(Live) EMDR for Racial Trauma with Black Clients (2 Hours) (Coming Soon)

Course Description:

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is an evidence-based trauma treatment, but its effectiveness depends in part on whether the clinician understands the context in which a client’s trauma occurred. This two-hour live webinar examines the intersection of culture, race, and trauma in EMDR therapy with Black American clients.

Participants will consider how historical, racialized, and intergenerational trauma may shape clinical presentation, and how stigma, shame, mistrust, and prior experiences of discrimination can affect treatment engagement and the therapeutic relationship. The program introduces a three-level framework for understanding context (personal, generational, and societal) and connects that context to the Adaptive Information Processing model through the meaning a client has assigned to an experience.

Culturally responsive considerations are then applied across all eight phases of EMDR therapy, with particular attention to inviting discussion of race during history taking, allowing the client rather than the therapist to identify the negative cognition, selecting ecologically valid positive cognitions when environmental threat is ongoing, and addressing external stressors at closure. Two structured case discussions give participants practice in case conceptualization, including identifying present triggers, earlier touchstone memories, and inherited survival messages.

The program also distinguishes culturally responsive practice from colorblind approaches and invites examination of therapist assumptions, bias, and discomfort in case conceptualization. Culturally responsive EMDR does not require knowing everything about a client’s culture. It requires humility, curiosity, clinical skill, and enough safety for the client to tell the clinician how culture matters.

This workshop builds upon knowledge obtained in EMDR therapy training.

This training does not qualify you to practice EMDR

Learning Objectives

1. Identify at least three ways historical, racialized, and intergenerational trauma may influence the clinical presentation of Black American clients.
2. Describe how stigma, mistrust, shame, discrimination, and cultural experiences may affect engagement and the therapeutic relationship when providing EMDR therapy to Black Americans.
3. Apply culturally responsive considerations across the eight phases of EMDR therapy, including history taking, preparation, target selection, reprocessing, and reevaluation.
4. Differentiate culturally responsive EMDR practice from colorblind approaches and identify how therapist bias, assumptions, and cultural humility can affect EMDR case conceptualization and treatment.