Leading the Way in Trauma Therapy

Since developing Progressive Counting (PC) in 2007, I’ve been teaching it quite a bit, often to therapists who are already trained in other trauma resolution methods. I enjoy the reactions: typically surprise and excitement for how well PC seems to work, how quickly, and how smoothly, relative to other trauma treatments. I’ve also heard two typical objections that I find curious:

• Some EMDR-t ...

Maybe there’s no nice way to say this, but I’ll give it a try.

First of all, I’m not trying to put anyone down. Someone wants to tell their story, more power to them. But (you knew there was a but coming, right?) I just wish some of the stories went farther.

A famous person – from sports, politics, pop culture – discloses having been abused. This is good, it models disclosure, puts the shame on ...

Have you wanted EMDR training but it was too expensive? If so, you’re not the only one. When I ask this question at trauma workshops, nearly every therapist who has not been trained in EMDR says they wish they were, but for the cost.

At present, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is the most effective and efficient of the well-established trauma treatments (Ho & Lee, 2012 ...

I have a lot of beefs (beeves? plenty beef?) with extant trauma training practices, so I might be offending a lot of prominent people here. Hopefully to good purpose. However, I will not be calling out trauma treatment training approaches by name, other than EMDR, which I can critique more freely as that is my own professional “family”.

My training institute recently conducted a needs assessme ...

Like most people, I never set out to develop a new trauma treatment. It happened more or less by accident. I had long regarded eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR; Shapiro, 2001) as the trauma treatment of choice, because it is so effective, as well as being better tolerated and more efficient than the other leading brands (Greenwald et al, 2017). The problem with EMDR is that ...

Therapists often ask me which trauma treatment they should learn: eye movement desensitization & reprocessing (EMDR) or progressive counting (PC).

First of all: Yes – you should learn EMDR or PC, if you haven’t already! Efficient, effective trauma treatment methods enable therapists to systematically guide clients in healing from their psychological wounds. This is much better than merely teac ...

One of the striking features of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), as well as progressive counting (PC), is that the therapy action seems to occur entirely inside the client’s mind. This has led some people to proclaim that, for these methods, the therapy relationship is superfluous.

Early on in PC’s development, I conducted brief post-session interviews to learn more about ...

How long does it take to get traumatized? A few minutes? A few seconds? The brain can make profound changes very quickly – right?

So how long does it take to get untraumatized, to heal? Can the brain make that profound change quickly as well?

As it turns out: Yeah, pretty much.

EMDR set the standard for efficient, effective trauma therapy (Greenwald et al, 2017), and PC may be even more efficien ...