Jamie Sedgwick, LCPC, NCC

TSTI Training Director

Trauma Specialists Training Institute consists of trainers, consultants, and many other “behind the scenes” team members who share a passion for training all therapists to treat trauma well. We aim to do so by offering a variety of products for learners at every phase of their trauma training journey. 

One of the most unique products offered by Trauma Specialists Training Institute is our EMDR Circle. It is a product for EMDR trained clinicians who want to continue their learning beyond Basic Training with opportunities to stay connected to fellow trainees, consultants, and trainers.

The EMDR Circle consists of three membership levels (Basic, Consultation Plus, Certification Track) with each membership level offering access to a variety of learning tools including a 24/7 learning library, monthly chats, monthly Q&A sessions, consultation, and advanced learning groups. One of the most frequently asked questions...

By:  Jennifer Youdom, LCSW-C

EMDRIA Consultant in Training

 Anxiety.

Just the word brings a felt sense of this anticipatory emotion. I know for me I can feel the knots in my stomach and the tension throughout my body as I simply think about the concept of anxiety.

While anxiety includes a broad range of topics (including phobias, panic, performance anxiety, OCD, social anxiety, agoraphobia, hoarding, trichotillomania, skin picking, etc.) and can seem like a daunting task to attend to, there are numerous studies showing the effectiveness of EMDR in treating anxiety disorders. Research indicates that participants who engage in EMDR have significantly reduced symptoms of anxiety. Here’s how EMDR therapy can help treat anxiety:

1. Processing Traumatic Memories

Anxiety often stems from unprocessed traumatic memories. EMDR helps individuals process these memories by guiding them through a series of eye movements (or other form of bilateral stimulation) while...

By:  Jamie Sedgwick, LCPC, NCC

EMDRIA Consultant & EMDRIA Basic Trainer

Early on in my career as a mental health therapist, I got training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). As a result, clients were frequently referred to me for meeting criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (commonly referred to as “BPD”). I found these clients to be insightful with high levels of emotional intelligence. However, they commonly experienced difficulty identifying the events that would trigger high levels of emotional distress and render all of their DBT skills inaccessible and unhelpful. As I worked more with these clients to help them understand and manage their symptoms, I recognized a common thread: everyone was reporting experiences of attachment wounding or relational trauma during critical developmental stages in their lives. As I began connecting the dots between these traumatic experiences and Borderline Personality traits in adulthood, I realized I needed to...

By: Katie Honeywell, LPC

EMDRIA Consultant

Emotional neglect often goes unnoticed and can have a significant impact on an individual's mental health. This can be a form of abuse, but can also exist with well-intentioned caregivers who lack necessary skills. It occurs when a person's emotional needs are consistently not met, often leading to feelings of vigilance, loneliness, and inadequacy. Let’s dig a little deeper into the impact of emotional neglect on mental health and the importance of addressing this issue to promote overall well-being. 

Neglect can have long-lasting effects on an individual's health. It can lead to a range of mental health issues including depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, complex trauma, and difficulties forming healthy relationships. 

Examples of emotional neglect:

• A child who grows up in a household where emotional needs are consistently ignored, dismissed, or gaslighted.
• The absence of feeling, naming, and support in navigating the...

By:  Dr. Shari Kim

EMDRIA Consultant

The human brain is amazing, and we don’t even fully grasp its potential. One of the truly spectacular things it can do is to protect us from things that are too traumatic to hold.  

As we experience traumatic events, we experience a variety of responses. Sometimes, when those events become overwhelming, our brain has the capacity to build compartments within itself to hold those events. The depth of those compartments may vary, meaning we might be able to hold things in them only for short periods of time before they pop back out. At other times, our brains may build them so deeply that we can no longer access them by our own volition. Sometimes our compartments take on lives of their own, developing unique identities.

As we explore how our brain compartmentalizes trauma in this way, it starts to become clear how this process makes us dissociate. The more compartments we build, the easier it is to become lost in them. When...

