Thanks Carol Ann, I know why this answer is necessarily long. It takes a lot of words to describe exactly to walk a tightrope. All responsible mental health professionals walk the same rope, without leading. I call it, "Paragraph H." I don't know why I call it "H" unless maybe it's short for HighWire.

I had a case once where a client said, "I think my father abused me sexually but I'm not sure." I said something similar to what Carol Ann has described. Her snippet was the sense of being sexually touched and also the picture of her father's face, angry.

We did EMDR on this, working up the target as best we could. In the course of it as the fragmented memory integrated, she realized that the neighbor boys had molested her in the shed, and that her father burst in on the scene, and angrily told the boys, "Get out of here!" The memory had been dissociated for decades because when she got in the house her mother blamed her for what had happened, though she'd been very little.

I was very glad I had not taken any kind of position on what was true and real.

I should also say that it doesn't necessarily go like this. People don't necessarily end up clear about what happened or have a memory integrate into a coherent story. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. Paragraph H.