EMDR training
Practitioner programs
Trauma training
Trauma Training
Clinical Competencies in Treating Dissociative Identities
Bridging Lived Experience and Science
When Dissociation Shows Up, and Your Training Did Not Prepare You
Most therapists were taught that dissociation is rare, extreme, and best left to “specialists.” In real practice, it is everywhere in complex trauma work. Clients “go away” right when you get close to certain memories. They lose time, feel like “different versions” of themselves are taking over, or describe watching life from outside their bodies. You feel the weight of deciding what is ethical, what is actually possible, and how to maintain competency and reduce risk in EMDR when dissociation is part of the picture.
Most clinicians were given very little real training on dissociation:
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Minimal coverage in graduate programs.
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The sense that dissociation is rare, extreme, or “for specialists only.”
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Conflicting messages about whether EMDR is appropriate at all.
So you are left with understandable questions:
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Is this dissociation, something else, or both?
- How do I assess it in a way that actually guides treatment?
- Will I destabilize this client if I move forward with EMDR?
- How do I adapt the eight phases without abandoning fidelity or myself as a clinician?
Your hesitation is not avoidance. It is an ethical clinical responsibility when you have not been given enough support.
This course is designed to help you get there, and you will:
- Develop confidence in assessment, case conceptualization, and EMDR adaptation with dissociative clients.
- Integrate EMDR thoughtfully, ethically, and with competency to reduce risk when working with dissociation.
- Practice “assessment before activation” and remember that “competence includes pacing.”
- Bridge scientific models and lived experience so your work reflects both what research says and what clients actually report.
Practical Skills
Practical Interventions You'll Learn
- Assess dissociative experiences using clinical inquiry and formal screening tools
- Identify adaptive and maladaptive dissociation through lived experience
- Differentiate dissociation from emotional regulation challenges
- Map a client’s dissociative profile using the Window of Tolerance framework
- Conceptualize dissociation as a protective survival response
- Identify parts, selves, or dissociative states without pathologizing or forcing integration
- Honor the client's language and meaning-making as a form of clinical inquiry
- Modify grounding and stabilization strategies to reduce dissociative drift
- Reduce clinician fear, bias, and misinformation related to dissociation
- Apply dissociation-sensitive approaches to containment, resourcing, and competency‑based risk reduction
What You Get
What's Waiting for You Inside This Training
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Attachment-informed case conceptualization
Map symptoms to unmet developmental needs and relational trauma using the AIP model as your clinical structure.
Target selection without discrete memories
Create EMDR targets using themes, emotional states, and felt sense when clients cannot recall specific events.
Assessment for emotional neglect
Identify attachment injury when clients minimize, intellectualize, or insist they had a good childhood.
Protocol adaptations for low affect
Use concrete pacing, stimulation, and interweave shifts for clients with blocked processing or limited explicit memory.
Cognitive interweaves for core shame
Address earned worth, shame, fear of dependency, and emotional self-abandonment with interweaves that access meaning.
Attachment-attuned resourcing
Build co-regulation and attachment repair without bypassing unresolved material or reinforcing emotional suppression.
Lifetime on-demand access
Go at your own pace and return to the material whenever a client's attachment work calls for it.
Free community membership
Join TTI's shame-free community of practitioners for ongoing conversations, support, and resources. No cost, no catch.
Meet Your Trainer
About Your Trainer
Jamie Marich
Ph.D., LPCC-S, REAT
Dr. Jamie Marich is an internationally recognized clinician, author, and educator whose work sits at the intersection of trauma therapy, EMDR, expressive arts, and dissociation. She is the founder of the Institute for Creative Mindfulness, the developer of the Dancing Mindfulness approach, and the author of Dissociation Made Simple: A Stigma-Free Guide to Embracing Your Dissociative Mind and Navigating Life, along with the accompanying clinical flipchart. Her other titles include EMDR Made Simple, Trauma Made Simple, and Healing Addiction with EMDR Therapy, and her contributions to the field have been recognized with the EMDR International Association's 2019 Advocacy in EMDR Award. She brings both clinical depth and lived experience to her teaching on dissociative identities.
Free Resource
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Take The Next Step
Ready to Begin?
From Hesitation to Informed, Thoughtful Action
Dissociation shows up in complex trauma work constantly, and most clinicians were never given enough training to meet it well. This course gives you the assessment skills, the Window of Tolerance mapping, and the stigma-free language to work with dissociative clients ethically, thoughtfully, and within your scope.
Lifetime access. ASWB and NBCC CEs. Real clinical tools for the presentations your training did not prepare you for.