience high levels of dissociation.
- EMDR can be used to effectively integrate the parts of the self however when processing traumatic memories in a dissociative person, a good deal of preparation needs to take place in order to manage the dissociation and stabilise the person beforehand.
- Ego state therapy using EMDR can be useful to improve a sense of inner connectedness so that ego states are working together instead of against each other in conflict.
