You finish your EMDR basic training, go back to your caseload, offer a client a choice between the therapy you have always done and this new thing you just learned, and the client picks the old one. Every time.
That is one of the most common things Deb Kennard hears in consultation, and it is almost never a scripting problem. In October’s free monthly webinar she walked through how to explain EMDR so clients say yes. The short version: the explanation works when you actually believe it.
The Real Hurdle Is the Transition, Not the Script
Starting EMDR after a training is the biggest hurdle most clinicians face, because you are doing something new while still learning it. Clients hear that. Offer EMDR the way you would offer an experiment you are unsure about, and they will choose the familiar option.
Start With Your Own Experience of EMDR
Half of the six-day basic training is experiential. EMDRIA requires it, and that goes back to Francine Shapiro. Some trainees love that half, some dread it, and some are downright angry about it. Deb’s read on the anger is worth sitting with: feeling a lack of choices is itself often a sign of unresolved trauma.
Plenty of people have a real shift during the practicum. Plenty do not: you are working with a trainee doing this for the first time, in a room full of distractions. If that was you, go get the experience somewhere else. Find your own therapist, or trade practice sessions with another clinician, with clear boundaries that this is a practicum and not therapy. (It is not ethical to be someone’s therapist and their client at the same time.)
This matters for more than competence. You notice being activated, and you barely notice when the activation is gone. That is why EMDR has a re-evaluation phase. Watching that change in yourself is what makes you a therapist who believes in the method.
Explain Trauma as Physiology, and Keep It Simple
When Deb says trauma, people picture earthquakes, floods, death and destruction. Trauma is also attachment trauma, the overwhelming experiences where we did not have what we needed, including small things we do not remember that still gave us an idea about ourselves and the world. This is why Deb is skeptical when a clinician says a client has no trauma, or that they worked on all of it already.
Explaining it is mostly an exercise in not sounding like a clinician. Everyone doing EMDR has an advanced degree, and we start talking to clients the way we talk to each other. Deb tested this on a PTI colleague who is not a clinician, and he told her he was just hearing buzzwords. Big words do not help. Simple helps.
Simple sounds like this: trauma is about your physiology. The sweating, the heart beating, the stomach churning, the face going red, the hands clenching. EMDR treats a negative belief as the verbalization that results from the memory, not the thing itself. The experiential root is stored physiologically. That is also the honest answer to why CBT, which Deb trained in and still respects, helps many things and leaves a particular group unhelped. You cannot think your way through trauma.
Believe That the Reaction Is About the Past
What carries the explanation is your own conviction that if someone is reacting, it is about the past. Anger that passes is a fight response doing its job. Anger that runs for days, months or years is something else. The client believes the thing in the present is the reason for the activation. Finding the other reason is our job.
A lot of clinicians worry that linking a client’s current pain to the past is disrespectful. Deb’s answer was blunt: if I am your client, please disrespect me in that way, because what you are doing by not disrespecting me is leaving me activated. The client walks out feeling validated and still carrying the activation, justified in it, with all the tension and illness that goes with it.
Use the Answer so the Explanation Is Their Own Story
The Answer is PTI’s term for the adaptation a client made to maximize safety and connection, the two things every human needs to survive. We adapt to the scary, lonely or absent things, especially the pervasive ones our family culture promotes, and those adaptations are both a strength and a limitation, because an adaptation is an imbalance.
The Answer is meant to keep the client away from the pain. What it actually does is encase it. When something big enough or close enough comes along, the pain comes out, and that is the insomnia, the depression, the addiction, the presenting symptom. Presenting issues are always a reflection of the Answer.
So Deb does the Answer before she explains EMDR. Knowing the adaptation, the strengths and the resources lets you predict what will block the client and what will help, and it lets you explain the process using their story instead of a generic script. It also lets you normalize. Nobody comes to therapy the first time they have a problem. They come in after years, asking why they keep doing this to themselves. Why is a mostly useless question in a therapy room. What is here, and how do we transform it, is not.
Reframes That Lower the Threshold
“You are already reliving it.” Clients say they do not want to go back there. We could not go back there if we wanted to, there is no time machine. The pain is already here, hidden, creating the symptoms. Finding the root is like finding an abscess under the surface so it can heal.
The drum. They do this, you react. They do this, you react. A beat gets established. You find the root, reprocess it, and then they do this and you do not react. They may beat the drum harder for a while, but the pattern cannot hold without you participating.
Activation is the good news. Tell clients ahead of time that the memory may come up the way it was stored. Your chin might wobble like a little kid’s, your voice might get softer, you might smell something that was there. It is a kind of mini flashback, and it is the sign we found the right thing.
“The good news is there is something we can do about it.” This is horrible, I am sorry all of this is happening, and there is something we can do about it. You do not have to know what the memory is. We will find it.
One structural note: do not start with the most recent event if you want a comprehensive effect. Running the standard protocol on an adult memory before the early experiences are processed produces a lot of affect and no movement, because you have not reached the root. That root is found in Phase 2, right up against Phase 3.
Questions From the Live Session
Kids and teens. With a child, Deb mostly asks if they want to try something, uses kid-friendly words, and sits on the floor with the drum or has the parent do the bilateral stimulation. The explaining happens with the parents, and when possible she offers the parent their own session: let’s take the thing about your kid’s behavior that activates you most. More than once the parent’s activation went away, and then the child’s did too.
Traumatic grief, when the client feels the present loss is not being addressed. Deb told the story of a mother who called two months after her 18-year-old son completed suicide. Deb had an 18-year-old son at the time and was not sure she was the right person. They found an earlier loss, one where the woman felt she should have done something differently, and processed it. The next session they processed the guilt about having sent him to live with his father during his behavior problems. At the end of that one she said her son was there, that a mother knows her son, and she had a conversation with him. She went from not functioning to functioning, and people started telling her she looked free. Deb’s read is that the fear of not honoring belongs to therapists more than to clients. Clients want to feel better.
Clients who do not believe the past affects the present. Use their own symptom. If you called Deb lazy it would not land, because no part of her feels lazy. The thing that hurts only hurts because there is a wound there. Then ask what they want, and help them imagine it if they cannot.
Brain science and couples. Name the amygdala if a client is academic, though Deb usually just says parts of the brain shut off during trauma, so the memory stays in the emotional part. On couples: if your ethics allow it, seeing each partner individually alongside couples work can work very well, and Deb wrote about that in the EMDRIA magazine.
Go Deeper
If this is the piece missing in your practice, it gets built in the practicum half of the 6-Day EMDR Basic Training, where the Answer and the S.A.F.E. Approach (Somatic and Attachment Focused EMDR) are taught alongside the standard protocol.
Pathways members earn 1 CE credit for each free monthly webinar, including by watching the recording later, so you do not have to attend live to get the credit. The Pathways CE Library holds the full catalog.
Next up live: Lashanna Alfred on EMDR for Racial Trauma with Black Clients, November 6. Pay what you can, with access for a year, so you can watch later if the date does not work.
👉 Sign up for our next free EMDR webinar
👉 Access the Pathways CE Library
👉 Learn more about EMDR training with PTI