By: Sarah Martin, LCPC, NCC

EMDRIA Consultant

My partner and I were having a disagreement one day. In true therapist fashion, I asked him a question about his childhood. His response back to me (he works in IT) was, “Does everything have to go back to childhood?” Well, when we’re talking about relationships and communication in relationships to best understand how we show up, we do have to go back to childhood. The relationships we had with our caregivers earlier on in life set the stage for our relationships with others throughout our lives. After all, our very first experience in life with a relationship is the one we experienced with our caregivers. Knowledge is power, and the more we understand about our experiences the better we can understand how to navigate them. Let’s first define attachment.

What is attachment?

I like the definition of attachment from the founder of the Trauma Specialists Training Institute, Rachel Harrison, LCPC, NCC. She defines...

By:  April Lehman, LPC

EMDRIA Consultant in Training  

Back in 2011, when I started my journey as a therapist, I had in my toolbox of skills several talk therapies that I routinely used with my clients. I considered myself an eclectic therapist, but I routinely used my “go-to” therapies of cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational interviewing with my clients with co-occurring disorders. After attending a 2-day, live training in 2015 with Bessel van der Kolk on his book The Body Keeps the Score, I learned more about a therapy I was only vaguely familiar with at the time—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Then in 2016, a coworker told me about a local EMDR training and I immediately signed up.  It’s not an overstatement to say this training changed the way I practice as a therapist. EMDR has some similar attributes of traditional talk therapy, but how does it contrast?

Let’s start by talking about how traditional...

By:  Lauren Rudolph, LPC

EMDRIA Consultant

When it comes to trauma, there are still myths floating around out there, such as: Trauma is only something veterans and people who go through life-threatening situations experience. Some people may still think “trauma is only in your head” or it’s something that will negatively affect your life forever.

It wouldn’t be surprising then that complex trauma, a relatively new concept, has its misconceptions and lack of understanding out there. Complex trauma typically refers to trauma that occurs in childhood and is ongoing, such as emotional abuse and/or neglect, bullying, domestic violence, etc. It can also include traumas experienced in both childhood and adulthood.

Here are 4 things everyone needs to know about complex trauma:

1. Complex trauma is often what did not happen to you

We tend to think of trauma as something that happens to someone. However complex trauma allows us to understand that we can be...

By:  Lauren Rudolph, LPC

EMDRIA Consultant

As a therapist, I feel my journey continues to be finding out what I don’t know yet. Starting out in the field working with addictions, I realized, wow, there is a lot of trauma we are not treating. And, as I went on to become trained to treat trauma, I realized, wow, there is a lot of dissociation needing to be addressed. And, now that I have spent more time learning about complex trauma and dissociation, I’m noticing how pervasive these experiences are among the clients who we’re treating for mental health.

Let’s briefly review trauma. Trauma is the Greek word for “wound.” When we talk about psychological trauma, it can be a wound that is physical, psychological, or spiritual. Although the DSM 5 TR has criteria for defining what qualifies for a PTSD Diagnosis, trauma is a term that can encompass much more. Trauma used to be thought of as events such as natural disasters, near-death experiences, or...

By:  Dante Brown

EMDRIA Consultant & Basic Trainer

In a world where the mental health of children and teens is a growing concern, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) emerges as a beacon of hope. With the stresses of modern life bearing down on young shoulders, EMDR provides a pathway for young people to navigate and cope with trauma and the challenges of growing up in today’s complex world. In my practice, I've witnessed firsthand the impact of EMDR, an evidence-based therapy acclaimed for its success in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults, now being thoughtfully tailored to the hearts and minds of children and teens.

Why EMDR for Children and Teens?

Young people process trauma and stress through a different lens than adults; their brains are a work in progress, and often they lack the vocabulary and cognitive tools to deal with deep-seated emotions. EMDR transcends the barriers of verbal communication, making it an especially...