Clients need to trust they’ll have a safe experience and get the best possible outcomes with their EMDR therapy. When treating clients with dissociative disorders and profound emotional wounding in childhood, this can be a challenge to deliver. As long as clients have fears about healing that block therapy, have belligerent child parts that sabotage therapy, or are so easily triggered they cannot tolerate trauma processing, the benefits of EMDR will be out of reach. This workshop teaches a systematic, comprehensive, Phase 2 preparation plan to resolve these problems and more. It involves direct communication with individual wounded child parts connected to a past, present, or future EMDR target. Once a targeted wounded child part has met specific benchmarks of stabilization and emotion regulation, Phase 3 on that target can begin. The workshop will illuminate the differences between trauma wounds and attachment wounds. It will provide an introduction to ego state theory, an explanation of Memory Reconsolidation Theory, and a review of Shapiro’s Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. In addition, it will explore the challenges and limitations of treating attachment-wounded clients with EMDR. The workshop will equip you with many innovative stabilization interventions not taught anywhere else. It will detail how to…
- quickly and effectively mobilize a team of vetted Resources
- establish a Special Safe Place (a fun place for wounded parts to hang out)
- identify therapy goals that can actually block processing
- set an effective therapy goal – free of blocks
- invite wounded parts forward
- start a dialogue with wounded parts
- attune, validate, and empathize with wounded parts
- build rapport with especially belligerent and oppositional parts
- give wounded parts missing information, and clear any misunderstandings
- connect wounded parts to a loving, supportive team of Resources
- orient wounded parts to present time
- enable wounded parts to see reality more clearly
- show wounded parts that the upsetting experience they seem to be reliving, is actually just a harmless recording
Clinicians taking the workshop should be able to start using these interventions right away with the scripts provided. The workshop also explains how these interventions track with Porges’ Polyvagal theory and Dan Siegel’s parenting advice.
This training teaches basic ego state therapy skills and interventions of value to all therapists – whether trained in EMDR or not – so all therapists are welcome to take it. While this is NOT an EMDR training, the content is specifically tailored for EMDR therapists who need help preparing fragile, wounded, dissociative clients for trauma desensitization. Limited seating available.