Our story

We didn't set out to build a training center. We set out to fix something that was bothering us.

Both of us had been in private practice for years — Kevin as one of the longer-practicing EMDR clinicians in the region, Linda as a trauma therapist who kept noticing something that didn't sit right.

It started with a conversation. Linda came to Kevin one day and described what she kept hearing from clients — 20-minute sets of bilateral stimulation with no pauses, no check-ins, no processing in between. She asked him what protocol that was.

His answer: it's not one.

That conversation opened a door we couldn't close. We started comparing notes. Kevin was hearing the same things — clients arriving having received no resourcing, no preparation, no closure at the end of sessions. Trauma material opened and left there. As we both became Approved Consultants in Training with EMDRIA, it got more specific and more troubling.

Some clinicians were scared to use EMDR at all — trained but paralyzed, defaulting back to whatever modality they knew before. Others were doing the motions but importing their prior therapy style into the middle of the protocol. Taking over. Directing. Doing everything EMDR specifically asks you not to do.

Because the hardest thing to learn about EMDR isn't the technique. It's knowing when to get out of the way. When to trust the process. When your job as a clinician is simply to hold the space while the brain does what it already knows how to do.

Most therapists never got taught that. Because most training ended after the weekend course — and nobody was watching what happened next.

One day Linda said: we need to train people ourselves. And we need to get to them before they're entrenched in their own way of doing therapy.

So we built something. Not as a business plan — as a response to what we kept seeing, and a decision that we weren't willing to just keep watching it happen.

We became a nonprofit because quality care shouldn't depend on what you can pay. We built a training center because the field needed it. We accept insurance when most EMDR practices won't, we pay therapists fairly, and we hold every session to the full eight-phase protocol — every time.

That's why NWMHA exists.