EMDR

Mark Brayne with Laurel Parnell in the glorious Redwoods of Scotts Valley.More than 100 delegates from across the US met for the recently established Parnell Institute’s first Annual Conference held at the 1440 Multiversity Conference Centre deep in the majestic redwoods of California’s Scotts Valley, just south of San Francisco. Mark Brayne, an EMDR Europe Consultant and Parnell Institute Facilitator, reports on the proceedings The choice of venue could not have been more appropriate. Named for the 1440 precious minutes that make up each day, the 1440 Multiversity enabled us to use our time well, with plenaries and workshops facilitated by Dr Laurel Parnell, my now-fellow PI trainers and facilitators, and also Somatic Experiencing luminary Maggie Phillips. Themes explored ranged from the body and spirituality in EMDR and the challenges of working with gender identity, and from how with EMDR we can rewire how dysfunctional early attachment experiences are stored in the brain to processing the primal wound of adoption and strategies for when an EMDR session “goes south” as the Americans say, or off the rails.

Author: Mark Brayne, Parnell Institute Training Facilitator and Director of EMDR Focus. Half-way through a demonstration session at an Attachment-Focused EMDR (AF-EMDR) workshop in London last year, it was becoming clear that my volunteer client and I were getting worryingly stuck. We’d identified where George was being triggered in his present life – a row with his partner – and we’d bridged efficiently to him sitting alone and forlorn on the kitchen floor at the age of four or so, as his mother, her back turned, busied herself at the sink. As she had always done. As an EMDR therapist reading this, [...]

London Mon-Tue Sept 16-17 2019 - Healing Relational Trauma and Rewiring the Addicted Brain with EMDR. £295 – CPD points applied for. Very last minute (see below…), we’re delighted to welcome Dr Parnell for her first workshop in Europe focusing on the ideas in her her new book for EMDR with addictions Rewiring the Addicted Brain. We’re not yet settled on a venue, but it will be in central London, and this will be of interest not just to colleagues already trained in Laurel’s Attachment-Focused approach to EMDR, but newbies too. Through lecture, slides, and videos of live client sessions, and LOTS of discussion and As, you’ll learn how to integrate an attachment-focused, brain-wise approach into treating clients with addictions and dysfunctional behaviours, as well as practical tools you will be able to use immediately with your clients.

Forget books on parenting, I get the best mummying advice in the world from my patients. Because almost all of them are healing wounds from their mothers. I had my first child before I worked on myself and before I trained in this line of work. I suffered from post natal depression, felt like my world had imploded - I remember driving home from the hospital - terrified of going home with this little baby, and wanting to scream out of the window at people walking in the street “how can you be getting on with your lives like nothing has happened, can’t you see the world has changed???!” Such a difficult time. My husband at the time was working and hardly ever home, my family lived miles away, and I felt so ashamed of the fact that I found this new baby stuff so hard, I simply felt I couldn’t reach out to any friends. I felt isolated, alone, and very, very, low.

Thanks to Rachael Ward for sharing the following touching client story, inspired by training in September with Laurel Parnell in London in the Attachment-Focused approach to EMDR. (Names and identifying details have been changed.) I loved the AF approach and one of the reasons is that it has validated some of the things I was instinctively doing, but feeling 'bad' for doing them as it was against standard protocol. One such case was a young woman I saw seven years ago as a client of a Mental Health Service. She had a diagnosis of NEAD (non epileptic attack disorder) and was suicidal due to the impact it was having in her life. The Neurologist had done all he could for her and she had received CBT, Psychodynamic therapy and a raft of other interventions that had been unsuccessful at helping reduce the 20+ seizures a day.

I’m curious how the EMDR Europe and UK communities will respond to Francine Shapiro’s new, third edition manual of EMDR. I’ve just finished reading it, on Kindle, and as someone interested especially in the Attachment-Focused approach to EMDR, have a number of points it would be good to see discussed: First, most importantly, I wonder what status this book has in the practice, training, supervision and research of EMDR? Francine Shapiro is the originator of EMDR, and directs the EMDR Institute in the US, a commercial training operation alongside others under the accrediting umbrella of EMDRIA. But to what extent are we in Europe as accredited Consultants, Practitioners (and Trainers) bound by its recommendations, or instructions if that is what they are? To what extent are the revised recommendations in this important handbook based on new (or old) research?

