Using EMDR with Children and Youth: An Advanced EMDR Workshop with Ana Gomez

This workshop focuses on specific strategies that will assist clinicians in following EMDR therapy principles and procedures while meeting the developmental needs of children.

Clinicians will learn how to make EMDR therapy successful and effective even with difficult clients. This workshop has numerous video clips that explain step by step each phase of EMDR therapy.

 

 

Participants attending this seminar will be able to:

• Develop case conceptualization skills and treatment plans based on the Adaptive Information Processing Model (AIP).
• Identify key factors when establishing the client’s readiness for EMDR therapy.
• Effectively prepare children for EMDR therapy. This includes a wide and rich variety of resources for stabilization and affect regulation as well as the use of RDI (Resource Development and Installation).
• Identify targets using developmentally appropriate float-back, affect scan and mapping strategies.
• Use play therapy strategies to assist children in identifying past memories of trauma and adversity, triggers and the future desired outcome.
• Use a wide range and different types of interweaves that are child-friendly and more suitable for children.
• Use “The Skill Building Phase” and EMDR Games to facilitate and enhance the use of EMDR therapy with children.
• Use effective strategies with children to prepare the nervous system before reprocessing traumatic material to optimize the child’s integrative capacity.
• Use a wide variety of strategies geared to modulate arousal during reprocessing with children that tend to move into hyper- or hypo-arousal states.

Workshop description: Day # 2

 Complex Trauma, Attachment, and Dissociative Symptoms: Treating Children with Emotion Dysregulation and Constriction Using EMDR Therapy.

This workshop provides theoretical and practical strategies to assist clinicians working with children with severe dysregulation or constriction of the affective system: Children exhibiting insecure patterns of attachment, developmental trauma and dissociative symptoms.

How to use EMDR therapy and attachment theory strategies directed to titrate the amount of trauma and keep children within manageable and tolerable levels of activation to facilitate reprocessing is demonstrated.

In addition, clinicians will learn advanced strategies to work with dissociative children and children with insecure patterns of attachment throughout the eight phases of EMDR therapy.

Participants attending this seminar will be able to:

• Use strategies for EMDR therapy case conceptualization and treatment plan development with children with complex trauma using the AIP model.
• Use effective resources for stabilization and affect regulation that are suitable for dissociative and highly dysregulated or emotionally constricted children.
• Use advanced interventions to provide distance, titrate and help children overcome the phobia of the trauma and its accompanying effect.
• Clinicians working with children with severe deficits in affect regulation face the challenge of having these children become extremely aroused or dissociated during trauma reprocessing. These two responses (hyperarousal and hypo arousal) can interfere with the child’s ability to integrate traumatic material.
• Participants attending this seminar will learn strategies to keep children within manageable levels of arousal and maximize the child’s integrative capacities.
• Master the use of interweaves with children with complex and developmental trauma.

Ana M Gomez, MC, LPC is a psychotherapist in private practice, author of several books, chapters and articles, and a lecturer internationally known for her innovative work with children and adolescents.  Ana Gomez is an EMDRIA approved consultant; an EMDRIA advanced training provider, an EMDR Institute, EMDR-IBA and EMDR-HAP trainer.  Ana has received training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Play Therapy, Sandtray Therapy, Theraplay, Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB), and the use of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). She has worked with children, adolescents, adults and families affected by trauma and adversity for almost 20 years.

Ana has been a guest lecturer for plenary sessions and pre-conference workshops on several occasions. She has been a guest speaker at the 2008 (Phoenix) and 2014 (Denver) EMDRIA conferences and the pre-conference workshop and plenary presentation at the EMDRIBA conference in Costa Rica. She has been a keynote speaker at the 2008 EMDR Brazil conference, the Touchstone Annual Childhood Trauma Conference in 2013 and 2014 and the SWS Annual Conference in 2014.