Description
Course Delivery Format: training is a recorded asynchronous distance learning course/training. Course is available immediately upon purchase
Course Description:
This 6-hour virtual EMDR training is designed for therapists seeking practical tools and clinical insight to effectively treat complex trauma. Led by Deborah Kennard, a senior EMDR trainer and trauma expert, this course explores how to conceptualize complex trauma cases, understand attachment disruptions, and identify client strengths and blocks that influence EMDR therapy outcomes.
You’ll learn how to integrate somatic awareness, mindfulness, and relational techniques into your EMDR practice—especially when working with dissociation, developmental trauma, or clients with patterned survival responses. The training introduces The Answer Questionnaire, a powerful clinical tool that helps therapists identify attachment styles, dissociative strategies, blocks to processing, and appropriate resourcing pathways.
This advanced EMDR course emphasizes how your own attachment patterns can impact the therapeutic relationship, providing insight to increase attunement and presence with your clients. Through case-based learning and actionable strategies, you’ll gain confidence in managing difficult EMDR cases and deepening the healing process.
This is an on-demand EMDR course ideal for psychologists, social workers, counselors, and trauma therapists working with complex clinical presentations.
Instructor: Deborah Kennard
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will identify 3 ways that early attachment patterns can show up in the therapy process.
- Participants will describe at least 2 resource areas that are helpful to explore prior to EMDR therapy processing.
- Participants will describe how a client’s strengths can also be a block in EMDR processing.
- Participants will demonstrate how the Answer questionnaire can be used to identify client strengths, blocks, patterned survival responses and relational attachment patterns.
- Participants will describe a way to use an experiment in the EMDR therapy process.
- Participants will describe how moment to moment mindfulness can be useful in deepening the client’s sense of safety.Â
- Participants will identify how the Answer questionnaire can be useful in deciding which resources the client may need to develop.
- Participants will identify at least 3 indicators that a client is outside of the affective window of tolerance.
- Participants will identify how attachment wounds can create developmental disruptions.Â
- Participants will describe how to use a cognitive interweave of talking directly to the younger part of the client.Â
- Participants will describe how to use verbal tracking of the client’s experience to assist the client in deepening awareness of their experience.
- Participants will identify how dissociation can be an adaptive response that is also a strength for the client. Â
- Participants will describe how the client’s posture can be an indication of the client’s past traumatic and attachment experiences.Â
- Participants will describe how to work with excess fear response during the EMDR reprocessing phases.
1 year of Course access is included in purchase! Take at your own pace.
Audience: EMDR Basic Trained professionals (completed a 6-day EMDRIA approved training program), Masters Level Mental Health Professional
Conflict of Interest: There are no known conflicts of interests for this workshop
Course Content Level: Intermediate
6 APA , NBCC and EMDRIA credits provided upon completion of course, quiz and evaluation. No partial credit provided. Please see participation agreement for cancellation policy
Personal Transformation Institute, 1924, is approved as an ACE provider to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Regulatory boards are the final authority on courses accepted for continuing education credit. ACE provider approval period: 4/21/2025-4/21/2026. Social workers completing this course receive 6 general continuing education credits.
