For the Screen Technique, trauma patients are asked to imagine their memories like a movie on a screen. It is supposed to create some distance to the memory to avoid flooding. The memory is not happening right here right now, it is just on the screen. The pictures on the screen can then be changed at will to give the patient agency over their experience. The Screen is less of a stand-alone technique and more like an element that is used in a lot of different ways, from managing flashbacks to trauma processing.
Managing memories
A version of a screen technique can be used to gain control over memories when they come up. We imagine them on a TV screen and then change things about the picture:
- turn it black and white
- turn off the sound
- make it very small
- turn it so bright or dark that it becomes hard to see any details
- slow it down/speed it up
- move it to a small corner of the screen
- change the channel to something else
- switch it off
Patients often report that they struggle to do this when they are dealing with a full-on flashback experience. The most useful action to imagine for a flashback is simply pressing an off-button to end the movie.
Playing around with the scene can potentially give people a sense of control over it but it can also just be a waste of time that doesn’t even work that well. It is an important part of trauma therapy history and it’s been years since I saw anyone actually use it that way in earnest. Simple Orientation & Grounding is the faster and more grounded way to become aware of the present reality again.
Discrimination
What is more commonly used today, is a screen or split screen to help us find the differences between past and present situations. In the split screen technique, therapists ask us to place the past scene on one side of the screen and the current scene we want to compare it to on the other side. Then we find all the differences to make sure that what we are facing today is not the same as the memory. This is an incredibly valuable exercise. Using screens might just over-complicate things. Keeping a split screen with detailed situations in mind is a cognitive challenge. A lot of people stumble over the screen when they try to do this exercise because it gets in the way instead of helping. Going through one element at a time and comparing them can pace the process and give us enough distance to make the screen unnecessary. I personally prefer using pen and paper and lists for grounding and pacing during this exercise and no screen at all. Staying in an observing posture does not depend on imagining screens. It helps some and others feel a bit helpless with the instructions because they can’t make them work and that is not their fault. A split screen is highly demanding.
Distancing during Trauma Processing
Most techniques for trauma processing require that we can look at the memory without getting flooded. They all need a way for us to keep some distance to the memory and not get sucked in. Some techniques use the screen technique more than others. Sometimes you will see therapists specifically advertising their technique as ‘using the screen technique’ for trauma processing. That just means that the screen is the main way to maintain an observing posture while we (repeatedly) share our story. This is very common and effective with mono trauma and has fallen out of fashion for complex trauma with dissociation because it is too difficult to maintain.
We will find this inner posture of keeping our distance and observing the memory from a fews steps away in pretty much every trauma processing approach but other elements like bilateral stimulation or active imagery rescripting are added. We might not think of it as a screen anymore when we use them, or even picture it like one. I personally believe that it is more useful to focus on observing from a distance than it is to practice seeing an inner screen for that. The imagery of the screen can get a bit distracting from the real goal it is trying to achieve. On this blog, you will find exercises to practice distancing yourself from inner experiences under the umbrella of the distant observer and not as a stand-alone screen exercise.
The screen in DID therapy
When we are working with DID, we usually have parts who don’t feel like the trauma happened to them and the memory isn’t even ‘theirs’. The structural dissociation comes with a built-in distance that makes us observe things as if they have nothing to do with us. We rarely have to practice that. It makes pure exposure therapies less valuable for DID. Techniques that just tell adult parts to watch the memory on the screen will create numbing which is a key characteristic of ANPs, and no processing. Brain studies confirm this typical ANP response to trauma content.
Is it theoretically possible to use a screen to make things feel more real? Yes. But that is ill-advised. It would just lead to overwhelm and not to integration. Flooding is not a trauma therapy technique.
When we are working with younger parts who know about the trauma, they rarely have the capacity to hold the mental image of a screen for processing. They fall into the memory like a stone falls into a well. Demanding a screen from them is like asking the stone to float in thin air. Don’t drop the children in the well.
Trauma processing in DID often demands that these parts work together and the first kind of part supports the second kind of part throughout the process. We need the adult part to hold on to the trauma part and their observing posture. The trauma part will make the memory feel more real and painful when they share their experience.
