The Value of EMDR Consultation

I owe my EMDR clinical career to the consultation I received soon after my basic training AND throughout my entire EMDR therapist career.

Who benefited? My clients.

Here are the reasons why you and your clients can benefit from consistent EMDR Consultation:

If You Are Newly Trained

Now that you have completed your basic EMDR training, it’s time to consider hiring an EMDR consultant. It takes practice and support to build your confidence in applying the 8 phases of EMDR with your clients. Clients come in with all kinds of presenting problems, so how do you as their therapist develop a treatment plan that clearly addresses their symptoms, goals, and interventions with EMDR?

The information taught in the foundation EMDR four-day training is extremely valuable yet can be overwhelming initially. It’s difficult to fully integrate all the information that you have invested time and money to learn. Questions about: Have I collected both sufficient and the correct information during history-taking? How do I effectively explain EMDR to my clients when I’m just beginning to grasp what it is myself? When should I start installing a positive resource and which one should I utilize first? Which target memory should I focus on initially? What happen when I start processing and will I carry it out correctly? How should I handle my clients’ dissociation? What if I miss a step? How do I really know if all the memory channels are processed?

Presenting your cases to a consultant helps you to not only be more effective with your clients, it builds your confidence in your skills and instincts as an EMDR therapist. Whether you join a consultation group or meet individually with a consultant, the guidance you will receive is invaluable to your development as a confident, skilled, and effective EMDR therapist. 

Setting Up Regular EMDR Consultation

Let’s face it: Every therapist – EMDR or not, highly experienced or not – needs objective consultation and perspective on a regular basis on our cases. The most expert EMDR trainers and authors readily acknowledge their consistent attendance in peer consultation groups AND individual EMDR consultations. You and your clients benefit from an experienced EMDR consultant’s objective and supportive perspective. Just think about all the variables that connect to every client: finding the correct client diagnosis, asking questions related to social media and AI chatbot usage, effect of medications and sleep disturbances, dissociative tendencies and unconscioius client-therapist re-enactments, to name only a few, 

What is regular EMDR consultation? Monthly is the norm. Set up the appointment no matter whether you have a complicated case (which you always will have) or not. I recommend building up questions that naturally occur with every EMDR session, no matter the randomness or ‘tiny’ the question or observation. I guarantee you will never lack for questions about your cases especially if you provide EMDR therapy to people with more complicated presentations. Complex PTSD anyone? Your EMDR consultant will help you cut through the many factors that tend to hinder your clear formulation and treatment plan for these presentations.

How to Find the Right EMDR Consultant for You

Start with your EMDR basic training. Did you connect with any of your facilitators during the afternoon practicums? Feel free to ask if they provide monthly case consultation and go from there. No matter who you find or connect with, I recommend interviewing them in a zoom meeting to learn their approach to consultation. This meeting will give you an idea of their personality as well as your comfort level with their approach and expectations. I recommend interviewing more than one consultant to learn their fees, availability, and general business practices. Each one will have an individual and/or group consultation contract that explains all the expectations of the consultant/consultee relationship. If you have a special interest in a clinical population or demographic cohort, finding an EMDR consultant with that specialty would be especially helpful. 

EMDR Consultation is Not Just about EMDR Therapy

No matter how well trained we are or how many years we have been clinicians, sometimes we can get dragged into an unconscious transference situation with our clients. It can happen to any of us! Here is where we expect our EMDR consultant to come in and gently point out how we are feeding into the transference with our reactions to the client. Your EMDR consultant should be trained in these psychodynamics in addition to their general clinical skills.