Wow — three days of EMDR training has really come and gone. Fortunately for me, I had the opportunity to practice further to hone my clinical skill in EMDR therapy, and it has been astoundingly powerful and convincing.
So… I’m accepting new clients now who might want to work with me using EMDR.
The basic process of EMDR is quite straightforward. As a client, you will have an opportunity to allow your brain to do the reprocessing on your own without really needing talk therapy as the lead. We basically believe that your brain will do it’s emotional healing on its own. The EMDR therapist uses EMDR as part of a repertoire of skills to lead the client toward resolution of the situation.
Often, the emotional situations you might experience are clustered around a variety of things. This may include fragmented memories (memories that you haven’t really processed or are confusing, possibly traumatic) and a cluster of memories associated to other memories (called feeder memories). In this case, we process the entire series of emotions until you reach a resolution on your own without the therapists intervention.
You probably will not expect the therapist to carry out EMDR until after the therapeutic alliance has already been set, as we as practitioners have been warned not to jump into it. The EMDR process itself is not as important as collecting the right kind of information from the client so as to be of better support to the client.
The process tends to draw out emotional issues that express themselves in the beliefs we have that are primarily unconscious. The client, however, is given the chance to make those changes happen through a deceivingly simple method. Yet, converting emotional events and negative beliefs into their mirror opposites are no longer difficult using EMDR. This is not to say it cannot be hard for some people (especially with long-term psycho-pathologies) but I believe that for most who need to change their thoughts about certain things can work with an EMDR therapist in practice.
I’ve set aside some time to take in some new local clients, as I will be looking at getting those who are interested in EMDR therapy to connect with me via this website.
Stuart Tan, MBA, SDCG, BA (Hons), is a Licensed NLP Trainer since 1997, a trained counselor and therapist since 1999, and a leadership, team performance and change management consultant. He certifies NLP Practitioners and Master Practitioners through a competency based approach. He is also an executive coach and life coach.
Contact him for information about his corporate seminars, certification workshops and coaching services.