Dr Emily

And I think in EMDR, it's often explained as though you have a filing cabinet of memories and that for non-traumatic memories, they're filed appropriately, like under the right section, in the right order.

Whereas like for a traumatic memory or an upsetting, distressing memory, it's like those memories are stored, it's like things flying out of the cabinet and they can fly out at any time and we have no kind of sense of order about it.

And so when we do this work in some ways, yes, it's reprocessing and reordering and putting the memories back into the filing cabinet.

And so we actually get like, so what I would often ask clients, for example, is that, can you tell me, you know, at the very beginning, can you tell me what you're seeing in this picture?

So we get like a percept, a perceptual image.

And then what so often happens is that if you do this kind of reprocessing work or the imagery work is that I might ask you, what does that image look like now?

Does it look any different?

Yes.

And it does.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we get perceptual changes to the memory as a function of doing this work.

Yeah.

Um, so like in a very long winded way of coming back to the very reflection question is that, um, I guess I want to emphasize that regardless of whether there is like a diagnosis that changes how you look back on things or not, we can still do this work.

Hmm.

And that we don't have to hold so tightly to the defectiveness.

Because like in this work, what we'll often find is that that critic is

whilst helpful then is not helpful now.

And that it's actually, you know, if we don't learn how to relate to it differently, is that it is creating more suffering for us.

Yeah.