The Butterfly Hug. Resourcing Yourself with EMDR.

A reprocessing tool from The Toolbox Approach. This tool helps us repair and restore from the inside, even when you're not sure exactly what emotional baggage or mental block is holding you back.

What is EMDR?

EMDR is an evidence-based psychotherapy intervention that equips people with the skill set to think about the most stressful parts of their lives in a less distressing way.  It’s most often described as a therapy for trauma survivors, but truthfully clinicians have used it with a variety of people who may or may not consider themselves “trauma survivors” but are feeling stuck in some way. The goal of EMDR is to assist people in adjusting their thought processes so that their trauma (or anxiety or whatever is keeping them “stuck”) loses its ability to generate disordered ways of thinking and reacting.

EMDR incorporates work on the past, the present, and the future, helping patients to use effective strategies that help them adopt healthier ways of thinking. There are eight stages to the EMDR process: taking a history, preparation of the patient, assessment of the patient, the desensitization process, the installation process, the body scan technique, achieving closure and treatment assessment, and evaluation.

What The Toolbox Approach does for many of the trauma modalities performed in therapy is personalize the approach for individual use. The 8 phases of EMDR can be intense and even a professional may pause at a certain point and realize that the reprocessing may bring you through something but also outside of your Window of Tolerance (WOT) in the form of new or returning symptoms. In a therapy setting, most find they can work through phases of returning depression with new insight however strict adherence to the stages is required. The Toolbox Approach allows you to use EMDR as a tool for resourcing your yourself. Which means becoming your own safe place such that you can have one foot in your body and one inside of an emotionally triggering experience and be able to access many of your inner resources.

HOW IS EMDR A TOOL?

EMDR is used by therapists in therapy with the above process, yet this can be transformed into a tool that empowers the individual as they navigate life outside of therapy, where emotional triggers still occur no matter how much “stuff” or “emotional baggage” you have come to terms with. Your body always remembers the past and sources the past to react in the present, however with new tools it also comes to remember how using the tool feels. Now, when triggered, this is new learning, and a new neural capacity is developed. This increases your WOT and you feel more in contact with all the possible choices you have to respond to things both short and long term. This technique gives you complete control of reprocessing in the moments of life where you need a container or space for it and yet there is none. This approach is not the full EMDR processing of the past experience, but it can help the experience be different from that body memory you keep repeating when there are stuck experiences.

We are often in situations where the “others” around us are talking and continuing on while the activating event for you is halting your adaptive responses. There is pressure to talk and explain what is happening, both with them and with you, as the activating event is in progress. The emotional past, in these situations, is an elephant in the room, trying to make its way in the conversation as well.

Words fly through the air or through our minds dictating what is happening, however this is not emotional processing. This is an analysis. We abandon ourselves when we do this. We talk and think defensively about “what happened and why” and this effectively keeps the experience explained only, but not processed through. Process through, means all the feelings occur without analysis outward. When we stay inward, for example, we begin noticing things differently. The Butterly Hug Technique in this article is a resourcing tool that allows you to “tap in” and stay looking inward. When we analyze outward it can seem like an internal process, but it is not emotional processing. Take this example:

Jack yells, “do it yourself”. He is immediately told he is “doing it again”. He is called hot headed, and he has also believed this about himself and felt alternating shame and defiance. Usually, he lashed back “What? You will never learn with me doing it for you, that’s just how it is, I won’t always be here!”. He has been learning to tap in though, and after the argument he went outside and tried to stay inward. He used the Butterly Hug Technique and noticed what the yell in his throat felt like. He came to realize if felt like despair, not anger and that his statement and tone “do it yourself” hid that he was so worried and alone when his son could not do a task on his own at this point in his life. He was worried about him living home at age 20, on a “pause” from school, with no real direction in life. He realized that his wife would be better at teaching him how to search for meaning and purpose, he was always too abrupt, but they had been separated over a year now and it could be permanent. Maybe he was even to blame. He realized, as he put it, “I need someone else to anchor me once and awhile and I think I have a lot of regrets to be honest”.

All of us want to move past our emotional “baggage” however what EMDR reprocessing as a personal tool largely does is help you meet with emotional triggers without an activated response there in your way. Then you can enter into the classroom of your own triggers. Regardless of the statement “you triggered me"!”. Triggers are yours; they don’t happen to you; they happen for you to learn yourself better. What is there that just got triggered? That is what EMDR as a tool can help you with. The Butterfly Hug Technique plays a large role in getting you to “tap in” and then, as part of my Toolbox Approach concept, we reformat what traditional EMDR does with a therapist, as a tool for the individual to be able to see what is there and reprocess damaged meaning into clear meaning that guides you forward.

This is not “get over it”, that concept is so tragically non-healing. This is you replenishing what your system is for, processing experience with more than analysis, so it can truly come through for you. This helps us stop using analysis to send you messages about what needs fixing and removes your lens of wrongness. My article on the use of Positive and Negative Cognitions Lists from EMDR is another helpful tool for inner work to consider now or after reading.

What is the Butterfly Hug Technique?

