When Am I Competent to Practice EMDR?

Hi, My name is Dr. Jennifer Sweeten, and I'm a licensed clinical psychologist and longtime EMDR trainer. I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to answer a question that I get really frequently from clinicians who are attending my trainings or thinking about attending my EMDR trainings. And I think it's a really good question, a really important question, and I just wanted to take a few minutes to address it. And the question that comes up over and over again is, when can I practice emdr? Or more specifically, when am I competent to. To practice emdr, to actually use this with my clients? And I know that this answer is probably wholly unsatisfying, but my answer is actually, I don't know. Okay, so let me give a little more information than that. I'm not gonna do a video just to tell you I don't know, but I think this is a really good question. It's a question that we actually don't talk about with therapies a lot. It seems like it's kind of funny. EMDR is like the one type of training or the one type of therapy where this comes up over and over. But when I teach prolonged exposure, it doesn't come up. Or cognitive processing therapy, different trauma workshops, neuroscience workshops, when I've attended other workshops myself with trainers in other areas, I swear this never comes up unless it's emdr, this question of competence. But I think it's such an important one and actually something that we should be asking about all therapies, not just emdr. So let me give you my answer. Sometimes I'll write this in emails, respond to clinicians who are asking about this in emails. But I wanted to give a video about this, too. Okay? So thoughts that I have about this, how I usually answer this. One thing to keep in mind just at the outset, is that the entity that you have to respond to, okay, that you are beholden to your regulatory entity is going to be your licensing board. That's always who you're going to answer to first, first and foremost. So I can't ever tell you, yes, you're allowed to practice EMDR or no, you're not. That's outside of my scope of practice. That's above my pay grade. I can't do that. Likewise, there's no continuing education company who can tell you, yes, you're competent now. There is no other EMDR organization who can say, okay, yes, we know you're competent now. Now, there's going to be indicators of competence for sure, but in terms of allowing you to practice that's always going to be a question your licensing board. But of course, we're not just concerned about what the licensing board says. We are concerned with that. But we want to know beyond that, like, okay, just because we technically can do something doesn't mean we should, doesn't mean we're competent. Right. We do also have our ethical codes and we're very concerned about doing harm naturally. Right. We want to do no harm. That's in all of our ethical codes. Regardless of whether you're an LPC or a social worker psychologist, that's always at the forefront of our minds. And I think that's what's really behind this question of competence with emdr. So then how do we know? So just a few things for your consideration and keeping in mind, I'm not going to be the person that tells you yes, you're competent and probably no other individual can either. But some things to consider. First of all, when you're coming to EMDR for the first time, how many years of clinical experience do you have? This is not like a solid determiner of anything. This is just something to consider. Someone who is one year out of school, has probably not been exposed to as many different therapies, has not had as much experience in the therapy room as someone with 30 years of experience. Right. I oftentimes in these workshops work with clinicians who have a lot more experience than I do. And when they make comments or ask questions, I mean, that experience really shows it matters. And we know that from research. Right. That years of experience, it's not everything, but it does matter. So if you're coming to EMDR with 10, 20, 30 years of experience, I can tell you you're probably gonna feel more comfortable with EMDR faster than if you had just graduated yesterday. So that's just one consideration. I think another consideration is how much experience have you had treating trauma in particular? So if you have 20 years of experience, but you really have never focused on trauma, it's gonna be a little harder to move into emdr because EMDR is a trauma focused exposure based therapy therapy. So if you're not super familiar and experienced with trauma focused therapies with exposure based therapies, this is going to be a little bit more difficult, steeper learning curve. If, however, you've had a lot of experience treating trauma for years, then I can pretty much guarantee you EMDR is not going to be that difficult to learn. Because you probably already know the basics of exposure therapy. You probably already know about memory reconsolidation and how it works. You already know about stabilization tools, you already know about the effects of dissociation on something like learning and neuroplasticity. So you probably already have a sense of these things. And so you may hit the ground running with EMDR a lot faster than someone else with no trauma treatment experience. So how long you've been in practice, how much trauma experience you actually had, these are things that are really important to consider. Another thing is your own confidence level. So if you are an independently licensed mental health provider, then what the licensing board is essentially telling you is that they trust your