EMDR and Suicidality

Somewhere in your EMDR work, a client tells you they have been thinking about ending their life. The session you had planned gives way to a more urgent one, and most of us respond the same way: slow down, shore up safety, and quietly set the trauma work aside until the risk has passed.

That instinct comes from a caring place, and it is not wrong. But the belief underneath it, that active suicidality puts reprocessing off the table, deserves a closer look than most of us were ever given. The research tells a more nuanced story, and the distance between what we were taught and what the evidence supports is where a lot of thoughtful clinicians get stuck: postponing the very work that might loosen the despair's grip, while wondering privately whether they are being too cautious or not cautious enough.

This is why we are opening the EMDR Mastermind Series here. Suicidality is one of the most requested and clinically consequential topics in EMDR consultation, and it belongs in a room where real cases can be worked through with an expert guide, not a lecture hall. Wendy Skillern has spent her career doing this work with high-risk clients, and she is bringing that experience to a focused hour built around the questions Basic Training never had time for.