Unleash your EMDR: Release the Magic Part Two. EMDR with Intergenerational Trauma, Parts/Ego States and Dreams.

This page sets out our Unleash your EMDR – Release the Magic Part 2 workshop, covering EMDR with Intergenerational trauma, Dreams and Parts.
The workshop has 12 EMDR Association UK CPD points and also 12 EMDRIA CE credits, valid for anyone who attends the full workshop live or views any parts missed on recordings available afterwards for one month.
Note that for viewing the workshop purely in recorded form, we can issue only EMDR Focus attendance certificates (not EMDR UK or EMDRIA) for the six hours of instruction and discussion.
Triad sessions, central to these workshops, are not recorded.
Where Unleash Part 1 (previous attendance required if you want to join us on Part 2) explores the basics of what might be termed advanced, attachment-informed EMDR (the rupture and the absence of repair), Part 2 goes deeper, adding tools we at EMDR Focus find increasingly indispensable for tackling complex trauma.
Here we focus on the stories and programming we carry from our parents and our families, tribes and inheritance, on dreams (catnip for the transpersonal therapist) and a simple but seriously powerful way of working with parts.
Stop Press February 2023 – you can now book Parts 1 and 2 together at a discount (£850 for both, as against £990 if booked individually), and the registration form will explain.
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.
- Identifying and targeting intergenerational trauma, both explicit and implicit, internalised experientially in childhood and passed down epigenetically (cf Rachel Yahuda’s research into Holocaust and 9/11 trauma in NY.)
- Learning what Janina Fisher calls the Language of Parts as they inform a client’s management of emotion and experience.
- Exploring briefly Internal Family Systems (cf Richard Schwartz) and structural dissociation (Onno van der Hart et al) in their impact on affect management in the present.
- Unpacking dreams and their meaning, as a portal into the developmental networks where clients’ trauma is so often stored. This can be astonishingly powerful.
- And refreshing essential understandings of attachment- and narrative-informed case conceptualisation.
- A reminder/refresher in the proactive use of bridging/floatback to identify developmental targets most likely to deliver change in a client’s current life.
- Exploring again a wide range of imaginal and creative interweaves to facilitate client healing in accordance with the principles of Adaptive Information Processing.
- And above all, the importance and value of session structure when working with childhood trauma and the impact of developmental deficits from earlier life.
From the EMDR Focus attachment training I have learnt so much. It has absolutely transformed my practice.
An analogy would be the standard protocol although good feels like vanilla icecream whereas the Attachement-Informed EMDR I have done with EMDR Focus is like the Ferrero Rocher with all the sprinkles on.
Since starting I have practiced as much as I can and I have found that it has reached places that no talking therapy ever could.
People can often rationally understand it and get it but don’t feel it.
This training has allowed me to be able to do that with patients at a true emotionally level and has truly transformed their lives too.
I was already a die-hard attachment informed EMDR fan before doing any of Mark’s training but I feel like, after level one, my practice moved to a whole different level. I had clients tell me that they felt one session using this approach produced greater changes in their belief systems and behaviour than the 20 or so years of previous therapy they had experienced (including standard EMDR).
I am not going to lie, the level 2 training sounded a little far-fetched but, given the success I had post level One, I was game.
However, after experiencing the intergenerational trauma work personally during the sessions, I am 100% in.
I had been working on a personal issue in standard EMDR for over 2 years and had little resolution with it and, in just 30 minutes of a practice session, I could feel my internal body changing.
It was as if, for the first time in 20 years, my body allowed itself to let go of the grief it had been holding and truly relaxed.
One of the most powerful and valuable courses I have experienced. To be in such a safe place to engage fully in the supervised practicums meant that the learning was embedded at a very deep level, which can only be of benefit to both client and therapist.
This will make a significant difference to my practice, and I can already think of clients for whom this will be appropriate.
I loved this course, it was so informative, Mark was excellent, so warm and responsive. His style, and emphasis on attachment, warm, kindness was missing so much in our training.
Mark’s enthusiasm for EMDR, and his love of teaching, which is clearly a passion for him, is infectious and what makes training with him so enjoyable and leaves you wanting more!
Thank you so much Mark and Sarah, Jutta, James and Maxine. I loved my two days. Your presentation style is engaging and easy to understand and the demos were really useful. The supervision was both useful and tactful.
These workshops include full, in-depth and live demonstrations of EMDR with a real personal issue. This can be a very powerful experience, both for the group and for the volunteer kindly offering themselves to work openly this way.
Participants are invited to work in triads on similarly real issues, using the tools of attachment-informed EMDR, and this too can go surprisingly deep.
While we find that participants value this opportunity, both as therapist and client, the experience can be triggering. For our part, we commit to doing our best to keep the training safe and contained. We correspondingly ask participants to take responsibility for their own responses, and to remain at all times open and respectful towards the processes and learnings that will unfold as the workshops proceed.
You will of course have the opportunity to decline to bring personal issues to the practicum, but for your own sake and that of others on the workshop, please do allow space for a willingness to be vulnerable, as well as to be bold.
By registering for an EMDR Focus workshop, and recognising that participation can involve both observation and personal experience of sometimes profound trauma processing, participants agree to take appropriate responsibility for their own emotional wellbeing, and to ensure they have access to any necessary therapeutic and/or supervisory support following the workshop.
If you need to cancel up to six weeks before the workshop, we will refund your fee minus a 10% handling charge. After that, refunds will be at the discretion of EMDR Focus.
12 CPD hrs over 3 days. 12 EMDR Europe CPD points and 12 EMDRIA CE credits.
Venue: Online, on Zoom.
Cost: £456 (or local currency equivalent). Note that these prices, comparable to basic EMDR training, include relevant taxes, full facilitation of triads and pairwork as well as workshop materials.
September 27-29 2023 (Wed-Fri)
UK/US Timings
1500-2000 UK
0700-1200 PDT
1000-1500 EDT
December 8-10 2023 (Fri-Sun)
UK/AUS/NZ Timings
0700-1200 UK
1800-2300 AEDT
February 19-21 2024 (Fri-Sun)
UK/AUS/NZ Timings
0700-1200 UK
1800-2300 AEDT