The temporality of belief: VOC, SUDS, and traumatic experience

This paper explores a hypothesis that EMDR’s two measures (VOC and SUDS) may track different neurobiological processes, helping explain why distress can decrease without a positive belief feeling true, or vice versa.

Resource Abstract

“The Standard Protocol of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy uses 2 measures: subjective units of disturbance (SUDS) and validity of cognition (VOC). Both are rated at assessment. SUDS is taken again when the target seems cleared; a reading of zero or one permits the move from desensitization to installation. It is also retaken at re-evaluation. VOC is rated again at installation and, once a target has reached installation, at re-evaluation. By the close of successful processing, disturbance is expected to be low and conviction high. In practice, this is sometimes not what happens: SUDS falls while the positive cognition still does not feel true, or the cognition begins to feel true while disturbance does not diminish. Drawing on affective neuroscience (Panksepp, Solms) and predictive processing (Friston, Seth), this paper proposes that the 2 scales index processes with different relationships to time. SUDS indexes the affective activation maintaining temporal collapse, a state in which past threat is experienced as present and the future as unreachable. VOC indexes the degree to which the predictive apparatus has opened toward temporal extension, the condition under which a positive cognition can be felt as true. That the 2 have distinct neurobiological bases is held as a hypothesis and developed at the predictive and phenomenological level. Panksepp’s primary emotional systems are read by the temporality each produces as well as by their motivational profile. Divergence between the scales is then clinically informative rather than a procedural problem. Four implications follow, including a reading of the widespread omission of VOC under high disturbance as an enactment of the client’s temporal position.”

—Description from publisher

Resource Access

Open Access

Tomaszewski, T. (2026). The temporality of belief: VOC, SUDS, and traumatic experience. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 20, Article 50. https://doi.org/10.34133/jemdr.0050(opens in new tab)