The Butterfly Hug technique is a simple, bilateral (meaning back and forth) tapping motion that is often used by EMDR therapists. Essentially, you’re tapping either side of your body in a specific, narrow area many know of as the clavicle or collarbone. The theory behind the Butterfly Hug is that by using bilateral stimulation (BLS), you are activating the entire brain. This has the effect of stimulating the brain to file memories differently, usually in a more helpful way. Through using BLS throughout the 8 phases of EMDR, many trauma survivors find that the negative emotions that surround the events they've lived through are beginning to be replaced by healthier, more positive emotions.

As an individual tool, this technique can be helpful for a different process:

1. Noticing

2. Resourcing

3. Reprocessing Triggers

The last part is important because when triggers become our classrooms for learning about what we carry, we naturally enter into a reprocessing when we see the way we want to take care of that baggage better, heal it so it responds with a thoughtful request for what you need rather than fight, flight, freeze or appeasing reaction.

We need tools for times of big stress or anxiety, such as when we are getting triggered repeatedly in an ongoing situation or identify an ongoing stressor or relational concern and are not able to find relief or let it go. However, a portion of the technique includes “resourcing”, it is used with the process above but can also be used for calming as a stand-alone technique. I will explain and demonstrate both resourcing with the Butterfly Hug Technique and tapping into the situation you need clarity on with the technique below. Then we will put it all together with a case example of how this can work. Remember you can always use resourcing alone as a way of going inward to settle anxiety or distraction, overthinking and mood swings and leave reprocessing for another time when you have the space for it or in therapy.

Step 1, Noticing

To really prepare for using this tool, take a day or reflect on a day of your life and play it back in your mind. Notice the times you are ramping up too much, getting ahead of yourself, multi-functioning a little bit frantically. Additionally, notice the times you are getting stuck delaying, avoiding, going blank. Spend a day just tapping in with the The Butterfly Technique so that you get familiar with it at these times.

For example, I have worked hard to create a structure where I can ease into my day. As a trauma therapist, I deal with trauma reprocessing five days a week and I have learned that the start of my day requires a lot of releasing the day before and grounding back to myself. Regardless, there is one part of this process where I routinely start to speed up inside. I used a noticing playback to see it, sometimes I even felt it from the way my cat starts to zoom around in response to me. I will eat my breakfast checking email and responding to patient portal requests to “get ahead” on the day and lose all my intentional grounding.

Once I started using the bi-lateral effect of the Butterfly Hug, I created a different awareness there around that day of time that makes me intentionally eat my breakfast with only a Kindle Book now. This noticing made me realize I was boundaryless at times with work and I then selected an issue to reprocess based on this awareness. That is the way to use Step 1. Noticing.

Step 2, “Tapping In” or Resourcing

In EMDR, resourcing is one of the first things you do in therapy. During this stage of EMDR, you’re identifying specific coping skills that can help you cope with moments of high stress or anxiety.  Then you “instill” these resources using bilateral tapping. “Tapping In” is used early in the EMDR process to bring out positive emotions such as improved calmness, tranquility, or positivity.  The goal is that you’ll learn to use these specific coping skills to bring you back in the “window of tolerance” or WOT.

An important note on the WOT, as a term commonly used in trauma counseling, is that it describes the zone of arousal in which a person can function effectively. It means that you can feel upset (anxious/scared/etc.), but still be able to function and not be completely hijacked by your emotions. Trauma can often make your window of tolerance really small, making it difficult to stay balanced in the face of stress.

I often share this infographic with people, it is a great visual aide for describing the window of tolerance.

The window of tolerance is an essential part of EMDR therapy. For any effective reprocessing during to be done, a client must be able to maintain dual awareness. This means that a client must be able to have one foot in a memory and one foot in the present. For this to happen, a client first must learn how to widen and strengthen their window of tolerance through resourcing. We don’t want to, in the EMDR tool for the individual, ever do reprocessing unless you have taken a moment to do resourcing and feel “tapped in”. If you get too activated, that is the place to return to and repeat. It is also a sign that you may want therapy in addition to The Toolbox Approach or other self-help methods you have been trying.

When using the Butterfly Hug for resourcing, you’ll generally focus on something calming, empowering or that otherwise brings out a positive emotion and then briefly tap on alternating sides of your clavicle below your right and left shoulders using the butterfly hug technique. See the video below. (As an alternative, you can use eye movement looking at one corner of the room to the other back and forth for a bi-lateral stimulation experience, or taping one knee and the other, alternating left and right in whatever rhythm comes to you)

Step 3, Reprocessing Triggers

As you have seen from the example with Jack above. Tapping in or Resourcing with The Butterfly Hug Technique when you have begun to believe in noticing can really help reprocessing triggers. Jack learned that he was holding regret and despair that landed in his son as anger and was reflected back at him as such. He believed it too for a long time. He was stuck believing, “I am an angry guy”. Now he knows to face his regrets and has been working on this by choosing the full Toolbox Approach that you will see tools for in my Substack by subscribing below. Search the library to make use of the tools. You can also find the tools on Spotify’s ENYA, Everyone Needs You Always Podcast. Now, onward for paid subscribers, Reprocessing Triggers.