Did you know that 20% of people have a disability whether it’s developmental, cognitive, physical, or mental and many have co-occurring diagnosis and disabilities? Persons who identify with a disability are up to 4 times more likely to experience trauma than persons who do not. This makes the use of trauma treatment and resilience building methods such as EMDR a critical component in healing. One of the wonderful things about EMDR is that it does not discriminate as it empowers all individuals to adaptively face their realities and heal via such processes as cross neural plasticity. Via lecture, handouts, guided activities, and client videos, this workshop compares the similarities in how trauma and disability is defined, reviews the Adaptive Information Processing Model (AIP) as it relates to persons with a disability, familiarizes participants with cultural terminology and describes adaptations of EMDR methods that accommodate disabilities throughout the eight phases.

Neurodiverse people think, process sensory information, communicate, socialize and engage in movement differently than those who are neurotypical, but EMDR therapists can use playfulness, flexibility and modifications to make the benefits of EMDR available to this population. The use of stories in therapy can enhance the access to adaptive information and expand the child’s tolerance for focused work in therapy. The EMDR storytelling method, first described by Joan Lovett, has often been used with young children as a way to titrate and augment EMDR processing and structure the participation of caregivers. This workshop will build on the structure of Lovett’s storytelling method and offer additional suggestions and play-based adaptations as well as case examples which illustrate the application of this method with neurodiverse children and teens, including how to structure the participation and support of attachment figures and address clinician challenges with the method in consultation.

Somatic therapy modalities have been supporting clients' healing for generations and can be supportive to the success of EMDR therapy. In this presentation, clinicians will be invited to gain a deeper understanding of how to notice the story the body is holding onto and learn new ways to help that story be worked through. Discussion of implicit memory, somatic markers, and the threat response cycle will be highlighted, allowing clients to better appreciate how the body has helped them stay safe and survive. Specific strategies of pendulation, titration, and innate movement will be discussed to enhance all phases of EMDR and increase compassion for somatic cues and interoceptive experiences. Increasing the ability to notice comfortable sensations and befriend the body in new ways will be highlighted. Specific strategies for desensitization phases will be introduced. Clinicians will walk away with new strategies to help clients heal.

Many EMDR therapists struggle to prepare emotionally dysregulated, dissociative clients for trauma processing. This presentation introduces ego state therapy concepts and interventions from the Developmental Needs Meeting Strategy (DNMS) for stabilizing these clients in EMDR Phase 2. It explains how child parts split off in early childhood to cope with painful attachment failures. It describes interventions for mobilizing a team of loving, attuned, vetted resources, and for establishing a special safe place where child parts can hang out. It covers DNMS interventions focused on meeting the emotional needs of wounded child parts—helping them form an attachment bond with the resources that’s so healing, they become less dissociative and more grounded in present time. As more and more child parts heal this way, dissociative clients become more stable and better able to regulate emotions. This prepares them well for safe and effective Phase 4 trauma processing.

This presentation focuses on three key areas of EMDR with an attachment- and survival-informed perspective: case conceptualization, session structure, and the use of imaginal and creative interweaves. Consistent with the EMDRIA definition of EMDR, these tools developed over nearly a decade of workshops with approaching 1000 attendees, identify and target - beyond trauma - primarily the client's formative early-life experiences which underpin their presenting challenges. These experiences can be identified and reworked therapeutically with creative interweaves that rewire the client's formative narratives at levels well beyond the cognitive, including "session-within-a-session" work to address emotional and behavioral patterns handed down through generations. Attachment-informed EMDR is contained within a tight session structure, enabling clinicians to retain close reparative focus on specific past experiences - not always trauma - that need attention. Focusing on these three key areas of AI-EMDR, the presentation will demonstrate the power of this adaptable and possibly game-changing approach.