Hoping you’ve had as good a Christmas/festive season as one might hope for in these challenging times, may I first wish you a rewarding 2024 in every possible way, with appreciation for being part of an EMDR Focus Attachment-Informed community that’s now nearly 2000 strong.
Sharing a few thoughts at the turning of the year, it’s time to let you know that our East Anglia EMDR UK Regional Group research project with the University of the West of England (UWE) exploring EMDR for attachment-informed complexity has come to a halt, well short of generating the data we hoped would validate an RCT design that would test the effectiveness of Attachment-Informed EMDR alongside the Standard Protocol.
As many of you will know having heard me talk about it for nearly three years now, a great deal of hard work went into the project. In the end, and given the priority in the UK to get EMDR properly accepted by NICE for wider use in the NHS, I can regrettably understand why our colleagues on the EMDR Association’s Scientific and Research Committee finally ruled that it was proving too complex and costly for the UWE team’s capacity to manage what we had planned. So the plug has been pulled.
As the East Anglia regional group, we did sponsor an excellent piece of research with Sheffield University in the first year of the Covid pandemic on client and therapist experience of using EMDR online, confirming that whatever the initial caution and scepticism, online EMDR delivers the goods. We’d hoped that this new project would do something similar for AI-EMDR.
But with halfway decent RCT research projects costing upwards a quarter million pounds (yup, that seems to be pretty much a minimum), the just over one-tenth of that which we had raised over a couple of years through our regional East Anglia workshops turned out not to cut the mustard. (Great English phrase that, which I discover has its roots right here in Eastern England, referring to hand scythes too blunt to harvest the mustard crop.)
With thanks to UWE’s Christine Ramsey-Wade and to Abbi Matthews as principal investigator and research assistant respectively, and to many of you who expressed interest in taking part and especially also to Yesim Arikut-Treece who was able to do seriously good work with an early client signing up before the project was halted, we’re still hoping to get a research design outline written up for the Association, plus a case study for submission to the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research.
Also, as part of the project we did manage to work up a draft Fidelity Checker for Attachment-Informed EMDR to be tested alongside the official one here for the Standard Protocol. Now that the UWE project is halted, I’d welcome any thoughts or experience on the former’s usefulness.
We move on, and as AI-EMDR continues to develop and grow, may I remind you of our mainstay, and always fresh, Unleash Your EMDR Parts 1 and 2 workshops, starting with the next Part One timed for UK/Australia at the end of the new year’s second week, January 10-12, with further workshops and webinars now planned out to Easter 2025.
Full details here, and note that there are discounts for anyone who’d like to join us again as a refresher.
I’ve got a briefer Couples half-day coming up on January 20th (US timing), Intergenerational on February 5th (UK+Australia-friendly) and a Part 2 (intergenerational, parts and dreams) again over three half days with facilitated practice (UK/US timings) on February 19th-21st.
Changing gear, I’m very much looking forward to next Friday’s meeting online (January 5th, 1700 GMT) with the Chief Executive of EMDRIA in North America, Michael Bowers, where we’ll explore where EMDR in the post-Shapiro era is now heading as a comprehensive, integrative psychotherapy.
Most of you will know where I stand on the need for EMDR worldwide to embrace what another Michael – Mikhail Gorbachev of the former USSR – might have termed Glasnost and Perestroika, or what Deng Xiaoping as China’s reforming leader, likewise in the 1980s when I was reporting from there for the BBC, used to call in very similar terms Reform and Opening Up.
It does strike me that EMDRIA in America is now trying to move in that direction, including especially with an exciting online conference planned for September 2024 for which proposals are welcomed on how EMDR might now adapt and innovate.
I’m submitting a workshop proposal for this gathering with the ambitious title Trauma, Attachment and Formative Experience: an EMDR Paradigm Shift, reflecting how EMDR in my experience is so much more effective when we move beyond and below the more obvious traumas that clients bring and identify, through what might be termed the Noise into the Signal, and use creative imagination to target and rewire the early-life Formative Experiences that determine how we all respond to what happens to us as life unfolds.
As a transpersonally-trained psychotherapist with EMDR at the heart of all my practice, I would of course say this. But I do I now make the case that Attachment-Informed EMDR as we train and understand it could be a game-changer not just for the narrower world of EMDR but for wider psychotherapy too. I suspect and hope that some of you reading these lines might be beginning to agree.
