Approved for 6 EMDRIA Credits

EMDR’s standard assumptions quietly break down when the client is chronically ill. Our protocols were built around a trauma that happened – an event with a before and after, a body that has returned to baseline, a nervous system we can help settle. Chronic illness offers none of that. The target isn’t over; it’s Tuesday. The threat isn’t a memory; it’s the next flare, the next appointment, the next dismissal by a provider. This training is for EMDR clinicians who have sat across from a medically complex client and felt the eight phases strain against a reality they weren’t designed for.

This course will reframe chronic illness as active, ongoing trauma and work through what that changes at every phase: how to conceptualize targets when the “incident” is still happening, how to prepare a client whose baseline is dysregulation rather than safety, and how to reprocess without pathologizing an accurate fear or installing false comfort. Along the way, participants will learn a preparation approach – grounded in resource development and a prepared-not-ready framework – that meets clients where their nervous systems actually are instead of at an external readiness bar. The course covers accessibility and language, ethical considerations specific to medical trauma, and interweaves for grief, uncertainty, and loss that doesn’t resolve. Drawn from the growing evidence base for EMDR in chronic pain and medically unexplained symptoms, and from the presenter’s clinical and lived experience.

Presenter: Erica Smith, LCSW

EMDRIA is not involved with the registration of this event. Please click the Register Here button below to visit the registration website. If you have any questions regarding the training, please use the contact information available on that site.