Invisible Loyalties: What EMDR Can Learn from Intergenerational Family Therapy
Trauma doesn’t begin with the individual it often lives in the echoes of family legacies.
Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy’s Intergenerational Family Therapy also known as Contextual Therapy brings a powerful lens to EMDR, helping us understand how invisible loyalties, emotional debts, and systemic injustice shape our clients’ inner worlds.
These concepts offer a rich conceptual grounding that pairs well with systemic EMDR, especially when addressing intergenerational trauma, loyalty conflicts, and the client's embeddedness within family legacies.
Here are key concepts from Boszormenyi-Nagy’s work (1973 and later), with notes on how they can inform or integrate with EMDR therapy:
1. Relational Ethics
The heart of Contextual Therapy: relationships are sustained by fairness, reciprocity, and trust. When these are violated, it creates invisible loyalties and emotional debt.
Application in EMDR:
Use relational ethics to frame target selection (e.g., unfairness, betrayal, emotional debts).
Ask: “Who was this experience unfair to?” or “What felt out of balance in the system?”
2. Invisible Loyalties
Unconscious commitments children make to maintain loyalty to parents or ancestors, even if it means self-sacrifice or internalised suffering.
Application in EMDR:
Blocked processing may reflect a loyalty to family suffering or a refusal to "heal" if it feels disloyal.
Use interweaves like: “Is there someone in your family you might feel you're betraying by letting this go?”
3. Destructive Entitlement
When people do not receive fairness or love in relationships, they may act out entitlements in damaging ways toward others or themselves.
Application in EMDR:
Target memories of neglect or injustice where the client internalised unworthiness.
Helps explain patterns of repeated trauma or “acting out” behaviours.
4. Ledger of Give-and-Take (The Family Ledger)
Families keep a psychological balance sheet of who owes what to whom emotionally, materially, relationally.
Application in EMDR:
Explore burdens clients carry on behalf of family (e.g., “I owe it to my mother to suffer too”).
Can shape Phase 1 history taking or inform parts work during processing.
5. Multi-directed Partiality
The therapist maintains empathic understanding for all family members' perspectives, even if only one is present. This builds trust and promotes healing across generations.
Application in EMDR:
Helps therapists regulate their own countertransference and hold systemic complexity during processing.
Use this stance to model empathy toward internal parts or “family ghosts.”
6. Exoneration
The process of restoring fairness in relationships through insight, rebalancing, or forgiving. Not to excuse harm, but to free oneself from the emotional entanglement.
Application in EMDR:
Target sequences that help clients release guilt or rage while restoring a sense of balance (e.g., interweaves guiding them toward understanding or releasing inherited burdens).
7. Transgenerational Transmission
Unresolved emotional legacies, trauma, and ethical violations pass from generation to generation unless acknowledged and repaired.
Application in EMDR:
Phase 1 history can include genograms or legacy burdens.
Clients can process "inherited trauma" through parts work or symbolic targets, even without clear episodic memories.
Sources:
Boszormenyi-Nagy, I., & Krasner, B. R. (1986). Between Give and Take: A Clinical Guide to Contextual Therapy.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.).