EMDR Advanced Training
EMDR with Couples: Clinical Decision-Making and Protocol
Trainer: Grace Chen, PhD, LMFT
Live Training: June 11th | 9:00 AM Central Time | Available for synchronous, live learning
On-Demand: Available one week after the live event
Most therapists who do EMDR work with couples eventually hit the same wall. You know the protocol. You know how to facilitate reprocessing. But in the couple's room, the rules change. One partner floods while the other shuts down. Trauma responses look like relationship conflict. And the standard EMDR protocol, designed for individual work, doesn't have a built-in answer for what to do next.
This training fills that gap. In this full-day EMDR training with Dr. Grace Chen, PhD, LMFT, you will learn a Polyvagal-informed framework for adapting EMDR to the couples therapy room: how to assess relational readiness, how to move through the EMDR phases with two clients present, how to use conjoint witnessing as a vehicle for corrective emotional experience, and how to make the complex clinical decisions that standard EMDR training simply doesn't prepare you for.
Dr. Chen brings a rare combination of credentials to this work: an EMDRIA Approved Consultant, AAMFT Clinical Fellow, and a couples specialist whose entire clinical identity sits at the intersection of EMDR and relational therapy. This isn't adapted content. This is her actual clinical practice.
Practical Interventions You’ll Learn
In this EMDR couples therapy training, you will learn how to:
- Screen couples for EMDR suitability using a structured exclusion criteria framework, covering active domestic violence, affect tolerance, psychiatric stability, and willingness to engage in the process.
- Evaluate how the couple's relational dynamics, including attachment patterns, capacity for repair, and power dynamics, will either support or actively work against EMDR reprocessing, so you can make an informed clinical decision before beginning.
- Use your own autonomic nervous system as a physiological anchor to maintain multidirected partiality, providing co-regulation when a couple is locked in survival responses and neither partner can access their social engagement system.
- Conduct an Integrated Relational History-Taking process using the Gottman Relationship History Interview to identify significant attachment injuries, map a traumatic history of the relationship, and screen for exclusion criteria including active domestic violence and limited affect tolerance.
- Facilitate Relational TICES and State Naming in Phase 2, helping partners notice and name their physiological reactivity so that conflict can be externalized as an archaic survival response rather than an intentional attack.
- Implement Advanced Dyadic Resourcing techniques, including building internal nurturing relationships for partners with early trauma and creating Positive Pro-Attachment Timelines to stabilize the present relationship before addressing feeder memories.
- Navigate reprocessing setup in Phases 3 through 7, including the clinical distinction between conjoint witnessing and joint bilateral stimulation, and the use of relational interweaves when processing stalls.
- Apply Future Template work to reinforce adaptive information and address anticipatory anxiety around relational challenges such as communication patterns, co-parenting dynamics, and the facilitation of forgiveness.
What You’ll Learn in This EMDRIA Approved Advanced Training
EMDR and couples therapy each have their own complexity. This training shows you how to work at the intersection of both.
This course will equip you to:
- Incorporate established EMDR couples therapy research and existing relational protocols (including EFT, Imago, and somatic approaches) into your own clinical style, using Polyvagal Theory as a unifying framework across modalities.
- Explain how the core tenets of Polyvagal Theory, specifically neuroception, the hierarchy of autonomic states, and the social engagement system, serve as the essential bridge connecting EMDR with the relational dynamics of couples work.
- Adapt EMDR Phases 1 and 2 for relational stability by identifying maladaptive memory networks in each partner, assessing individual autonomic blueprints, and implementing resourcing strategies that stabilize the couple system before any reprocessing begins.
- Facilitate conjoint witnessing in Phases 3 and 4, coaching the observing partner to act as a Compassionate Witness who provides the working partner with a corrective emotional experience during desensitization and reprocessing.
- Help couples de-personalize and externalize relational conflict by identifying stonewalling, flooding, and other archaic survival responses as autonomic reactions to perceived threat rather than intentional relational attacks, reframing trauma as the primary antagonist in the relationship.
- Make confident, informed clinical decisions at each phase of the EMDR process when two nervous systems are present in the room.
Expect a full day of practical, clinically grounded content with protocols, scripts, and frameworks you can bring directly into your couples work.
Who is this course for?
This training is designed for EMDR-trained clinicians and trauma therapists who are doing couples work (or want to) and feel the gap between what their EMDR training covered and what the couples room actually demands. It's especially for you if you want to:
- Confidently adapt the EMDR protocol for couples without abandoning the standard phases or improvising your way through complex sessions.
- Understand how Polyvagal Theory explains what's happening in the room when one partner shuts down, and the other escalates, and know exactly what to do next.
- Work with couples where individual trauma histories are driving relational conflict, and move beyond surface-level communication interventions.
- Use dyadic resourcing and conjoint witnessing as structured, evidence-informed techniques rather than improvised supports.
- Make sound clinical decisions about when to proceed with reprocessing, when to return to stabilization, and how to hold the therapeutic frame when both partners need you at once.
- Integrate your existing modalities (whether EFT, Gottman, somatic, or IFS-informed approaches) with EMDR in a way that feels cohesive and clinically grounded.
Whether you work in private practice, a group setting, or a community agency, if you are bringing EMDR into the room with couples and want a clear, structured, Polyvagal-informed approach, this training was built for you.
Prerequisites note:
Participants should have completed EMDR Basic Training. Prior couples therapy training is beneficial but not required.
About Your Trainer, Dr. Grace Chen, PhD, LMFT
Dr. Grace Chen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, EMDRIA Approved Consultant, and AAMFT Clinical Fellow whose clinical practice sits entirely at the intersection of trauma and relational therapy. EMDR is her primary treatment model. Gottman's Method is her relational framework. And attachment theory is the foundation underneath both.
Dr. Chen specializes in working with individuals and couples navigating complex trauma, PTSD, anxiety, communication breakdown, and infidelity recovery. As a Taiwanese immigrant, she is a bilingual (English and Mandarin Chinese) and bicultural therapist with deep experience supporting immigrant couples and those navigating cross-cultural relationships. She brings both clinical precision and genuine relational warmth to everything she teaches.
Her goal in all clinical work, and in this training, is transformation. Not just skill acquisition. Not just technique adoption. She wants you to walk away with a framework that fundamentally changes how you see and work with couples in the trauma therapy room.
Dr. Chen offers EMDR consultation services, supervision, and professional training for clinicians, and maintains a private practice in Andover, Massachusetts.
Additional Information
Schedule - Central Time
Learning Objectives
Prerequisites
Continuing Education
Course Completion
Cancellation Policy
Free resource from our team!
Couples EMDR Readiness Assessment Tool
