Mark Brayne, December 2024
It’s been a long time brewing, but as Ralph McTell (and I, as a young guitar enthusiast at university in the late 60s) used to sing, finally the moment has come and here we stand, with a note to let you and our wider attachment-informed EMDR community know that this coming Easter 2025 I’m retiring.
There’s sadness at moving on from a world of enthusiasm and passion which over the years has transformed not just the lives of so many clients and fellow therapists I’ve worked with, but also, very personally and profoundly, my own and that of my wife, EMDR consultant partner and co-Director of EMDR Focus, Jutta.
In there with the sadness there’s also relief at a number of levels, not just anticipating the space at the age now of nearly 75 that opens up for things other than EMDR.
Jutta is also retiring, so we’re entrusting EMDR Focus with its workshops and networks to our daughter Katharine, whom many of you already know from online gatherings and from recent EMDR UK conferences in York and Glasgow.
Katharine is herself an EMDR-trained psychotherapist working towards certification with EMDRIA, steeped in the attachment-informed way of working in addition to her training as an Integrative practitioner. She brings her own warm and engaging style, and some colleagues have called her Mark Brayne without the edges.
I’m told that is a compliment.
Katharine won’t at first be leading EMDR Focus workshops. But with your help (and with occasional following wind from her parents in the background) she’ll aim to keep the warm collegial energy going in the international ai-EMDR community that we’ve all built together over these past 10 years or so.
For my part, the coming months will be a transition in stages.
From Easter I’m closing my frontline therapy and supervision/consultation practice and will let go of my various accreditations/certifications as they gradually lapse. I’ll still however be fronting a number of continuing EMDR Focus Unleash Your EMDR online workshops Parts 1 and 2 that are already on the website through to Easter 2026.
Notwithstanding the current war in Ukraine, about which I have very clear views, I’m looking forward to bringing attachment-informed EMDR training to colleagues in Russia in their own language. There will be a future for the Russia I love, and those personal connections matter.
Katharine will keep the Find-A-Therapist-or-Consultant pages running on the EMDR Focus website (currently being redesigned and simplified) to which a rewarding number of you are, hopefully productively, subscribed.
I’ll be letting go of organising and moderating our wonderfully engaged and engaging ai-EMDR Google group, now nearly 1,000-strong, and will step back from the new EMDR UK attachment-informed SIG and its monthly 2nd Monday ai-EMDR open discussion space. That SIG does, by the way, need a new chair—could it be you?
Katharine will keep a number of monthly supervision groups going as spaces to explore best practice ai-EMDR.
With serious sadness but also serious satisfaction at what we’ve achieved with our fabulous regional East Anglia EMDR group, I’m handing over my backstage organisational role 10 years now since together with a core group of colleagues we created this group with our first meeting in Norwich.
We’ve since organised nearly 30 regional events, in earlier years in-person and since 2020 online as well, and we’ve raised serious sums of money (see below for further comment on that) for TAUK and for research.
We’ve had speakers ranging from Ana Gomez to Caroline van Diest and Jamie Marich, and have provided a platform for enthusiasts within our own ranks to present on subjects as diverse as working with the body, somatic experiencing and walking EMDR, and, of course, lots of attachment-informed ideas.
I’m also stepping back from my engagement with the EMDR UK Climate Crisis SIG, with thanks and appreciation to Martina Leeven especially for her unquenchable and dogged determination to get climate onto the EMDR agenda.
I may (or may not—time will tell) continue with a very small amount of individual EMDR psychotherapy, and may even (no promises) get around to updating my Unleash Your EMDR guidebook on Amazon, which many of you already know in its current form.
On the personal front, Jutta and I look forward, while health and stocks last, to enjoying more long-distance tandem rides (the other bilateral stimulation), other forms of more sedate travel (all around southern China and Tibet by fast train next October), reading at last books that aren’t just about therapy, for me perhaps finally getting fluent-ish in Hungarian (mad, I know, but rewarding), and in Jutta’s case likewise with French.
We’re fortunate too to have two delightfully cheeky and challenging grandsons living around the corner of our Sheringham home on the North Norfolk coast. Colleagues who have grandchildren or who have ever been one will know what fun—and how all-consuming—that can be.
For me there’s the thrill too of polishing my Russian. What a pleasure it is on these dark early winter evenings to be listening to a 78-hour audio reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the original, and, as memories flood back of university and reporting years in Moscow 50 years ago, finding that I still understand almost every word. Very useful preparation for those upcoming workshops with EMDR Russia.
