EMDR Therapy and Trauma Processing: Getting Back to Basics

Over the past few years we have noticed that many of our consultees have questions regarding how to follow the basic EMDR Therapy protocols.  In addition, many of the innovative uses of EMDR Therapy have been geared towards Resource Development and stabilization (Leeds and Shapiro, 2000, Korn and Leeds, 2002).  Resource Development and stabilization can be helpful in the preparation phase of EMDR Therapy to help stabilize and to prepare clients for trauma processing.  However, some clinicians report feeling a lack of confidence in processing trauma (Lipke, 1995; Greenwald, 2006; Luber, 2009, Ferrell & Keenan, 2013) and may use resourcing strategies, delaying or avoiding processing the traumatic experiences which lay down the psychopathology in the information processing system.  This presentation will focus on a review of the Basic Protocols of EMDR Therapy to aid participants to gain confidence for trauma processing (Shapiro, 2008).  There will be an emphasis in affect tolerance of the therapist to enable more rapid and profound trauma processing with EMDR Therapy.  The Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model posits that mental health problems (apart from organic deficits) are the result of memories of adverse life experiences which are not completely processed (Shapiro, 2014).  While stabilization and preparation are often necessary for more complex trauma presentations, EMDR Therapy practitioners may tend to focus on stabilization over processing of trauma and adverse life experiences.  There will be vignettes to help illuminate teaching points. We will focus on how to choose appropriate targets for trauma processing to allow for the most complete processing of experiential contributors.  For complex PTSD presentations, we will discuss how to implement the EMD protocol for more controlled processing.