Why We Started a Training Center — What We Kept Hearing About EMDR Scared Us

By Kevin St-Jacques, PsyD and Linda Smith, LMHC — Northwest Mental Health Alliance

This is not an easy article to write. It requires us to say something uncomfortable about a field we love and a therapy we've built our practice around.

But we think it needs to be said. Because the pattern we kept seeing — across clients, across consultation sessions, across intake after intake — was too consistent to ignore. And staying quiet about it felt like a choice we couldn't make.

So here it is: a lot of EMDR being practiced right now is not being done correctly. And some of it is causing real harm.

What we started hearing

It didn't happen all at once. It accumulated.

Clients would come to us after working with another EMDR therapist — sometimes for months — describing sessions that didn't sound like EMDR. A therapist who did bilateral stimulation for twenty minutes straight without stopping to process what came up. Sessions that jumped directly into trauma material without any preparation, assessment, or resourcing. Clients who left sessions feeling worse than when they arrived, with no closure, no grounding, no way to put things back in a container before driving home.

Some of them had been retraumatized. Not because EMDR doesn't work — it does. But because what they received wasn't actually EMDR. It was bilateral stimulation applied to trauma without the protocol that makes it safe and effective.

EMDR is a structured, eight-phase protocol. Bilateral stimulation is one component of it. Bilateral stimulation alone, without the rest of the protocol, is not EMDR.

We also heard this from the other direction — from therapists who came to us for consultation. What they described in their sessions sometimes stopped us cold. Skipping the history-taking phase because it felt slow. Moving into active trauma processing without establishing any sense of safety or internal resources for the client. Not completing closure at the end of sessions, leaving clients emotionally flooded and ungrounded.

These weren't bad therapists. Many of them genuinely cared about their clients. They had completed EMDR training. They believed they were doing EMDR correctly. They just hadn't been taught what correctly actually looked like — and the gap between what they learned and what the protocol requires was significant.

Why this happens

EMDR basic training is a 5-6 day course. That’s it. For a structured, eight-phase treatment protocol designed to address some of the most complex presentations in clinical practice.

To be clear: that training is a beginning. EMDRIA — the governing body for EMDR — requires many hours of consultation beyond basic training before a therapist can become certified. Twenty hours of working with an approved consultant who can watch your clinical work, identify gaps, and help you develop genuine competence.

Most therapists who complete basic training never pursue that consultation. There's no requirement to. There's no enforcement mechanism. A therapist can complete a basic training and begin billing for EMDR the following Monday, indefinitely, with no further oversight.

The credential "EMDR trained" tells you almost nothing about whether a therapist knows how to do EMDR well.

What we decided to do

We'd been running our practice for years when we made the decision to formalize what we were already doing informally: training therapists to a higher standard than the field requires.

The training center at NWMHA exists because we couldn't find what we needed in the existing landscape. Basic training courses that send therapists out the door with a certificate and minimal supervised practice. Continuing education that teaches technique without clinical judgment. A culture in the field that treats EMDR as a skill to add rather than a discipline to develop.

We wanted something different. A program where interns and clinicians learn EMDR from the ground up, under close supervision, with ongoing consultation built into the model rather than treated as optional. Where the standard isn't "did you complete the training" but "can you actually do this safely and effectively."

What this means for clients

Every clinician at NWMHA — including our graduate therapists — practices under a model of ongoing clinical oversight. Cases are reviewed regularly. Consultation is built into the week, not an occasional add-on. We review transcripts of sessions and notes. When something unusual comes up in a session, there is a licensed, experienced clinician to consult with — immediately, not eventually.

This is not standard practice. In most private practice settings, a therapist sees clients alone, writes notes alone, and makes clinical decisions alone. At NWMHA, no one is working in isolation.

We built it this way because of what we kept hearing. Because clients deserve to know that the EMDR they're receiving has been taught carefully, supervised closely, and held to a standard that goes beyond the minimum the field requires.

That's what the training center is for. That's why it exists.

If you've had EMDR before and it didn't feel right — or didn't work — we'd like to talk to you. What you experienced may not have been the full protocol. There's a difference, and it matters.

Apply for an intake at NWMHA — we respond within 3 business days. →