Taking stock, it’s now more than 20 years since, fresh from leaving a 30-year career in international journalism with Reuters and the BBC, I first trained in EMDR with Richard Mitchell.
Ten years later, my entire practice of EMDR stepped up several gears when a supervisee told me about Laurel Parnell’s attachment-focused approach, with its imaginal resourcing, its bridging and its simplifications of Phase Three. You know the mantra: Image, Emotion, Body, Belief…
The rest, as they say, is history. Laurel and I worked closely together for five years until the pandemic, when it was time for me to take things further and develop the frameworks and extended interweaves that we all now know as attachment-informed EMDR
It’s been an extraordinary, intense, all-consuming experience, and I’m profoundly grateful to all of you who’ve helped light the flame and nurture ai-EMDR (with its lower-case opening) to a point where it’s taking firm root in much of the English-speaking world from Australia and NZ through to South Africa, the UK and increasingly North America.
For those of us on these islands, there’ll be a chance to take stock and share a professional and personal farewell in March at our traditional attachment-informed EMDR dinner (already almost sold out) in Liverpool on the fringes of the next EMDR UK national conference. Maybe see you there?
And with five months still to go till Jutta and I pedal off into the sunset (actually, the sunrise, as our next big tour goes East not West, into Transylvania in the spring), I look forward too to sharing and acknowledging the best of what we’ve developed.
The spaces to do that include, before Easter, two more Unleash Part 1s, one more Part 2, four more monthly live session workshops, plus two specialist webinars in January and February on Case Conceptualisation/Target Identification and on ai-EMDR Interweaves.
All of these have EMDRIA CE credits, and all bar the two webinars also have CPD points from EMDR UK. Details on the EMDR Focus website, so book now while stocks last??
If this is enough information for you at this point, feel free to leave this letter now. If you’re OK to read on about some wider background (yes, you know me, it does get a little political), then head on down the page BTL, below the line.
As ever, all bi- and multi-lateral best,
Mark
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As I step back from frontline EMDR, I have to acknowledge another layer of relief at being able to move on from the complex politics of EMDR, especially those in Europe.
EMDR has to breathe, develop, and grow. And yet, a third of a century after Francine Shapiro first put her protocols together, EMDR is, in the UK and Europe—thankfully less so in North America—still trained and managed in ways that are found by too many to be unsupportive and restrictive.
A therapy as powerful as EMDR which claims to be trainable in just seven days (even allowing for previous experience) is a therapy that outsiders find difficult to take seriously. Derek Farrell was making the argument for EMDR training to be brought into academic establishments and over longer periods of deeper instruction long before EMDR was even a twinkle in most of our eyes. And yet, the basic system remains.
For the main “accrediting” bodies for EMDR in Europe, right up to the most senior leadership, still largely to be managed by commercial trainers—who, of course, can’t help but have serious conflicts of interest in maintaining the status quo—is even less appropriate or acceptable than it was when the system was set up in the 1990s.
Where the actual practice of EMDR is concerned, I have been consistently saddened by what continues to feel like, in some quarters, an emotionally driven and personal hostility to the very idea of explicitly attachment-focused or attachment-informed EMDR, especially from colleagues who haven’t taken the time to find out what we actually teach as it has developed over the years.
I hear it often argued that all good EMDR is already attachment-informed, and that there’s therefore no need for any explicit training or coaching. Indeed, some go further. I was reminded just this month (December 2024) at our regular SIG gathering that there are still consultants who tell their supervisees that Attachment-Focused/Informed EMDR is not really proper EMDR at all.
Arguing as they do that “there’s no research”, I understand their concerns to protect mainstream EMDR. But what’s been harder to take, and wearying to push back against, has been a shocking absence of serious interest on the part of what might be termed the EMDR “establishment” in what has actually come to constitute attachment-informed EMDR.
Ai-EMDR is entirely consistent with the eight-phase/three-prong/AIP-informed “Standard Protocol” and adaptations as allowed for in Shapiro’s 3rd edition bible, and in my view therefore covered, at least in principle, by existing research and practice.
Above all, as all of us who actually use it know, ai-EMDR works – and does so in most cases, and especially with complexity (which of our clients aren’t complex?), often more efficiently than the Standard Protocol as basically trained.
At EMDRIA’s September online conference, I set out the principles of ai-EMDR as a paradigm shift for the wider field of emotional wellbeing and mental health, using EMDR’s powerful structures and focus to get right into, and rewire/repair, the formative roots beyond trauma that drive our clients’ (and our own, of course) behavioural dysfunctions today.
