EMDR Basic Training Done Differently — on Purpose
Written by Susie Morgan, LMFT - August 4, 2026
For the Clinician Trying to Decide Where to Train, or Whether to Train Again
"It's the same six days. I could have learned all of this in the same six days. And now I've spent twice the money and twice the time. But now, actually, my clients can get better faster."
A clinician said that to me recently. She had trained somewhere else first, and then chose to take Precision EMDR's Basic Training as part of developing her skills as a Consultant-in-Training.
Her words stayed with me, because they named plainly what is at stake in this decision. An EMDRIA-Approved Basic Training is six days (or 50 hours) either way. The question is what fills those six days, and what a clinician can do on the other side of them.
In more than 20 years as an EMDR therapist and 15 years as an EMDRIA-Approved Consultant, I have seen certain patterns.
Patterns in where clinicians get stuck. Patterns in what leaves them frightened or confused when a client's reprocessing does not go in a way the manual prepared them for. Patterns in what they were never taught but really needed to know.
That bird's-eye view is what shaped Precision EMDR's Basic Training.
Recently, more clinicians have been coming to us after training somewhere else. Some as a refresher. Some starting the whole thing over again. Across multiple cohorts, they have been telling us the same thing:
Starting with Precision EMDR would have helped me feel safer and more effective. I would have known where on earth to begin - and would not have been so scared to use EMDR when leaving Basic Training.
If you are deciding whether Precision EMDR's Basic Training is worth the investment, I think it’s important for you to understand two things make our program what it is: what we teach, and how we structure the training. Both were (re)designed on purpose to provide clinicians with a different level of preparedness than I’d seen traditional trainings providing.
What We Teach: A Clinical Framework Built for the Clients We Actually See
It's the difference between a script and a strategy.
Some backstory. When Francine Shapiro created EMDR, she designed it as a treatment for single-incident PTSD. And it is a good thing she did, because that origin produced the incredibly robust research base showing that EMDR can change things in ways that are phenomenal for clients suffering severe trauma. Traditionally, EMDR Basic Trainings have been shaped around this focus.
But EMDR is now 30 years old. And in the meantime, all of us have been sitting in our offices, or on our Zoom screens, with clients who look nothing like that original research population. Layers of big-T traumas, little-T adverse life events, and early attachment experiences that left a mark - all shaping a kaleidoscope of relational, mood, anxiety, and other symptoms.
I do not think it is enough, 30 years in, to train clinicians only for the client Francine Shapiro was originally treating. As a trainer, my job is to equip clinicians for the clients they actually see. And a clinician will hardly ever meet someone who walks in with one bad event. In my entire history as an EMDR therapist, I can remember two such clients. Two.
My own experience of trying to learn EMDR well enough to treat the complexity of trauma and myriad of symptoms within my practice, was to go to training after training with all the greats in the field, learn from these incredible minds, and then have to trial-and-error cobble together what worked best. I wanted the treatment to be effective. I wanted it to be safe. And I also wanted it to be more efficient than the sort of cobbled-together thing I had going.
So I created a system. A strategic structure that let me see things from the front end that would keep me from getting stuck midway. A way of organizing things so the work could move more rapidly, more efficiently but safely, and create change where clients needed change most.
That system is what Precision EMDR Basic Training teaches. From day one. Because it was exactly the methodology I found consultees needing as well.
Readiness Capacities. We begin with readiness, not as a checkbox to clear before jumping into reprocessing, but as a lens. Our clinicians learn to see what a client's brain and nervous system currently have the capacity to do, and what to do when a capacity is not there yet or is on the weaker side. This is the piece that makes the biggest difference with complexity. It is also one of the most consistent gaps I see in clinicians trained elsewhere.
Dissociation. We teach a practical, meaningful method for screening for dissociation as a spectrum of symptoms. Our clinicians learn what range of dissociative symptoms can look like, the varied implications for EMDR therapy, and how to navigate determining what dissociative presentations are within or are outside their scope as newly trained EMDR therapists.
