The EMDR Therapy Training Committee was charged by ISSTD’s Board of Directors to maintain, update, manage, and teach the ISSTD EMDR therapy basic training and other long-form EMDR therapy courses offered by the Society. As of this writing, we have traded in our committee designation to align with other long-form trainings under the Center for Advanced Studies umbrella. Currently, these include the Professional Training Program (PTP) and the ASCH-approved fundamentals and intermediate clinical hypnosis trainings.
We have made some notable changes to the EMDR therapy basic training for 2025. Four years of experience teaching and facilitating this course offered the faculty a lot of perspective. As a result, the basic training has been distilled down from an 81-hour to a 73-hour course, which consists of the following:
- 33 hours of interactive didactic learning and 22 hours of practicum, which take place across three 3-day Modules
- 5.5 hours of on-demand didactic learning, distributed as three 90-minute to 2-hour segments that precede each live Module
- 12 hours of group consultation, with two 2-hour consults following each live Module
This revised course takes place in the span of six months, which means that it is now offered twice a year (January – June and August – December).
The training teaches the responsible application of EMDR therapy in its Standard Protocol form by helping learners become attuned to the presence and forms of simple trauma, complex trauma, and dissociation. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, participants will learn how to discern when (and how), at this stage in their learning, they can safely use the standard EMDR therapy protocol and procedures to resolve a person’s presenting issues.
What that means is that we teach the foundational elements of EMDR in a more nuanced fashion than is typically the norm, and stress repeatedly throughout the training that advanced study, training, knowledge, and experience in treating dissociative disorders, using complementary methods with EMDR therapy as an adjunctive approach, is essential to treat persons with complex trauma histories. This approach is in line with and complementary to ISSTD’s guidelines for treating adults with DID/dissociative disorders.
The training course focuses on the needs of new learners who have never participated in EMDR therapy training of any kind and combines both in-person and live webinar-based learning. However, we’ve also seen sustained interest and participation from auditors who have previously completed basic training (and possibly even gone on to achieve more advanced credentialing) in EMDR, but who want either to ‘refresh’ or to fill in some gaps in their existing knowledge. Notably, auditors participate only in the 38.5 hours of didactic learning, which allows ISSTD to offer them a reduced cost—and over twice as many hours as is the norm for the didactic portion of most EMDR therapy basic trainings. The course is taught by ISSTD Fellow and EMDRIA Approved Consultants/Trainers Jennifer Madere, LPC-S, and myself. The practicum and interwoven consultation sessions are facilitated by us, plus EMDRIA Approved Consultants Marilyn Korzekwa, MD, and Sheri van Dijk, MSW, RSW.
The ISSTD EMDR therapy basic training course takes place fully virtually for all (learn from the comfort of your own home or office!) and is open to both qualified new learners and auditors alike. Registration for the Fall 2025 cohort, which begins in August, will be open until July 14, 2025. You can learn more about the training content and other important information here.