Within the depth-psychology and trauma-therapy corpus, ‘processing’ operates as a multi-valent technical term spanning at least three distinct registers: neurobiological, psychotherapeutic, and phenomenological. In its neurobiological register — most fully elaborated by Ogden, Shapiro, and Levine — processing names the hierarchical transformation of raw experience across cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor levels, with the triune-brain model providing the primary structural scaffold. Ogden insists that these three levels are interdependent and bidirectional: dysregulated arousal in the aftermath of trauma disrupts integration across all levels simultaneously, producing the symptomatic dissociation and somatic fixity that characterize post-traumatic states. Shapiro’s Adaptive Information Processing model, foundational to EMDR, frames processing as the mechanism by which disturbing memory networks are metabolized and linked to adaptive associative networks; blocked processing, in this framework, is the proximate cause of psychopathology. Levine counterbalances the cognitive emphasis with a bottom-up argument: because human beings are ‘first and foremost motor creatures,’ sensorimotor processing precedes and conditions cognitive reflection rather than the reverse. LeDoux and Lench contribute a cognitive neuroscience perspective on how emotion modulates attentional and information-processing strategies. The key tension across these voices is directional — whether processing is best initiated from above (insight, narrative, cognitive reappraisal) or below (somatic discharge, movement, interoceptive awareness) — a debate with direct clinical stakes for trauma resolution.