Mapping the triggers + symptoms + trauma memory networks. We teach clinicians how to map the trauma memory networks. Not a list of the worst memories. Or a sporadic treatment focus based on the presenting concern of the day. A comprehensive map. What experiences has the client gone through, big and little, and how do those experiences drive what triggers them to be symptomatic in present-day life? That mapping is what allows a clinician to target what actually matters.
Choosing targets to optimize for generalization. There is a remarkable phenomenon in the way EMDR works with memory networks: target in a specific order, and the brain will generalize. Essentially, target strategically, and the brain realizes, Oh, this applies to this, this, this, this, and this. Less material to process. Less time in therapy. Faster reduction in a client's suffering. Target less strategically, clients are more likely to experience blocks to processing and slower progress. We teach target sequence planning to optimize the generalization effect, so that clients with a lifetime of painful experiences can experience resolution without having to individually reprocess as many trauma memories.
Attachment, mapped practically. Mapping the good stuff - and the absence of it - across the clients’ relational experiences. Specifically, their early attachment experiences and the symptomatic patterns those created. We teach assessment that moves beyond diagnostic labeling of “attachment styles” to developing a nuanced, practical map of the dimensions of attachment need met and unmet across the lifespan - allowing the clinician to see where processing may become blocked and how repair of the attachment system during reprocessing could facilitate capacity for secure attachment and restored self-worth.
A strategic methodology before reprocessing ever begins. Together these translate into confidence to determine what degree and type of preparation is needed before reprocessing, along with foresight into to how to intervene strategically once reprocessing is underway. These are the pieces I initially had to cobble together on my own for my clients - and these are the pieces I saw consistently missing for my consultees coming out of EMDR Basic Training.
Learning the full experience from the inside. And there is one more crucial piece to how Precision teaches EMDR differently, on purpose. Learning EMDR well means understanding the why - and not just the how - of each element of the procedure.
Scripts are necessary training wheels for learning the steps, but personal experience providing and receiving EMDR allows a felt understanding and nuanced learning that books and lectures cannot provide. I believe this is as important for determining readiness capacities and mapping the work, as it is for the reprocessing procedures themselves.
The practicum component of Precision EMDR’s Basic Training is designed to provide comprehensive experiential learning of the entirety of EMDR therapy. Clinicians learn from the inside how it feels to be asked the questions we teach them to ask their clients, what it is like to map their own experiences, what they connect to when guided through the steps to connect to resources or activate a trauma memory for reprocessing. And then, what it feels like to track progress week to week in how the work changes their responses in real life - and what generalization actually feels like in their own systems.
A Re-Imagined Basic Training Structure: Refusing to Lose What Matters Most or Keep Tradition for Tradition’s Sake
Structure is not incidental. It is how the learning actually happens.
When we say the Precision EMDR program is boutique, we mean it. Our clinicians are not 1 in 200. They are human clinicians we care about and want to care for well during the learning process, because how they are cared for while learning shapes how they go on to care for their own clients.
Practicum, protected. One of the big reasons clinicians often consider a non-EMDRIA-Approved training is to avoid the practicum piece. And honestly, if I were sitting in the shoes of someone choosing an EMDR Basic Training, I might consider that too. Those programs are often cheaper. And clinicians may have heard nightmare stories about practicum being done (frankly) in a way that dishonors the human vulnerability that practicing EMDR together requires. Being called on to demonstrate in front of the class. Practicing in a large group setting where everyone can catch a glimpse of what unfolds in the group next to them. Having random staff members circling the room and intervening, without having built prior familiarity or trust.
None of that happens in a Precision EMDR Basic Training. We meet EMDRIA’s standards, but we reconfigure the traditional practicum model.
Practicum is still vulnerable. It just is. It still asks clinicians to push past what is comfortable. To lean into the discomfort of being new and awkward with a script - and the discomfort of leaning on the history and validity of that script to allow someone new and awkward to guide you in and through deep and personal places.
But, with us, practicum has purposeful protections. Because we are on Zoom, it happens in private breakout rooms. Practice is done in pairs or triads who are part of a small group of 6 or less (not 10 like EMDRIA allows). That group works together the entire training, paired with one Consultant for both in-class practicum and between-class consultation. And that Consultant is tracking each clinician’s needs and progress closely. They are the clinician’s safety net if a question or concern comes up.
