Closing a Chapter on EMDR

So many people have thanked me for what I have built...while I appreciate the sentiment in such a compliment, the reality is that what I have built is crushing me.

Photograph by Alexander Rivero, Healing TREE Gala 2025

The announcement that I am about to make will come as a surprise to many of you, yet not to those of you who know me and my process well. While so much of my professional identity is connected to my work in EMDR Therapy, I am making the official announcement with this post that I will be moving away from being an EMDR Therapy Basic Trainer and from running an EMDR training company. In the last year so many people have thanked me for what I have built with the Institute for Creative Mindfulness (ICM) and its related projects. While I appreciate the sentiment in such a compliment, the reality is that what I have built is crushing me.

I am in the process of selling ICM to my friend and original collaborator on the curriculum, Amber Stiles-Bodnar. The last EMDR Therapy Basic Training that I offer will be a Deluxe cycle starting in February 2026 alongside Jasmine Adams. The calendar year of 2026 will be one of transition as current faculty members will still be offering training under the present Institute for Creative Mindfulness brand as they decide the next steps that they will take as I work on the details of the transition and sale with Amber.

I initially announced that I would be changing the name of Institute for Creative Mindfulness to the Creative Mindfulness Network as a rebranding that better expresses what the company has become while making a statement about the problem of institutionalism in our field and in larger society. Yet deeper reflection brought me to a decision with which I am even more at peace: to walk away from the basic training game completely as I continue to evaluate what role, if any, I want to continue occupying in the larger mental health/trauma industrial complex.

I could go through the motions of being an EMDR training provider for the next 25 years, yet that feels dishonest. And I care too much about the healing potential of the modality to do that, even though I struggle with the politics that surround EMDR Therapy. I want to turn training over to the people who are truly enthusiastic about doing it and who have more stamina than I do at this point to continue wading through the institutional politics of accrediting bodies, the academy, the government, and continuing education boards. Clinicians coming for training deserve people with that enthusiasm and stamina. I am no longer that person.

Perhaps I never was that person.

My first book EMDR Made Simple: Four Approaches to Using EMDR with Every Client (2011) fully introduced my rebellious nature in practicing EMDR to the community. I remain honored that so many of you have found strength through that book to make EMDR a more responsive modality to the people that we serve. For many years I didn’t think that I could be an EMDRIA-approved EMDR basic trainer because it was not in my nature to be that technically rigid. And while I explored some possibilities for offering EMDR-related training that wasn’t as orthodox, I found that so many folks who knew me and my work were asking me to offer the official training. A few turning points in 2014 convinced me that I could be an official EMDRIA-approved trainer, which would mean teaching the standard EMDR Therapy protocol as written by Sharpiro…as long as I could be myself while doing it. So I wrote a curriculum that assumes that we must treat complex EMDR Therapy presentations with high potentiality for dissociation as the norm while also learning the basics of EMDR Therapy technique. I’ve always believed that the consultation component of training would most fully bridge the gap between learning the clunkiness of good EMDR Therapy technique with the realities of clinical practice.

In the ten years that the Institute for Creative Mindfulness has been in existence, the 21 faculty (some of whom have since moved on from ICM) who have worked with me have gone on to train tens of thousands of clinicians in EMDR Therapy. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down in 2020, I was fiercely impressed by the way that we pivoted to online training immediately, making EMDR Therapy training even more accessible to people who couldn’t previously access it with ease. While I am proud of all that I’ve been able to do with EMDR, the point remains that it has only been a small part of what I feel I am called to do with my career. And offering basic training is something that others asked me to do. Now is the time to fully follow my intuition about what I am meant to do.

As I documented in my most recent book You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir (2024), the process of deconstructing and reconstructing is very familiar to me. I’ve done it several times with my faith; leaving and picking apart what proved to be suffocating about the religions in which I was raised in order to discover a spiritual connection that nourishes me. I believe that I’ve been going through a similar, years-long deconstruction about what it means to be both a therapist and an educator of other therapists. Walking away in the way that I am is a major part of that process, and it remains to be seen if I will be led to deconstruct even further. Because in so many ways (some of which I’ve written about, and some of which I will be writing more in the future), I feel that our trauma therapy field is missing the point about what it means to heal and to transform.

My plan is to still remain active as an EMDRIA-approved consultant and provider of some advanced topics and other continuing education training, both through my Redefine Therapy brand, and with other organizations that host me. While I would like to continue offering formal CE credits when possible, I will no longer sacrifice my authenticity to appease approval organizations. The Creative Mindfulness Media brand, which is the label for my online content and the imprint behind which I released titles like Process Not Perfection: Expressive Arts Solutions for Trauma Recovery (2019) and Queering EMDR Therapy (Ed. Roshni Chabra, 2025) to the world, will also remain in my ownership. I may or may not further explore book and media publishing as the next steps in my work.

Like many things in my life at the moment, more will be revealed…