The Seba library treats Flooding in 7 passages, across 5 authors (including Winhall, Jan, Yalom, Irvin D., Shapiro, Francine).
Flooding and numbing bring first-person experiencing to chaos/rigidity’s intellectual, conceptual quality.
Winhall theorizes flooding as one pole of a dysregulation dyad—paired with numbing—that constitutes the bottom-up experiential counterpart to the top-down neurophysiological categories of chaos and rigidity.
, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelthesis
flooding and numbing 3–4, 22, 78–79, 82, 125
The index entry confirms flooding’s systematic pairing with numbing as a central conceptual axis throughout Winhall’s felt-sense polyvagal model of trauma and addiction.
, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelthesis
S. Rose, ‘Intense Feeling Therapy,’ in Emotional Flooding, ed. P. Olsen… T. Stampfl and D. Lewis, ‘Essentials of Implosive Therapy’… P. Olsen, Emotional Flooding.
Yalom’s footnotes situate flooding within a genealogy of cathartic and implosive therapeutic traditions—Olsen’s emotional flooding, Stampfl’s implosive therapy, Janov’s primal scream—all premised on inducing intense affect as a vehicle for psychological change.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
Implosive (flooding) therapy reduces symptoms of PTSD in Vietnam combat veterans.
Shapiro’s bibliography records empirical evidence that flooding (implosive therapy) reduces PTSD symptoms in combat veterans, providing the behavioral-clinical baseline against which EMDR is compared.
, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
Marks, I. M. (1972). Flooding (implosion) and allied treatments. In W. S. Agras (Ed.), Behavior modification: Principles and clinical applications.
Shapiro’s reference to Marks formally situates flooding as an established behavioral technique—synonymous with implosion—within the broader behavior-modification tradition from which EMDR partially diverges.
, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 2001supporting
Depression, 50, 94… and the flooding treatment, 183–84
Herman’s index links the flooding treatment to depression within a trauma recovery framework, acknowledging it as a recognized clinical procedure while situating it alongside the broader phenomenology of post-traumatic suffering.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting
Patients are gradually desensitized from their irrational fears by bringing to mind what they are most afraid of, using their narratives and images (‘imaginal exposure’), or they are placed in actual (but actually safe) anxiety-provoking situations (‘in vivo e
Van der Kolk describes the exposure-based desensitization logic underlying CBT—the conceptual infrastructure shared by flooding techniques—without naming flooding explicitly, positioning it as a graduated approach to overwhelming affect.
, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014aside