Hey there,

Being an EMDR consultant has always required a high degree of clinical agility. And lately, external macro pressures are making the consultation room feel a lot more complex.

Beyond navigating EMDRIA's recent consultant standards updates, consultants right now are managing TWO overlapping challenges. One which has been ongoing for several years, the other is more recent since the boom of AI:

Ongoing Challenge: Consultees are arriving with wildly inconsistent training.

New Challenge: AI tools are entering EMDR sessions in ways the profession hasn't fully reckoned with yet

Both put extra pressure on consultants to act less like a traditional consultant and more like a remediation educator.

The Training Inconsistency Problem

The first thing, and arguably most critical, is that basic EMDR training isn't standardized (or at least in the way it should be).

Different trainers emphasize different things:

• Some lean heavily on the protocol as written, while others introduce modifications early.
• Some cover complex trauma thoroughly, others barely touch it.
• Some spend significant time on Phase 2 and resourcing, others move through it quickly to get to the "interesting" phases.
• Some de-emphasize the 3 pronged approach and clinicians leave not doing future templates at all

…and other trainings are flat-out wrong but somehow slip through the cracks of EMDRIA approvals.

As a consultant who consults with other consultants regularly, I see the result of this every week. We expect to spend our consultation hours refining case conceptualization, but instead, find ourselves completely reteaching the mechanics of floatback or correcting fundamental misunderstandings of the AIP model.

The tricky part is that consultees often don't know what they don't know, and might genuinely believe what they were taught is the standard.

(That’s why building a unified ecosystem like Helicon is so important for our community, which aims to build a vetted benchmark of clinical excellence so consultants and consultees can speak the exact same professional language and level up together).

The temptation as a consultant is to simply correct the technique and move on, but that completely misses the deeper opportunity.

Consider this:

When a consultant arrives with inconsistent training, we have a chance to help them build a better understanding than they had before (such as, helping them understand why we sequence targets the way we do).

Consultees who understand the underlying model can navigate variations, adapt to complex cases, and recognize good practice when they see it. Whereas consultees who only know the checklist version get thrown off every time a case doesn't fit the mold.

AI Tools in Therapy?

The second pressure is newer and less familiar, and I believe we need to talk about it more openly as a community of therapists.

AI tools are starting to show up in EMDR practice.

There are tools being marketed to therapists that promise to guide clients through EMDR sessions in real time, prompt therapists with what to say next, generate treatment plans, or automate parts of the protocol.

I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers on whether these tools belong in EMDR practice at all.

What I can say is that outsourcing live, in-session presence to an algorithm introduces a massive barrier to the somatic and relational attunement that EMDR requires.

My first concern is privacy.

Most of these tools work by processing session content in some way. That means client material (either transcripts, summaries, or full recordings) is going somewhere outside the therapy room. Even if the tool claims to be HIPAA-compliant, that's not the same as understanding where data goes, how long it's retained, whether it's used to train other models, and what the client has consented to.

My second concern is fidelity.

A tool that prompts you with what to say next is making assumptions about what should happen in that moment. Those assumptions come from somewhere (usually a static training dataset). So unless you deeply understand a certain protocol, you don't have a good way to evaluate whether the AI's prompt is clinically appropriate for the client in front of you, or whether it's a generic suggestion that completely disrupts an organic processing loop.

My third concern is the deskilling risk.

When we outsource clinical judgment to a tool, we don't develop the judgment ourselves. Therapists who rely on AI to prompt them through EMDR are less likely to build the intuition that comes from thousands of hours of clinical decision-making.

My colleagues and I agree here: if you are a proficient EMDR therapist, you would never trust in AI to dictate how you perform EMDR therapy. And the most effective way to become a proficient EMDR therapist is to practice doing EMDR with clients (not offloading your brain to AI to do it for you).

This kind of tool seems to be marketed to EMDR clinicians who are inexperienced or lack confidence, and it shows up in consultation. Some consultants are considering setting rules against using AI tools, due to the three concerns mentioned above.

It’s the clinical equivalent of college students using AI to write their papers. When you offload your brain power onto AI, are you even learning or developing mastery?

For consultants, you're going to have consultees who ask about these tools, or use them without asking, or defend using them when it comes up. Being ready to think clearly about the concerns (privacy, fidelity, deskilling) is going to matter more as the tools proliferate.

The Root Cause: Shortcuts vs. Mastery

Both of these pressures, different as they look on the surface, actually point to the same underlying issue.

• Inconsistent training means many EMDR therapists never got the reasoning behind what they're doing.
• AI tools mean they don't have to develop that reasoning themselves.

The result, in either case, is the same: therapists who can execute a protocol without really understanding why it works.

What consultation can do, right now, is build the opposite. We have the chance to anchor clinicians in a grounded, model-based understanding of EMDR that goes deeper than any specific technique or prompt could reach.

That could mean asking questions like:

• Why does this phase come before that one?
• What is the AIP model saying about what's happening here?
• Why does this modification work for this population or this type of presentation?
• What are you seeing in the client's nervous system that tells you they're ready to move on?

Consultees who can answer questions like these don't need a tool to prompt them. They also don't need to worry that their basic training left them with gaps, because they're building the underlying framework that lets them fill those gaps themselves.

That's the opportunity underneath both pressures.

Consultation right now can produce EMDR therapists who understand the work at a level basic training doesn't reach and that no AI tool can substitute for.

If you're consulting and running into either of these 2 tensions in the EMDR world, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it. And if you're relatively new as an EMDR therapist, what are your thoughts on these topics?

I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time,
Chris

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Disclaimer: The information contained in this article is for informational purposes only. This is not legal or clinical advice and we make no guarantees about the outcomes or results from information shared in this document. Proceed at your own risk and discretion.​