Fostering resilience in complex trauma survivors using EMDR therapy - Lessons learned over three decades

Adult survivors of childhood abuse and neglect face significant difficulties in regulating emotions, behaviors, and somatic experience. They also report deeply held negative self-beliefs, profound states of aloneness and shame, and problematic patterns in relationships. Unfortunately, for these vulnerable clients, psychotherapy has the potential to trigger affect and attachment phobias, rigid defenses, and high levels of dissociation. Dr. Korn will discuss the lessons she has learned over the course of thirty years using EMDR to treat complex trauma survivors and their families in inpatient, partial hospitalization, and outpatient settings. She’ll talk about the importance of acknowledging and privileging clients’ strengths and survival resources and of establishing a strong therapeutic relationship. She’ll also stress how critical it is for EMDR therapists to think beyond basic symptom reduction, focusing instead on comprehensive healing of the whole person with an emphasis on increasing resilience and post-traumatic growth. She’ll highlight how EMDR therapists can integrate useful concepts and techniques from other trauma-informed models and expand their use of “interweaves” to help clients with moment-to-moment regulation, developmental repair, and movement from powerlessness to action. Finally, Dr. Korn will describe how to help clients integrate and maximize the gains made during their EMDR sessions, helping them carry their transformational learning experiences from the therapy office back into their everyday lives.

Conference

English

Deborah Korn

Korn, D. (2022, June). Fostering resilience in complex trauma survivors using EMDR therapy - Lessons learned over three decades. Keynote at the 23rd EMDR Europe Conference, Valenica, Spain