Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy

Name: Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy
Author: Francine Shapiro

Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy is a work by Francine Shapiro (2012).

Core claims

Shapiro’s Adaptive Information Processing model is, beneath its clinical packaging, a theory of psychic dissociation that converges with Jung’s complex theory and Kalsched’s self-care system—making EMDR less a technique than a contemporary rediscovery of the psyche’s autonomous capacity to metabolize traumatic images.
Getting Past Your Past translates the depth-psychological insight that the past lives in the present body into a self-help protocol, accomplishing what Hollis describes as the obligation to “re-imagine ourselves in order to live in the present”—but by bypassing narrative meaning-making entirely in favor of somatic and imaginal reprocessing.
The book’s most radical move is democratizing access to the memory network model, revealing that what depth psychology calls complexes and what neuroscience calls maladaptively stored memories are the same phenomenon viewed through different lenses—a convergence that neither tradition has fully reckoned with.

How does Shapiro’s concept of maladaptively stored memory networks compare to Kalsched’s self-care system in The Inner World of Trauma, particularly regarding the question of whether traumatic dissociation protects or imprisons the psyche?
Estés argues in Women Who Run With the Wolves that survivorship must be transcended through ritual and re-naming; Shapiro argues it must be transcended through memory reprocessing. Are these competing models of transformation, or do they address different layers of the same phenomenon?
Hillman insists in Healing Fiction that case history is “soul-making as psychological poiesis”—that the narrative itself carries therapeutic power. Does Shapiro’s emphasis on somatic reprocessing over narrative elaboration constitute a refutation of Hillman, or does EMDR’s reliance on imagery and associative chains secretly depend on the same imaginal logic?