Shamanism can offer EMDR another way of understanding a memory that stays frozen: that a part of the person may have left and stayed behind in it, and can be found and brought home, whilst the part that stayed and coped needs care too. It offers a place of safety that is more than a remembered one, with helpers who are beings in their own right, and a very old practice of moving between the two ways of knowing that the two halves of the brain give us.
What might a flashback be telling us? #
In EMDR, a flashback is an unprocessed memory firing, and the work is to process it until it links up with everything else we know and loses its charge. Shapiro describes such memories as “frozen in time”.1 Shamanism reads the same thing in another way as well. Much of what we call trauma is soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer. When something is more than we can bear, a part of us leaves, and very often it stays stuck in the time and place where it happened. That is a pretty good description of a flashback.
Shamanism also looks at what happened to the rest of the person. In soul loss, part of the soul leaves and part stays. The part that stays is known as the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer: the one who soldiered on, holding the fort, often a child in a difficult situation doing the best they could. Contemporary shamanism often focuses on the lost part and tends to ignore the fort-holder, and there can be great benefit in going back in a journey to that child, letting them know they are not alone, and giving them the help they need from the Animal, Plant or Stone PeoplesStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer.2 So shamanism offers EMDR two more questions to ask of a frozen memory: where is the part that left, and who has been holding the fort? See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts? and What is soul retrieval?
Is a safe place only something we remember? #
In EMDR, the Safe or Calm Place is a place the person remembers, which carries no bad associations, strengthened with a word and slow tapping. If a person cannot find one, Shapiro advises them not to go on alone, because there are clearly unprocessed memories that need a therapist’s help.3
Shamanism offers a place of safety that does not depend on what a person has known. The Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is a place of absolute safety and healing, and it always feels deeply safe, safer than anywhere in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer.4 The helpers met there are not images made up to soothe us. A Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer is a being in its own right, the Oversoul of a whole species, in a relationship that grows over time.5 For someone whose life has given them no safe place to remember, this is something new to find. See What is the Lower-World? and What is a Power Animal?
Why left and right? #
EMDR moves attention from side to side, with the eyes or with tapping, and why this should help is still argued over. Shapiro herself asked why eye movements should have any effect at all.6 The research on whether they add anything is set out in What can EMDR offer shamanic work?
Shamanism has its own long interest in the two sides of us. Central to shamanic practice is bringing both hemispheres of the brain into balance, so that neither dominates, which lets the shaman move between two ways of being and two ways of knowing at will. Journeys are about right-brain, largely non-verbal knowledge; words and facts have their essential place too.7
The popular idea that some people are left-brained and others right-brained has been challenged. In 2013 Jared Nielsen and colleagues at the University of Utah analysed more than a thousand existing brain scans and found no sign that people favour a left or a right brain network, though particular functions, such as language, do sit more on one side.8 The idea of being left-brained or right-brained is now often regarded as pseudoscience. The reply in Therapeutic Shamanism is that the two hemispheres still work differently, one in a more separate and unemotional way and the other in a more holistic and empathic way, and that what matters is which one’s responses we pay attention to and act on.9 See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
Shamanism does not claim to explain how EMDR works. What it offers EMDR is a practice, far older than any therapy, of deliberately moving between those two ways of knowing.