The ideas were warmly received, and from EMDRIA, I experience an openness to change, and a curiosity and enthusiasm, that I find painfully lacking in the UK and Europe.
Coming back to research, with support from colleagues I was able in 2021 to publish a short and now widely-cited paper on positive clinician experience of attachment-focused EMDR. That led to our very active EMDR East Anglia Regional Group commissioning, with our own funds, an exciting, indeed ground-breaking follow-up research project into ai-EMDR in actual practice with the University of the West of England, UWE.
The project was admittedly underpowered, but we were very sad when EMDR UK chose to shut the project down in the context of its associated decision to require all regional groups to surrender their funds and financial autonomy to the national Association.
Thankfully, a couple of papers are still in train, including an individual and powerfully persuasive case study, and a summary of the project and its learnings. So all is not lost.
In the wider field of EMDR’s international management, I have become increasingly concerned by a profoundly unhelpful rift – one might even call it an undeclared ideological war – that has developed between, on the one side, EMDR Europe and its so-called EMDR “Global Alliance”, and on the other the EMDR International Association (EMDRIA) founded by Shapiro and her colleagues in the US in the mid-1990s.
Although none of this is being openly discussed with the membership, EMDR Europe maintains, with to my view unwarranted organisational hubris, that EMDRIA trainings and continued support standards are unacceptably lower than those of EMDR Europe, and has been putting pressure on EMDR Associations around the world to ally themselves with Europe rather than EMDRIA.
As myself an Approved Consultant and Continuing Education Credits Provider with EMDRIA, I work very closely with many colleagues in North America.
While recognising, of course, that there are brilliant EMDR therapists and trainers, and those that are a less proficient or expert, I find no evidence of frontline practice and professionalism being in any way generically of a lower standard within EMDRIA than the EMDR that is practised in the UK.
It’s worth noting (if my figures are right) that some seven in ten of those trained in EMDR in the US go on to certification as approved therapists. The proportion in Europe for trainees to become “accredited practitioners” is little higher than one in ten.
In this context, I’m also dismayed by the decision of the EMDR Association UK, informed primarily by the priorities of EMDR Europe and said Global Alliance, to sever its relations with Trauma Aid UK, formerly HAP, where I was also a Trustee for several years in the late noughties and early 2010s.
There has been at times in these past years a painful—and, for an organisation dealing with trauma, shocking—absence of fundamental kindness how EMDR UK members challenging the status quo have been treated.
Not all colleagues know (another major development that was never talked about) that I was, in 2015, myself suspended from Association membership for challenging the status quo in ways that the Board of EMDR UK said was disrespectful and damaging.
Re-reading the President’s formal letter, delivered that autumn by registered mail like a legal summons, I’m still shocked, (and, yes, OK, still angry) that this Association thought it fit to ban me from engaging with ANY Association activity, including the gatherings of the regional group I had personally set up two years earlier, and from contributing to or reading JISCMail – a decision which the Board had absolutely no authority to make.
I was thankfully able to secure generous, rapid and equally shocked support from my professional indemnity insurers. Under threat of legal action, that ruling was very reluctantly paused and eventually – once I had regrettably eaten humble pie in a deal quietly negotiated by the one Board member sympathetic to my case – dropped.
The Association leadership at the time included a number of colleagues who retain today positions of significant responsibility in EMDR Europe. Other than being told I should be over it by now, and apart from that one friend and colleague on that Board, I have never received an apology for how appallingly this was handled.
These are of course old wounds, compounded by how they were personally experienced by this one late-diagnosis autistic EMDR Consultant. And yes, 10 years on, it really is time to let it go.
Taking stock of my two decades with EMDR, I know that for all the agonies, the journey has been beyond worthwhile.
Personally and professionally, and especially since it became attachment-informed, working with EMDR and its international community has been by far the most rewarding period of an eventful life which, as many of you know (I do talk about it!), has included not just 30 years each of reporting international news and of psychotherapy but three marriages, the first and last of them, of course, to the same wonderful Jutta.
On the threshold of our fourth quarter century (and half a century since we met in Moscow), Jutta and I are beyond thrilled that we can step back knowing that with you all and ai-EMDR’s widest community, Katharine will take things forward.
Attachment in EMDR is becoming mainstream. Of course, you’ll all adjust the legacy. You’ll grow, as you should, you’ll challenge, you’ll struggle, and you’ll change.
One day, you might even officially reform the Standard Protocol…