Read Time: 5 Minutes
The client wants to heal. They said so in the intake, they said so last week, and they mean it. Then you set up the target, start bilateral stimulation, and something inside them refuses. The memory will not come into focus, or it comes into focus and nothing moves, or a voice announces that this is a terrible idea and the session turns into negotiation with someone you were never introduced to.
Nothing has gone wrong with your protocol. You have met a part, and the part is doing its job. The clinical question is not how to get past it. The question is how to recognize what is happening early, and what to do that does not cost you the client’s trust.
Parts rarely introduce themselves. They show up as changes in the processing, and most EMDR therapists have seen all of these without necessarily naming them as parts activity.
Looping. The client returns to the same image, cognition, or body sensation set after set, with no shift in affect or associations. Standard interweaves do not land. Something in the system has decided this material goes no further.
Sudden shutdown. Affect flatlines mid-processing. The client reports feeling far away, foggy, sleepy, or numb, or describes watching the memory as if through glass. Dissociation here is not a failure of dual attention; it is a protective maneuver executed by a part of the system that judged the material unsafe.
Abrupt shifts in state or voice. The client’s posture, tone, vocabulary, or apparent age changes noticeably. A capable adult becomes small and wordless, or a compliant client becomes suddenly hostile toward the work, or toward you.
Stated internal conflict. The client narrates it directly: part of me wants to do this and part of me is screaming no. Clients often use parts language spontaneously, long before anyone teaches it to them, because it accurately describes their experience.
One of these in isolation might be fatigue, a poorly chosen target, or an off day. A pattern of them, especially in clients with chronic or early relational trauma, points to an internal system organized around protection.
The instinct to push is understandable. The protocol was working, the client consented to the work, and the block feels like an obstacle between the client and relief. But a protective part reads pressure as confirmation. It mobilized because it predicted the material would be overwhelming, and a therapist who keeps driving toward the material proves the prediction right.
In the short term, overriding resistance tends to produce more of what you were trying to resolve: deeper shutdown, harder looping, abreaction without integration, or a client who becomes newly skilled at performing progress. In the longer term it erodes the thing EMDR depends on most, which is the client’s felt sense that the process is safe enough to surrender to. Parts do not negotiate with people who have overruled them before.
The reframe that changes clinical behavior is this: resistance is communication. The part that slammed on the brakes is pointing, with real precision, at the material the system is not yet resourced to approach, or at a fear about the therapy itself that nobody has addressed. Treated as data, the interruption tells you exactly where the preparation work is.
Parts that interrupt processing are rarely opposed to healing. They are opposed to being flooded, exposed, or abandoned mid-crisis, usually because those are the conditions they were created in. What settles them is consistent across frameworks.
They need to be acknowledged rather than bypassed, which can be as simple as naming aloud that something inside has concerns and that those concerns are welcome. They need orientation to the present, because many protective parts are still operating on decades-old threat data. They need accurate information about what reprocessing involves and what it does not. And they need some genuine influence over pacing, a signal to slow down that the therapist will actually honor.
None of this requires abandoning EMDR or switching models. It requires a structured way to make contact with parts inside the protocol, which is where technique matters.
Ad hoc acknowledgment goes a long way, but some systems need more than a kind sentence. When parts activity is persistent, when preparation keeps failing to prepare, or when the same protector derails every approach to a target, the indicated move is a structured parts intervention with a defined setup and defined uses inside the eight phases.
One of the most practical is Fraser’s Dissociative Table Technique, a guided imagery method in which the client builds an internal meeting place where parts can be identified, oriented, and brought into cooperation. It was developed for dissociative disorders, but it maps cleanly onto EMDR: in Phase 2 it turns preparation into genuine internal negotiation, and in Phase 4 it functions as an interweave when parts interrupt processing. We cover the technique in depth in our companion guide to Fraser’s Dissociative Table.
If your clients arrive speaking IFS language, the distinction is worth holding. Internal Family Systems is a complete therapeutic model; the dissociative table is a technique you can fold into standard EMDR without changing models. Clinicians drawn to the full integration can look at TTI’s EMDR & IFS Practitioner Program. Clinicians who need something usable in next week’s sessions usually start with the table.
EMDR Mastermind Series · December 9th
In the December session of the EMDR Mastermind Series, Rebecca Kase, MSW, LCSW, RYT, founder of the Trauma Therapist Institute and author of Polyvagal-Informed EMDR, teaches Fraser’s Dissociative Table Technique from the ground up: building the table, inviting the parts, using it in Phase 2 preparation and Phase 4 reprocessing, and the decision points for when it is the right tool. The session is live on Wednesday, December 9th at 1:00 PM Central, with Q&A for your own stuck cases, and the recording is added to the on-demand library.
The Mastermind Series is a $49/month subscription with the first month free, and you can cancel anytime. The next time a part slams on the brakes mid-session, you will know what to reach for.
Fraser GA. The dissociative table technique: a strategy for working with ego states in dissociative disorders and ego-state therapy. Dissociation. 1991;4(4):205-213.
Fraser GA. Fraser’s “Dissociative Table Technique” revisited, revised: a strategy for working with ego states in dissociative disorders and ego-state therapy. J Trauma Dissociation. 2003;4(4):5-28.
Kase R. Polyvagal-Informed EMDR: A Neuro-Informed Approach to Healing. W.W. Norton & Company; 2023.
Piedfort-Marin O, Tarquinio C, Dunezat P. The concept of ego state: from historical background to future perspectives. Eur J Trauma Dissociation. 2020;5(3):100189.