Not Your Usual Year-End Letter

My/our position is one that privileges lived experience voices and those who regard therapy as an art over those who see it as scientific endeavor.

Jamie (dressed in a maroon colored shirt) glancing to the side as she reads a passage from You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir in Fayetteville, NC, October 2024

They have become magnificent source material for comedy. And I have admittedly been one to send out the year end letter; complete with a full listing of what I’m up to in the new year and where you can connect with me! Although we pepper in some of that, this letter is a bit unconventional. As 2024 becomes 2025, I am reflecting on all of the ways that my life is calling me to reevaluate and to make some changes in the service of living as radically authentic a life as possible. I am embarking on a wild yet much needed ride.

I am still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. By most Western metrics, I’ve achieved great success professionally, building the Institute for Creative Mindfulness, one of the largest EMDR Therapy training programs in North America and supporting a network of trainers and consultants. As a network, we believe that we can offer EMDRIA-approved training in a way that honors creativity and necessary adaptations to meet the realities of the people we serve. I routinely need to turn down requests for training, speaking, consultation, and clinical services because my schedule is so full. Accepting everything would mean running my health into the ground. Yet I still cannot shake the feeling that even though we’ve made strides as a more progressive, person-centered organization, the way that the therapy training field operates is sorely missing the point. Discussing the inequities in therapy and treatment access that exist globally is a rant for another day. You’ll be reading many more rants from me about what I believe is wrong with our field if you subscribe to my newsletters either through ICM or on Substack.

For many years I labored trying to make change from within EMDR therapy circles, and then decided to follow the rules as much as I could to get my trainings approved within the EMDRIA system while still vowing to be myself/ourselves. The politics of the EMDR therapy world literally makes me nauseous. Even though I complain about EMDRIA, I know how good we have it compared to other international entities and their territorial politics. When I behold the state of the EMDR community on the global scale, and consider where the break-away trainers who are even more rebellious than I fit into everything, I feel like a kid growing up in extreme Evangelical Christianity once again trying to make sense of where my Catholic family belongs. I heard time and time again from the Evangelical influences in my life that this group and that group were not “real Christians.” And then when I broke free from Evangelicalism when I was nineteen, I realized how wrong they were. I learned how the people that they told me to fear were, in my view, better Christians than they ever were. You can read more about my backstory in You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir which came out in October of this year.

[Sidebar, that sounds more like the stuff of usual year-end letters: Hey, check out my book, which I am pleased to report earned a Kirkus “starred review” distinction, considered by many to be one of the highest standards of literary merit. ⭐️]

Therapy politics is not unique to EMDR. There is a larger problem in our field with the various entities that govern clinicians and their education having such an inferiority complex about not being a hard or “real science,” that we choke people into submission with endless standards. Entities like the EMDR accreditation bodies and continuing education approval entities like the American Psychological Association are setting continuously more rigorous standards for what counts as education and training, saying that they are doing so in the name of protecting the public and assuring quality. I contend that dictating how we fill every minute of our educational time does not allow for the necessary breathing room and flexibility that we need to be quality, real-world educators. There is a continuous call for more evidence-based, scientific research without considering that the healing of human beings is an art so much more than it is a quantitative science. Furthermore, we are still not discussing loudly enough how those in the academy and those in the most privileged of settings are still the ones who are by and large conducting the research and running the political systems for how it gets disseminated.

My/our position is one that privileges lived experience voices and those who regard therapy as an art over those who see it as scientific endeavor. In my opinion, those who approach therapy as an empirical science end up teaching overly academic theories and step-by-step protocols to best fix the people that come into their service. Indeed, even though we as a field shy away from that direct language of “fixing,” people, the whole nature of how our field trains professionals implies it strongly. We say that we want to relieve suffering and to help people reach the goals as they define them, yet there has always been a strong eugenic undercurrent in what we do in the field. Make sure that people aren’t causing trouble and being burdens to society; to do that we must make sure that we fix what’s broken or at least manage it so that they behave.

When I came out fully as a professional and established EMDR therapy trainer and author with dissociative identities in 2018, I was honored to learn that my coming out inspired many more EMDR therapists, consultants, thought leaders, and trainers to do the same. When I wrote Dissociation Made Simple: A Stigma-Free Guide to Embracing Your Dissociative Mind and Navigating Daily Life in 2023, it felt like a lived experience revolution was finally happening in our field. To be clear, it is happening. Like with any revolution, there is always blowback or people who hunker down and insist that the way we’ve always done things is what is safest and best for maintaining credibility. To quote the TikTok sensation Jools LeBron, I spent much of my career attempting to be demure, to be mindful in order to get along with the elite minds of our profession and get them to pay attention to those of us with lived experience who are also professionals. And something in me this year got more fed up with seeing other clinical professionals elevate the academic and institutional establishment minds who study dissociation as the prime sources of knowledge. I am not anti-research or anti-science and I thank the people who are providing the scientific evidence we need to show the general public that certain ways of being in the world are real. Yet I take issue with those who conduct such research as being the authoritative voices on how to actually do therapy, especially with marginalized populations and those of us who are historically misunderstood.

