PST-731 Trauma Treatment & Multichannel Eye Movement Integration

Course Overview

This course will review the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for PTSD, trends in trauma treatment, and the history and development of eye movement therapies for trauma. Special attention will be paid to Multichannel Eye Movement Integration (MEMI) as well as the Structure of Experience Theoretical Model and NLP presuppositions upon which this therapy is based. Participants will learn how stress-causing events, thoughts, feelings, sensory information and neurobiology all interrelate in the persistence of body dysregulation and traumatic memories. Through lecture, demonstration, discussion and practice, participants will also learn: the MEMI Protocol; how to establish rapport; how to anchor competent states; how to determine the structure of an experience; how to use therapeutic dissociation; and how to effectively perform an MEMI treatment session. Students will also learn how to evaluate treatment outcomes using the MEMI Intensity Scale, the Subjective Units of Distress (SUD) Scale and the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (Department of Veteran Affairs, 2019). Mastery of the skills taught in this course will allow participants to successfully utilize this therapy in sessions with clients. A certificate of completion from Trauma Counseling & Treatment of Tucson will be awarded to all participants who satisfy course requirements. The instructor is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional who also holds certifications as a trainer of Eye Movement Integration¿, Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and Neuro Linguistic Programming from the American Hypnosis Training Academy. The instructor has also completed intensive training in EMDR. MEMI an effective brief therapy for treating acute and post-traumatic stress, anxiety, phobias, addictions and negative or self-limiting thoughts. It is one development of the Neurolinguistic Programming field of the 1970s. The original technique on which MEMI is based was an outgrowth of a study of eye movement patterns conducted by Robert Dilts and others (Bandler and Grinder, 1979; Dilts, Grinder, Bandler and DeLozier, 1980) who found that unconscious eye movements are systematic and correlate with the internal processing of cognitive and neurosensory information. Connirae and Steve Andreas (1989) used these results to develop a specific therapy for interrupting and resolving responses to problem states and called it Eye Movement Integration. During this course, comparisons will be made between MEMI and EMDR, both outgrowths of the NLP field in the 1980s. Both therapies are now used widely as evidence based treatments for PTSD.