“And they lived happily ever after”: EMDR and the use of stories for traumatized children and adolescents

The use of EMDR with younger age children presents extra challenges for the practitioner who often needs to include the child’s parents/carers as a resource in the treatment process. Parents /carers can become the child’s spokesperson through creating a narrative of the child’s story. Based on the work of Joan Lovell, the EMDR protocol is assimilated and adapted to suit the diversity of each child’s unique experience through the process of story writing where the traumatic events are digested and processed with the help of the protective parental figure(s). The presentation will illustrate through the use of clinical material (video; drawings; collage; etc) how the practitioner can develop a multitude of creative means to access the pre-verbal or the severely traumatized young child; for whom we need to step “outside the box” and transform the EMDR protocol to suit each child’s needs.

Conference

English

S. Crystal

Crystal, S. (2009, March). ‘And they lived happily ever after’: EMDR and the use of stories for traumatized children and adolescents. Symposium conducted at the 7th EMDR Association UK & Ireland Annual Conference, Manchester, UK