judgment. Of course they're going to within certain guardrails. Right. Within certain parameters. But what they're saying is, hey, we're putting it on you to know when you're competent, to know when you're comfortable and to know when you're not, and to know when it's not your area of expertise. And for you to be able to reach out to other clinicians for consultation or supervision to help you feel more confident and competent in what you're doing. So know that your own self perception here matters. And of course we're hoping that clinicians tend to be pretty self aware and are pretty good judges of themselves. Right. We do kind of have to depend on that. But keep in mind that the licensing board is putting trust in you as a provider, that you're going to do what's necessary for you to be competent to practice whatever therapies you are practicing that they're allowing you to practice with that license. General things. I'll also recommend beyond that because I know some of this is kind of fuzzy, it's in a gray area. Right. What I would say is, yeah, you know, a one hour workshop on EMDR probably, I can guarantee you, is not going to help you be competent if you've never had any exposure to it. I can also say that if you completed, let's say 10 full days of EMDR training, that that would be awesome. But I can also tell you most clinicians are not going to need that. Think about it as a combination, taking the EMDR courses and I would recommend a multi day course, two day course if it's really condensed and like packed full of a lot of information and just focusing on the skills. Okay. Two, three, four day trainings. I would definitely recommend for learning the basics, original eight phase model. Okay. Then I would also recommend beyond that multiple days of advanced skills or variants or modifications for other populations, for first responders, for children, for anxiety, advanced techniques, let's say for treating developmental or complex trauma. This is really important. So all in all, I can't give just one number, but I would say think about learning EMDR in multiple chunks. Okay, multi day chunks or at least a multi day training on the front end to learn the basics and then maybe one day trainings periodically throughout after that and maybe three hour trainings here and there for different modifications. If you can do that, then see how you're feeling after you have the equivalent of three or four days of EMDR training. Kind of check in with yourself, how am I doing? How am I doing in the dyad practice? If you're doing dyad practice, are you doing dyad practice? How are you doing with the demonstrations? When you see a demonstration, are you catching on to it? How is it going? Practicing some of the skills that are not exposure based in emdr, like the stabilization skills? Do you feel like you have a good grasp on those? So the training is important and then what I would say is consultation, consultation, consultation all the way until you die or retire or whatever you need to be doing. Consultation. This is so incredibly important because we don't know what we don't know until we run into the roadblocks. Honestly, there's all sorts of things you're going to run into that you're going to probably benefit from some help with. So consultation on an ongoing basis. If you're interested in my trainings, I have a lot of trainings and actually a certificate program through onlinececredits.com so again that, that website is onlinece credits.com and I'll put it in the description as well. A full certificate program. Okay. This is not certification, but it's certificate program. You only have got to do it once. We're assuming at online CE credits that when you learn skills and you're practicing them, you're keeping up to date on them. You don't just lose them. So we're not going to take that away, right? We're not going to say you have to get the certificate again and again and again. It's one and you're done. It's completely home study, so you have access to the courses indefinitely. So if you forget something, you just press rewind or I guess whatever you do these days on the computer to rewind and you can review it. It also gives you access to consultation groups. So if you want to jump into a trauma consultation group and you've got questions that are coming up in your practice, it include multiple of those as well. It includes advanced trainings, modifications for different populations and of course, the basic EMDR skills training. So I encourage you to check it out. There's a lot of other people out there doing this too, so a lot of different CE companies, a lot of different individuals, a lot of expert EMDR trainers who seem to be kind of going off on their own solo, creating their own certificate and certification programs. These are amazing trainers. I would say get exposed to different people, watch me, watch other trainers, see how I do it, how it might be different than someone else. Just to get a sense of what your style is going to be in emdr. Because it's important that it fits you. Not just that you become something different for the therapy, but that you are who you are and the therapy becomes part of you. And I think the best way to do that is to really get exposed to different types of trainers. So I encourage you. Take EMDR courses, take a whole bunch of them. If you have questions about what you can or cannot do, consult with your licensing board. And then really beyond that, focus on multi day trainings, focus on consultation, get supervision. If you're still under supervision, get good supervision. And let's help the world and help our clients with emdr. Okay, bye.