Beyond Basic EMDR: How Relational, Ancestral and Intergenerational Training Changes What's Possible in the Therapy Room
When most people hear "EMDR," they picture a therapist moving their fingers back and forth while a client follows with their eyes.
And while that image isn't entirely wrong, it captures maybe ten percent of what EMDR actually is, and even less of what it can become in the hands of a therapist who has gone well beyond the basics.
I completed my foundational EMDR training in 2023 with the EMDR Institute in Melbourne, one of the most respected training bodies in Australia.
That training gave me a solid, evidence-based foundation in the standard protocol.
But I left knowing there was more.
Not because the foundation wasn't good, it was, but because the clients I was sitting with were bringing complexity that standard protocols weren't always built to hold.
So I kept going.
What "Basic" EMDR Actually Covers
Foundational EMDR training teaches therapists the eight-phase protocol developed by Francine Shapiro.
It is structured, evidence-based, and genuinely effective for many presentations, particularly single-incident trauma where there is a clear beginning, middle, and end to what happened.
But most of the people I work with aren't carrying a single incident.
They're carrying decades.
Patterns learned in childhood.
Financial beliefs absorbed before they had words.
Relational wounds that don't have a clear memory attached, just a body that braces, a throat that closes, a chest that tightens every time money comes up.
Standard EMDR was not designed with that kind of complexity in mind. Advanced training was.
Relational Integrative EMDR: Where the Real Shift Happens
The training that changed my practice most profoundly was Relational Integrative EMDR, Parts 1 and 2, with Amy English and Michele Bowes, the founders of Seva Training.
Both are Accredited Mental Health Social Workers with decades of clinical experience, and the framework they have developed is unlike anything in standard EMDR training.
Relational Integrative EMDR moves beyond the individual memory and into the relational field.
It asks not just:
"what happened to you"
but:
"what happened between you and the people who were supposed to keep you safe enough, and what did your nervous system learn from that?"
It integrates:
- parts work
- attachment theory
- somatic awareness
into the EMDR process in a way that feels less clinical and more like being genuinely accompanied.
For my clients, many of whom are healthcare professionals who have spent years being competent and capable and quietly holding things together, this relational dimension is often where the real movement happens.
Not because they need to be fixed, but because they have never had a therapeutic space that felt safe enough to let the parts of them that are still bracing actually soften.
The ancestral and intergenerational layer
The ancestral and intergenerational layer is where this training goes further still.
So much of what my clients experience around money, around asking for help, around believing they are allowed to have more, did not originate with them.
It was absorbed.
From parents who carried the weight of scarcity.
From grandparents who survived circumstances that rewired their relationship with safety and resources.
From family systems where speaking up wasn't safe, or where needing something felt like a burden.
Relational Integrative EMDR gives us a framework to work with that inherited material at a body level, not just cognitively.
We are not just talking about where patterns came from.
We are gently, carefully working with the places in the nervous system where those patterns are still living.
Group Trauma Protocols: Holding More Than One Person at a Time
In 2024, I completed the Group Traumatic Episode Protocol, known as G-TEP, training live online with Elan Shapiro and Ana Gomez.
Elan Shapiro is one of the original developers of G-TEP and a globally recognised figure in trauma treatment.
Ana Gomez brings deep expertise in working with children and complex trauma populations.
I want to name something about this training specifically: it ran in US time-zone.
Which meant very early mornings, late nights, and a genuine commitment to showing up fully for something that didn't fit neatly into my schedule.
I include this not to impress, but because it reflects something I believe about this work.
The therapists who go looking for more, who train across time zones with the people who actually developed these approaches, tend to be the therapists who bring something different into the room.
G-TEP was originally developed for use in crisis and disaster settings, where many people needed support at once and individual therapy simply wasn't available.
What it revealed, and what makes it so powerful in a broader clinical context, is how much healing can happen in the presence of others who are also processing.
There is something regulating about shared experience, about knowing that what your body is doing is not strange or broken, that other nervous systems have learned the same responses for the same kinds of reasons.
For clients who have spent years feeling alone in:
- their financial shame
- their pattern of overworking and under-receiving
- the quiet embarrassment of not having figured this out yet despite being so capable in every other area of their lives
group-based trauma work can be genuinely moving in a way that individual sessions sometimes cannot replicate.
The Flash Technique: Gentle Processing for Difficult Material
Not every piece of material is ready to be approached directly.
Sometimes a memory, a belief, or a pattern is simply too activating to work with head-on, and pushing into it can retraumatise rather than resolve.
The Flash Technique is a newer, evidence-informed approach within the EMDR world that allows difficult material to be processed with significantly less distress.
Rather than asking a client to hold a traumatic memory in sustained attention, Flash uses brief, gentle flickers of contact with the material, interspersed with neutral or positive focus.
The result, consistently in both research and clinical practice, is that the emotional charge of the material reduces, often substantially, without the client having to spend extended time in distress.
For clients who have tried to address their money patterns before and found the process overwhelming, or who have started therapy and stopped because it felt like too much, Flash offers a genuinely different experience.
We can move toward the difficult things without requiring the nervous system to brace and endure.
That matters enormously when the thing we are trying to heal is a pattern that the nervous system has spent decades protecting.
Why This Matters for the Work We Do Together
I am not sharing my training history to present a list of credentials.
I am sharing it because I think you deserve to know what kind of thinking and preparation sits behind the sessions we might have together.
When you come to me carrying:
- money shame
- a pattern of undercharging
- a body that tightens every time a financial conversation starts
I am not working from a single tool.
I am drawing on a clinical framework that takes seriously the relational origins of those patterns, the ancestral threads woven through them, and the nervous system responses that have been keeping you safe enough in the only way they knew how.
The work we do is not about fixing you.
It is about meeting the parts of you that learned to survive, and gently, carefully, helping them discover that safety is possible now in ways it wasn't before.
If you have been wondering whether there is something beyond the standard approaches, whether there is a therapist who can hold the complexity of what you are carrying without reducing it to a checklist or a quick protocol, I hope this gives you a clearer picture of what is possible here.
Ready to find out if this is the right fit?
You are welcome to reach out. There is no obligation, no pressure, and no expectation that you will have it all figured out before we start. Just a safe enough space to begin.