No one is lost in the crowd doing something this vulnerable.
We’ve got you (our small group of clinicians) while you are learning EMDR from the inside out.
And learning EMDR from the inside out is essential. The reason practicum is required in every EMDRIA-Approved training is that it makes all the difference in a clinician understanding both what EMDR requires of the client - and what it gives to the client.
Mentorship that continues. Our consultants define their role as that of a mentor, not just a staff member. Someone who knows a clinician's learning arc. Someone who in communication with me, if I am not that clinician's direct Consultant, so I know what they are needing and our team can build more support around them.
We have a neurodiversity specialist on the team. Clinicians come to this work with different brains, different processing needs, and different challenges in their own clinical settings. We brainstorm together about what is needed to support these varying brains in being able to absorb, integrate, and apply what they learn in safe and effective ways with their clients.
And EMDR Basic Training is the framework, not the finish line. We do our absolute best to give clinicians the strongest foundation we can for complex trauma and attachment, and to teach them the protocol backwards and forwards. But it is six days.
Fluency needs more than six days.
So we build the pathway forward into consultation and advanced EMDR coursework, with continuity. Clinicians continue with the same Consultant, or with someone else on our team if schedule, cost, or specialty make them a better fit. Clinicians don’t just get dropped off and lost in space. We make sure they can have our help moving forward as they learn to do this work well.
Even the schedule is re-imagined. Our training is also structured one day at a time - a series of six Fridays or six Saturdays. Each with a week in between to rest, digest, apply, prepare. Not the traditional two 3-day weekends scheduled months apart. Not the more recent evolution of a five-day stint to get it all knocked out quickly.
I understand why a more condensed series of days could sound appealing. But it’s important to ask if a brain can reasonably learn a full psychotherapy that way. This material is intense - conceptually and experientially.
If a clinician is falling asleep on day three of a three or five-day stretch, they are not absorbing it. They are not getting the most out of their investment in the training. Worse, their clients aren’t getting the most out of it either.
Why This Matters: The Shape of the Training Becomes the Shape of the Practice
It's the same six days. The difference is how they will shape a practice.
When Basic Training gives a clinician a clinical framework instead of only a script, when they walk out with eyes for readiness, a system for mapping trauma memory networks, a rationale for the order in which they target, attachment integrated from day one, and a mentor still walking with them, they enter their practice differently.
They feel safer. More effective. They know where to begin. They are not so scared to begin.
And their clients get better faster.
That is why we do things differently on purpose.
Train With Precision EMDR
If you are reading this and thinking, this sounds like what I have been looking for, we would love to have you.
If you are on the fence, or want to talk through the specifics before deciding, there is a form on our website where you can schedule a call with me directly. I will call you back, and we can talk through any and all questions you have.
If you are reading this and thinking, I don’t think I need to complete the whole Basic Training again, take a look at our advanced offerings. Our Refresher Course gives you the Precision EMDR methodology without repeating a full Basic Training. Our advanced courses can be taken on their own or alongside our consultation groups, which provide an opportunity to learn this material at a deeper level with the same mentor support.
If you would like to train differently, on purpose, we would love to have you.
Leave a comment here, reach out on Instagram @precisionemdr, or email me at susie@precisionemdr.com. I would love to dialogue with you about any of this.
Resources
- Develop and Deepen Your EMDR Skills
- Precision EMDR Basic Training: CLICK HERE
- Precision EMDR Refresher Course: CLICK HERE
- Consultation Toward Certification: CLICK HERE
- Advanced Certification in Precision EMDR for Complex Developmental Trauma: CLICK HERE
References
EMDRIA Approved Basic Training Guidelines: https://www.emdria.org/emdr-training/
EMDRIA Certification Requirements: https://www.emdria.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/A-Guide-to-EMDR-Certification-Requirements.pdf
Precision EMDR Certification Guide: https://www.precisionemdr.com/emdr-certification#basic
