Parnell at last officially legit in the UK…

At last, some rather good and very-long-awaited news, from the EMDR UK-and-Ireland’s annual Consultants Day in London on November 16 2019.

Laurel Parnell, her Modified Protocol, and Attachment-Focused EMDR are now, officially and publicly, accepted as legitimate, mainstream EMDR.

No need for a long exposition here. Most of those in our network know the history.

Suffice it to say that, when asked at the Consultants Day for thoughts on the position now of Laurel Parnell and Attachment-Focused EMDR and her Modified Protocol, Marian Tobin on behalf of the Association’s Accreditation Committee observed simply that Laurel does have official Association CPD points, (which I might note here that, briefly at the height of our difficulties, was not always the case…), so there’s no issue.

In a short ensuing discussion there was applause for Gus Murray from Ireland when he said that working from an attachment focus in EMDR, as indeed with somatosensory or other approaches, of course shouldn’t be seen as conflicting with the Standard Protocol.

Reference was also made to research into the galaxy of various and different protocols developed over the years for EMDR, which concluded that more than 90% of them were compliant with the Standard Protocol (though not entirely sure which ones aren’t).

For my own part, as a close associate of Laurel’s, I added (as emphasised in a post last week on JISCMail for those who subscribe there) that for all the misunderstandings of the past, there’s nothing in Parnell’s way of working that’s out of sync with EMDR’s Standard Procedural Steps – eight phases, three prongs and the rest – and that it’s good there is no longer any dispute.

It would have been better if we’d been able to avoid the heartache on the way, but (Hallelujah?!) Parnell is now, at last, explicitly and officially legit in the UK. And no-one has needed to lose face.

Feel free to make this quietly clear to your colleagues, and to your supervisees if you have them; that if anyone still hears anything to the contrary, and for the avoidance of doubt, working in the Parnellian way is NOT going off-piste, or any longer likely to get you into trouble with the EMDR-Powers-That-Be.

Noting at the same time of course that if anyone is going for accreditation (and anyway in my books as a precondition for best-practice EMDR), they do absolutely have to know the Standard Protocol off by heart/recitable in their sleep.

Those of you who know a bit more about our Attachment-Focused travails in recent years will appreciate how important a development this is, even if quietly undramatic in its arrival.

So hey ho. As we like to say about trauma post-EMDR, it’s over, it’s in the past.

Which brings me briefly to conclude to issues even further in the past, namely EMDR and intergenerational trauma, on which I was thrilled to present at October’s annual conference of the Parnell Institute in San Francisco.

If you’d like to hear the full three-hour audio, with a PDF version of the presentation, feel free to browse over to Resources on this EMDR Focus website.

Laurel herself, and a gratifyingly rich range of colleagues both here in the UK and in the US, are finding this approach to addressing the handed-down trauma of past generations really rather exciting.

If you’d like to know more, I will be taking colleagues through how it works in more detail both at a London Unleash your EMDR Part 2 workshop next February, and at Laurel’s next annual conference in New York next fall/autumn.

And possibly – if they accept the proposal – at the EMDR Europe conference in Berlin next June.