EMDR & Addiction: Essential Skills Beyond Basic Training

Research has shown that EMDR may be utilized to assist with recovery from chemical and process addictions. The challenges with this population can be daunting, and for many years EMDR therapists were encouraged to wait to do any trauma work until the client had months of recovery due to fear of relapse. This perspective has been found to be untenable in that the unprocessed memories often fuel relapse, demonstrating the need for concurrent treatment of addiction and trauma. Relapse is generally a process that begins weeks or months before the first slip, and multiple forms of resourcing can be utilized to address this issue Addiction clients often have great difficulty tolerating or modulating affect, or even difficulty naming an emotion or relating the experience of the emotion. Alexithymia and affect phobia are significant challenges in the addiction treatment field.

With current EMDR protocols, the EMDR therapist can address these issues and help the client work through addiction and trauma issues, putting them on firm footing to maintain recovery. In this workshop we will identify the origins of addiction from the AIP perspective and challenges specific to addiction clients; learn and practice creating a treatment plan from the AIP perspective for addiction clients; identify several resourcing options to prepare addiction clients for reprocessing, specifically addressing alexithymia, affect phobia, and difficulty with self-regulation; identify at least three protocols for use with chemical and/or process addictions; and determine when to use a specific protocol with an addiction client.