In reality, this process is a lot messier and intertwined than 2 parts sitting at a distance and watching a trauma movie on a screen. The imagery of the screen is very easily lost. In all my 15 years of doing this, I have never had a session where it held up for more than 20 seconds before being lost. If the trauma part is not re-experiencing some of the feelings, there is no re-processing for anyone in the system. In this case, the adult part serves as an anchor for grounding in the present which is a lot more effective than a screen. They are right there with the young part in a shared realm of inner experience and help to regain the distance. It feels a lot more like the ER than a movie theater but we are right there to help. Inner world exchanges and shared orientation in the outside world replace the screen.
Alternative imagery
I don’t bother imagining screens anymore but I do use similar concepts to manage trauma processing.
Stage
One is a stage. When I share the memory I try to set a stage. The room becomes a set, the furnishings props and the people on the stage actors who play the scene from our memory. This gives the younger parts a bit more distance because it isn’t them in this scene right now. It is just a play that replicates the events and they can direct it and tell what happens next. That is still plenty to bring up the old experience. It also makes it easier for the adult part to watch and witness and take it seriously. While the stage offers distance for the trauma parts it also offers a touching display for the distant parts who will get to feel some of the reality of the memory.
A stage like that can be frozen in time so that parts can walk between the actors, look at something in detail or change something. It is a lot more 3D than a screen but that somehow makes it easier instead of harder. Turning an inner experience into a 2D picture is harder than just leaving it 3D and the distance is not lost when moving across the stage. Allowing the trauma part to direct the play so that it tells their truth of the story is plenty of agency.
Doll house
The other imagery I use a lot is that of a doll house. When trauma happened inside a house, we can look into that house as if it is a doll house with a wall missing. This too is set up as a stage but we stay outside the miniature house, just looking in. The scene does not appear as a moving picture and instead becomes a series of still shots. The dolls that demonstrate the story for us have to be moved around to show what happened. This allows for a tremendous amount of agency and it is ideal when we are working with imagery rescripting anyway. When we retell the story we use Play to rescue the young part and change the doll house situation. The inner pictures and experiences are still very present and feel very real but some of the perspective of being outside the scene remains. It can sometimes be important for the integration of the memory to notice what happened in other rooms of that house at the same time. It might be guesswork or we might know, and it creates a bigger picture and a different frame for what happened.
Floor plan
I have used a sketch of the floor plan of a house or room. Sometimes I draw it while describing a scene and I also have more detailed and true to scale drawings of common places where trauma happened inside my therapy folder. Instead of a screen, I use the floor plan like a map to put on the table. It turns everything into 2D and a bird’s eye perspective without me having to do it in my mind. People who work with a sand tray might like to use the abstract items they have chosen for different parts to display the events of the trauma. Especially scenes with more than one part involved can benefit from telling the story like that because it gives us a better overview as we puzzle together the pieces of memory and a timeline of events. It is a lot easier for parts to join in and adult parts can actually see the story without it just being in their mind. The inner pictures of the rooms will come up but we use the map and items for tangible grounding. One of the unexpected benefits of this approach is that we don’t look at our therapist and our therapist does not always look at us. Looking at the map together can create a deeper sense of connection for people who struggle with being looked at too much.Therapists never really get to see the things in our mind. A map makes them more visible and more share-able and can help therapists to ask better questions.
My EMDR process has always been very different from telling a whole story or looking at a whole story all at once. It feels more like following a rope that leads from one detail to the next. Most of the scene goes out of focus when processing a detail and then the attention drifts to something that is connected. The bilateral stimulation demands so much attention in the outside world that it is grounding while also facilitating enough inner connection to create a shared emotional experience. I tend to think of it as following ropes with knots of details to their end and then feeling for the next rope to follow. There is very little screen in that because there isn’t a whole scene, just a string of details spread over different senses and inner experiences.
These are examples of things that, for me, have worked better than screens. Like the screens, they won’t make sense for everyone or for every situation. It is a normal process to start with a screen and then quickly adapt the technique to your own imagery. Like with the ‘conference table’ imagery for DID, that, once introduced, gets changed quickly because having so many meetings with the whole system is rarely how things work in real life, the screen technique is meant to be a starting point and not the end of all wisdom. It is a trauma therapy tradition but not something that needs to be followed strictly. The adaptations that result from it are all based on the same principle of creating distance while maintaining a safe connection to the past experience. That is what we aim for. How exactly you want to do that is up to you. There is no reason to feel bad when you can’t stick to the literal instructions for a screen. A screen is not the goal here. Focus on the main principles and it will hold up to the reality of the process.
This article is very much an opinion piece. You may have a different opinion. Personal experiences differ.