Another layer of frustration that is causing me to wonder how I really want to spend my one wild and precious life (thank you, Mary Oliver) is seeing how many clinical professionals that we train and clients that we serve are wanting to be told exactly what to do. The academic and establishment types who I’ve criticized in this article are the ones who are more likely to give people precise protocols for helping their clients find solid ground and “do EMDR Therapy without dissociating” (one of the most, in my view, ridiculous marketing claims that I’ve seen all year). They cite neuroscience or research (i.e., their favorite styles of empirical research) to justify their positions and this gets people’s attention a lot more than, “Hey, I have loads that I can teach you from both lived experience navigating life with dissociation and learned experiences from the trenches of mental health service… and I’m also going to make you do your own work and think critically for yourself. I am not going to tell you what to do.” If this kind of training style appeals to you, you will likely have a home with what we do in ICM’s Advanced Certificate Program in Dissociation Studies.

I could be more successful and make more money as an EMDR therapy advanced topics trainer on dissociation if I marketed my work as something regimented that will tell you exactly how to handle your clients who dissociate and/or those who struggle with addiction or spiritual abuse recovery. The closest I came to systematic was doing a flipchart of the Dissociation Made Simple content, another highlight of this year.

I could market my work by appealing to your “pain points,” manipulating your beliefs that you are not a good enough therapist or human and that you will do harm by not having an exact model to follow. I could show you exactly what assessment to give, which techniques to use, et cetera to manage people like me. Yet I would never do these things because people are not meant to be managed. As therapists, we are not meant to be a warehouse of techniques and specialty protocols. We are meant to do our own work and learn from it, an exercise that I feel is more valuable than any multi-thousand dollar training we can ever take, especially those trainings that do not require us to do our own work and get honest about our own lives. And I realize that by putting that out there I am flying in the face of what is conventional thinking in the clinical professionals, even amongst people who can be as clinically avant garde as EMDR and other trauma therapists.

I realized with full vigor this year, seeing my country elect Donald Trump president yet again, is that as a whole, human beings are looking for someone to save them. Someone who will tell them exactly what to do or exactly what to believe in order to be redeemed. I believe that this is a major reason that the Christ as Savior interpretation of Christian theology is the most embraced. This is the reason that even intelligent and successful people get roped into cults and other high demand religions or exploitative spiritual systems. Life is hard and we are made to feel by so many forces in society that we do not have what we need within us to save ourselves. Yet as I leave 2024 I am finally asking myself questions like, “Maybe I don’t need to be saved? Or maybe no one is coming to save us? What if no one is coming to fix us individually or to fix what’s damaged around us?”

Perhaps, with the help of those around us who we most trust, never just relying on just one person or their work, we are being called to save ourselves? Maybe save is not the right word… We are called to embrace ourselves as we are, and to alleviate our own suffering as best we can with the resources that we have. And by doing this, we can be better human beings and live more harmoniously with those around us. Special thanks to my Dr. Dick Schwartz, developer of Internal Family Systems who I had the opportunity to speak with as part of a joint interview on Therapy Chat Podcast, for reminding me about the healing value of harmony.

One of my favorite interviews this year where we discuss this entire salvation element that I take to task is with my friend Rev. Terry Williams, the spiritual organizer of Faith Choice Ohio. We had this conversation in the days following the 2024 election and you can check it out HERE. If you end up listening to it, and if you’ve read this far in the letter, I would truly like to engage with you, good people who follow my work, on how I can best be of service to you in the years ahead. While getting this feedback is only one element of my vocational discernment, it can be valuable for me as I sort things out. I’ve wondered if my energy is better spent on consultation and doing more direct clinical services instead of trying to keep fighting the uphill battle of a training industry that favors forms of pedagogy and inquiry that do not correspond with the way I educate and the may that we (our internal system) sees the world.

Perhaps I will lean more into spiritual work and ministry, like the work I am doing in the first part of this year by offering a memoir writing as spiritual practice course? Or just like many people get into the therapy professions as a second career, maybe an early retirement from this circus is in order for me as I pursue another vocation altogether?

More will be revealed.

I pose more questions than I offer answers in this not-your-usual-year-end letter, and I like that. I need that for my 2025. As I write in You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir:

I am beginning to see that asking questions is the work of holy rebellion

Recognizing also that some questions can never be answered

Jamie+ Marich

Akron, Ohio

31 December 2024