While we’re talking of EMDRIA and the US, here’s also flagging up an exciting partnership that’s brewing with the equally delightful Rotem Brayer in Denver, Colorado, with his platform The Art and Science of EMDR.
Rotem and I are talking online on March 29, and both before and after that, I’m inviting folk in his network to join me with daughter Katharine (Brayne, that is, emerging AI-EMDR specialist that she is) for a more detailed exploration of the attachment-informed approach over five recorded presentational sessions, each followed with a live two-hour Q&A. Dates still to be determined, but if you’re interested, do check out Rotem’s website and/or, again, reply to this note and we’ll keep you posted.
Looking further ahead to what Rotem would call the Fall, Jutta and I will be in Denver in early October for a two-day practical AI-EMDR workshop, inviting especially our North-America-based friends to join us in-person (though anyone from anywhere is of course welcome.) Again, if you’d like to know more, let us know, and we’ll be sharing details with you once they’re fixed.
In the background to all of this, some further snippets of news.
Some of you have already bought my Unleash Your EMDR: Release the Magic workshop handbook on Amazon. If you haven’t yet, or would like the latest version, over the break I’ve updated the book with new ideas and graphics, and it’s now available not just on Kindle and as a paperback, but now, as of a couple of days ago, as hardback too. Compared with some other EMDR books, it’s not at all pricey either.
In wishing you a rewarding New Year, I should note that I suspect that 2024 will be seriously important for us all in very substantial ways, as the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza continue to unfold and change our world fundamentally, and above all as climate crisis – or rather, the entire sustainability breakdown that we as humans have brought to this planet – becomes ever more dramatic.
With the year now ending already the warmest since records began, farsighted scientists such as James Hansen see 2024 as certain to be even hotter, and a year when it becomes clear how societies, governments, corporations, electorates, public spaces, therapists, all of us, have failed to prevent or prepare for what most scientists now view as unstoppable.
Many of you will know my own understanding of the science, which is that our present civilisation will not survive this century, and that almost everything we now take for granted – including the capacity to send newsletters like this or even to practice EMDR as we currently do – will come to an end within current lifetimes.
I won’t take it personally if, reading this, you join the occasional colleague in concluding that newsletters like this one are best kept out of your inbox, and you choose to unsubscribe (link at the bottom…)
I do hear the argument that we shouldn’t scare people as it demotivates them. But I have long taken the opposite view, that it will only be when we as a human collective are indeed existentially scared about what’s happening that there’s any chance of us pulling together, to face and prepare for what is by the far the greatest threat that our species has ever encountered.
As evolutionary life forms on this earth, we are of course doing what lifeforms do, which is to use up all the resources we can get our hands on, and in the language of earth systems science when sources of nutrition – like grass to deer or sugars to yeast or fossil fuels to humans – suddenly become richly available, to “overshoot” the environment’s carrying capacity until it can no longer feed us.
To us as therapists especially, but also just as parents and friends and colleagues and members of our families and communities, this poses some very big questions. I am now proactively naming these with most of my clients.
In this context, if you haven’t already completed it, and without prejudice to what you might want to say there, can I invite you, on behalf of the EMDR Association UK Climate Crisis Special Interest Group (SIG), to consider completing this questionnaire (eds: no longer live) on you feel these issues might need to impact our practice of EMDR.
We’ve already had more than 200 submissions, and they’re seriously fascinating, reflecting to me how interested but also how innocent most folk still are about what’s coming down the line.
In which context also, a personal note from Jutta and myself, as a couple heading fast towards our joint mid-70s and knowing that our time is so circumscribed.
Having circumnavigated Germany this past year on our tandem Daisy2, we will be taking another sabbatical from Easter to cycle anti-clockwise around France, blogging as ever on www.psychlotherapist.com. You’re welcome to follow us, either online or literally (just 2500 miles/3500km this time rather than Germany’s 3500miles/5500km), though we won’t take offence if you don’t.
Thanks for reading this far, and hoping to see you online again soon.
With all warmest and best for 2024, however it unfolds, from myself and Jutta and from the whole EMDR Focus team.
Mark Brayne