Building parental capacity to support their child’s EMDR therapy

When children participate in EMDR therapy it is important to involve their parents and caregivers. This can be done in many different ways which raises dilemmas for EMDR therapists. Parents can be in the session during reprocessing, they can be in the session at the start and end, or they can not be involved at all. Involving parents complicates the sessions as therapists need to be tuned into what is happening in the child, in the parent and in their relationship. Some parents have their own trauma that might be triggered, or the child feels they cannot speak openly with the parent in the room. However, involving parents also provides more opportunities to enhance healing for the whole family and improve attachment relationship and attunement. In this presentation these dilemmas will be addressed as well as answers to questions such as: How to assess the parent’s capacity to support the child? How can that capacity be improved with brief interventions and psychoeducation and the AIP model? Are there creative ways to involve parents with very limited capacity? What are situations when it is not helpful for the child and parent to have the parent in the therapy room? How can those parents still be involved and supportive in creative ways before, during and after sessions? What to do when children are in foster care or residential care, how can the biological parents still be involved and supportive? To illustrate the decision-making process, the presenters will have brief panel discussions on several vignettes. This presentation is developed by the Parent and Caregiver taskforce of the Global EMDR child alliance.

Conference

English

Debra Wesselmann
Arianne Struik

Wesselmann, D., & Struik, A. (2021, October). Building parental capacity to support their child’s EMDR therapy. Presentation at the EMDRAA Conference, Virtual