Working in close partnership with Dr Laurel Parnell in the USA, we’re passionate at EMDR Focus about empowering fellow therapists to Release the Magic, as we put it, of this extraordinarily powerful therapy.
If you’re already trained in EMDR, you’ll know the central position of what EMDR’s founder Francine Shapiro termed the Standard Protocol (SP).
At EMDR Focus we honour the value of that Protocol’s eight-phase/three-pronged structure, encouraging our workshop attendees and supervisees at the same time to build on that, and take EMDR to deeper relational levels with their clients.
We know colleagues who’ve trained in EMDR and never quite got going with it.
We know many too who do use it but, especially when working with clients presenting with more complex dysfunction rooted in childhood experiences of attachment to primary caregivers, find themselves at times constrained by what can be misunderstood as Standard Protocol rigidity.
The Standard EMDR Protocol, with its sequencing of cognitions negative and positive, its numbering of a PC’s validity and of the intensity of a client’s emotions (the VoC), has its important research-based place in the treatment of single-incident adult PTSD – and as the standardised approach that unites those working with EMDR around the world.
For working with more challenging clients, though, and with new definitions of complex or developmental PTSD increasingly embraced by the psychological professions, there’s a growing awareness how essential it is to adapt the Standard Protocol to the needs of the client.
So, in our EMDR Focus workshops, we build on the Standard Procedural Steps that make EMDR such a distinctive therapy (from History Taking and Preparation through Assessment and Desensitisation to Installation/Tapping In of the positive cognition, Body Scan and Re-evaluation and Closure), while introducing colleagues to the widest range of Parnell-inspired adjustments that fit the therapy to the individual.
If these thoughts capture either your own experience of EMDR as therapist, or indeed your concerns as a client, then we’ll be delighted either to work with you in therapy (contact us via our Braynework psychotherapy website) or to coach, train and inspire you to take your EMDR practice to a higher – or perhaps deeper – level.
Do get in touch if you’d like to know more.
Mark, Jutta and the EMDR Focus team.