With the world changed by Covid, and especially our therapy-informed corner of planetary experience, we’ve switched all our Unleash workshops entirely online.

Unleash Part 2 is open to colleagues who have completed an EMDR Focus Part 1 Unleash workshop and refreshes your core attachment-informed EMDR skills, adding powerful and often deeply moving approaches to addressing intergenerational trauma stories our clients carry from the deeper and shared past.

Drawing from personal stories and on an understanding of what might be termed the four levels of trauma targeting (see the illustration at the top of this page), we explore the deeper and beyond-the-individual narratives that so often drive our clients’ dysfunctional experience in the present.

While a Level One trauma is an experience which would cause distress in almost anyone (the old ICD definition of a PTE, a Potentially Traumatic Event), in other words the Rupture, Level Two is the Absence of Repair, and in most client presentations usually the more important of the two.

Unleash Part 1 focuses on identifying and addressing those experiences, so Unleash Part 2 takes us on to Levels Three – the internalised parent or primary attachment figure from childhood – and Four, the collective trauma experience that goes with our client’s ethnic/religious/ national/cultural/group identity.

Speaking psychodynamically, these targets can be understood as introjects, a “working model” (in John Bowlby’s words) of self and world, and the relationship between the two, learned in the course of early life/developmental experiences and continuing to determine affect-regulating responses to life’s present stressors.

In layperson’s terms, that’s Mother’s or Father’s or Family/Group stuff.

Targeted as such, it can be resolved with sometimes breath-taking power using standard AI-EMDR tools.

On Unleash Part 2 you’ll also learn the basic Jungian-inspired language of working with dreams, often serving as portal into the personal stories that drive a client’s presenting dysfunctions.

Be aware that this part of the workshop might be a challenge for colleagues not yet versed in working with dreams, as we move quite quickly through the basics into a demonstration of dreamwork in action.

We also introduce what in transpersonal psychotherapy is called the Transfer of Consciousness, or in simpler parlance a Transfer of Perspective, inviting the client to drop into that terrifying figure in their dreams or the wall that’s blocking access to critical memories and experiences from childhood, exploring (in NLP language) the benevolent, and always survival-informed, intent of that part.

Clients (and therapists!) can sometimes find this way of working a trifle unsettling and unfamiliar.

But used with kindness and care, dreams and the ToP can bring a new recognition to how the human nervous system, like that of all sentient creatures (and probably non-sentient beings also), has survived by remembering lessons learned from past traumas, often well past that experience’s sell-by date.

Uniquely we believe (for the moment) in advanced EMDR training in the UK, we give you the space to practise these new skills online in full and for real, with detailed support from our experienced (and friendly) team of EMDR Focus facilitators.