In EMDR therapy, there is a lot to learn. Forty hours of training and 10 hours of consultation isn’t enough. You encounter your clients with severe trauma again immediately after your training and translating all of it into something concrete, usable, and safe can feel overwhelming. These are some initial developmental suggestions to help make sure that you are making the transition from foundational training to working more effectively with complex trauma.
If your EMDR training was difficult or frustrating because while you were trying to learn you were simultaneously trying to figure out how to translate all of this into something workable for your complex clients, you may have missed some important things that we were covering about what this therapy is and how to do it with relatively healthy people. So here is a question: How well do you understand Standard Protocol? Do you know what Phase Five is? Do you understand why, conceptually, we train you to float things back to first and worst, even if you understand that starting there with clients with extreme trauma may not be advisable? If you are confused there, clean that up first. We’ll help you make the next steps, but you need to get the chords down before you try to learn jazz. You need to learn anatomy before you can understand the nuances of disease and complicated pathology. Pretend, for a moment, that you are working with the healthiest people on the planet. Get out your training manual and review it. Get out the Shapiro book and review it a little each day. If it’s too much, get Laurel Parnell’s, A Therapist Guide to EMDR. It is a more accessible introduction. Then work your way through the Shapiro book a little at a time.
Once you have a good understanding of Standard Protocol, then what we are doing with complex trauma is just making some sensible adjustments to it. There is no other, single, perfect, or ideal protocol for working with complex trauma. So asking questions like, “Where is the protocol for people with childhood sexual abuse?” is asking the wrong question. Protocols are not magic spells or incantations that make treating complex trauma easy. Nothing makes treating complex trauma easy. The helpful questions are:
“Where is my client?”
“Where are they stuck?”
“What (generally) do they need to heal from?”
“What assets or adaptive information do they have for the difficult stuff to link into?”
“How and where can we tolerably start doing this work?”
“What additional supports might they need to do this work safely and can we start getting those in place now?”
So, if you are newly trained… before you jump from modification to modification… take a breath. Ground yourself. Remind yourself that this work is always slow with those who carry the most and are resourced for it the least. There are many of us who can help you translate what you have learned into what you are seeing in your clients. Check out the EMDR Podcast.com, EMDR365.com, EMDRWithComplexTrauma.com, the Notice That Podcast, and join The EMDR Learning Community. All of these are free and there is more content there than any hungry person can easily consume.
You are going to figure out some really helpful strategies in working with your clients who most need to heal. The challenge now it to try not to burn yourself up trying to figure it all out right now.
365 Questions About EMDR With Complex Trauma 