Here’s a session I do with 7/8 of the clients who walk in the door. You are a baby in your mother’s arms. Look up into her face. What do you see? With whatever they say (her disappointment, anger, depression, adoration), I have them process it. If it’s adoration or love, I ask them where in their body they respond to it and what the feeling is, and then do some kind of bilateral stimulation, and install it. If it’s disappointment, or "she’s spacing out", or "she doesn’t want me," I set up the Standard Protocol: What does that say about you? What would you rather believe? What feeling? Where? and off we go. It is often the core injury of the attachment issue. It often clears in that first session, resetting much of the client’s self-beliefs. Nearly every client can do it. I’m not asking them to remember (very few of us remember anything about being a baby.) I’m asking them to imagine it, and then targetting the subsequent affect. Maureen Kitchur in EMDR Solutions says that’s you can’t always get a good cognition from an early target. She says, that if you can’t get the negative and positive cognitions you should skip it, do the processing, then say Now that you’ve cleared that, what would you like to know about yourself now and for the rest of your life.