Gearing up for Laurel Parnell's September trainings in the UK in her attachment-focused EMDR model, we've had a first-class day in London in partnership with Laurel's West Coast colleague Alison Teal preparing our team of AF-EMDR facilitators for the trainings in York and London. (Photo: AF-EMDR Trainee Facilitator team, London April 9 2017 - from l to r: Iram Shah, Mel Temple, Alison Teal, Jutta Brayne, Annabel McGoldrick, Mark Brayne, Jayne Averill-Smith, James Thomas, Joe Kearney, Gerry Virgo, Shawn Katz.) With commercial EMDR trainers in the UK focusing their efforts and marketing largely on basic training, and with other senior EMDR folk and regional groups offering only sporadic weekends of CPD, there's a real need in the UK for post-basic training that equips therapists to use EMDR with more complex client presentations. And that's the gap we at EMDR Focus are aiming at least to begin to address, in partnership with the Parnell Institute in the US.

It's been some time in the making, but it was a great pleasure to present to last weekend’s (March 24, 2018) EMDR UK & Ireland annual national conference on Laurel Parnell’s approach to Attachment-Focused EMDR. Here’s a link to the full presentation, in PDF form and slightly amended for wider public consumption, recognising that some of the slides, especially the pictures, won’t make overly much sense without the attendant explanation in person. After some controversy over recent years within the EMDR community about the standing of Dr Parnell’s approach to our work, it was particularly rewarding to be able to bring these very positive research results to the conference in the same week that Laurel heard from the EMDR International Association (EMDRIA) in the US that her EMDR training, with its Part III focus on working creatively with attachment, has been unanimously approved by the relevant accreditation committee.

As bookings come in for Laurel Parnell's three-day advanced EMDR training in London in September, I thought it might be useful to copy in here, as a post on EMDR Focus, a reply I've just sent to a colleague wondering what actually happens on the workshop. Laurel’s three days is essentially her Part 3, and I’ve now watched and supported her doing this a surprisingly, and rewardingly, large number of times. She assumes, obviously, a solid basic training and experience in Standard Protocol work, and an interest in working at greater depth with more complex clients, bringing in a very explicit attachment focus. Each day is structured basically the same.

A weekend workshop for Qualified Professionals. Friday June 23 -  Sunday June 25 2017. The Turning Point, Sheringwood, Norfolk, NR26 8TS EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitisation & Reprocessing – is one of the hottest and best-researched new approaches to psychotherapy, recommended for PTSD by organisations around the world. What’s less well known is how perfectly EMDR, with its understanding of trauma and neuro-biology, meshes with the transpersonal and the relational in psychotherapy, and how powerfully it can enhance an integrative, person-centred approach to healing. In this first-of-its-kind workshop, EMDR-Europe Accredited Consultant and Parnell institute training facilitator Mark Brayne from the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy (CCPE) in London offered 16 psychotherapist colleagues, all but two already trained in EMDR, an introduction to how EMDR with a transpersonal and attachment-focused dimension can enhance and support their own work with clients and patients.

We've been having an exciting time with Laurel Parnell this long weekend at the CCPE in London, as she introduces 36 enthusiastic and experienced EMDR therapists to ways of unleashing their work-in-depth with a new understanding of attachment and deep processing. Dr Laurel Parnell at work in London EMDR is increasingly evidence-based as a therapy of choice in addressing and clearing the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - but as we've been hearing this weekend, when used in a client-focused and undogmatic way, it is also brilliant at drilling into the deepest roots of childhood distress, and releasing trauma that can have been locked into the system for a lifetime. There are those in the international EMDR community who challenge Dr Parnell's way of working as somehow "not authentic EMDR." We can only recommend that sceptics experience her training and this way of working themselves to clear misunderstandings about how powerful and appropriate this work can be for the widest range of clients.