Because when we can begin to consciously effort towards thinking, acting, and speaking to ourselves in more adaptive, functional ways, we help rewire any maladaptive thoughts or behaviors that may have formed in our neural pathways as a result of the poor modeling we received when we were young.
But what do we do when we have no role models and struggle to think, act, and speak like a good enough mother/father/parent?
What can we do when we haven’t even the faintest idea of what this would look like?
How are we supposed to rewire our neural pathways then?
We can borrow inspiration from examples in books, TV, and movies and use these characters as resources to support our internal development.
Read on to learn more about how I specifically do this in my Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy work with my therapy clients to learn a tool (and examples!) that you can use in your own life (with or without me as your trauma therapist).
What are resources in EMDR therapy?
When I conduct EMDR therapy with my clients – whether for relational trauma recovery or for relief from phobias, single incident traumas, or any other challenging set of symptoms – I’ll develop and cultivate resources for them in the second phase of the work – the preparation stage.
But what are resources?
Resources encompass various elements, including individuals (from real life, fiction, history, or elsewhere), emotional states, animals, mastery memories, inanimate objects, and more, which you invoke in your mind to induce an internal emotional transformation, ideally a positive state.
In the context of EMDR, we combine this imaginative connection to resources with bilateral stimulation (BLS) to help your body and brain integrate the somatic and emotional response to this resource even further.
What’s so important about positive parenting role model resources?
Now, while I heavily customize resources for each and every one of my clients (developing a rich menu of tailored exercises that I believe will most support them in the memory reprocessing stage), inevitably, when working with anyone who comes from a relational trauma history, I’ll borrow from the work of Laurel Parnell, Ph.D. and resource my clients with nurturing, protective, and wise figures.
Why?
Because those of us who grew up in relational trauma environments – environments when caregivers and the early, influential institutions and systems in a young child’s life fail to respect and support their dignity, personhood, and biopsychosocial well-being due to individual or collective deficits – often lack healthy, functional models of what nurturing, protective or trust-worthy guidance might look like.
By “resourcing” my clients with these kinds of figures and models, I can help them begin to internalize positive parenting role models when they themselves have had little or none.
