EMDR Therapy and Adjunct Approaches With Children

This book is intended to provide to the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) clinician advanced tools to treat children with complex trauma, attachment wounds, and dissociative tendencies. It covers key elements to develop case conceptualization skills and treatment plans based on the adaptive information processing (AIP) model. A broader perspective is presented by integrating concepts from attachment theory, affect regulation theory, affective neuroscience, and interpersonal neurobiology. These concepts and theories not only support the AIP model, but they expand clinicians’ understanding and effectiveness when working with dissociative, insecurely attached, and dysregulated children. The book presents aspects of our current understanding of how our biological apparatus is orchestrated, how its appropriate development is thwarted when early, chronic, and pervasive trauma and adversity are present in our lives, and how healing can be promoted through the use of EMDR therapy. In addition, it provides a practical guide to the use of EMDR within a systemic framework. It illustrates how EMDR therapy can be used to help caregivers develop psychobiological attunement and synchrony as well as to enhance their mentalizing capacities. Another important goal of the book is to bring strategies from other therapeutic approaches, such as play therapy, sand tray therapy, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Theraplay, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) into a comprehensive EMDR treatment, while maintaining appropriate adherence to the AIP model and EMDR methodology. This is done with the goal of enriching the work that often times is necessary with complexly traumatized children and their families.