EMDR group protocol with children, adolescents and caregivers

When a trauma affect more than one people it is important to work in a group to have most effective, least time and energy consuming work to reach and help the survivors. The primary learning objective is that participants will understand the application of EMDR with the children in the group when there is a shared trauma and also adapt the protocol to different populations and to different ages. EMDR Group Protocol with Children, Adolescents and Caregiver can be used with different group populations who experience the same trauma with children older than 5 years old. In this presentation it will be focused on the work with the children that lost their fathers in a mine explosion and the phases of the protocol will be presented while working with mentioned population. The material which was introduced by the participants and the way they have processed their traumatic experiences during the group protocol differ in accordance with the occurrence of the traumatic event; it was carried out both as an acute intervention and in the period when the PTSD symptoms was developed. The intervention was found effective for the each condition. Furthermore, EMDR Group Protocol has a function for scanning the symptoms and treatment plan and it helped to find out the participants who need more clinical work and they are included in individual EMDR therapy sessions. It has been worked with 3 different groups (N=45) in acute period and 4 different groups (N=30) in the period when the PTSD symptoms were developed. At the beginning of the sessions, their SUD levels were 10. The SUD level at the end of the group is between 0-4. Rapid decrease of SUD levels was observed after the storytelling phase of the protocol. The results will be presented by case reports, drawings and videotapes.

Conference

English

Ümran Korkmazlar

Korkmazlar, Ü. (2018, June). EMDR group protocol with children, adolescents and caregivers. In EMDR Association with other psychotherapies. Presentation at the 19th EMDR Europe Conference, Strasbourg, France