EMDR Advanced Training

Trainer: Crystal Hines
On-Demand: Available with lifetime access for asynchronous learning. | This course was recorded on March 20th, 2025. 

Do you encounter blocks and defenses that are impacting the client’s therapy work, and you feel lost in where to go next? Maybe you keep hearing about “parts work” being discussed in your consultation group, and it seems important to learn, but you’re left feeling confused – what are parts, and how do I start? Or perhaps you know a bit about “parts work”–you might have even used the dissociative table–but now find yourself unsure of how to integrate this with your EMDR practice and what the next steps are? Our IFS Informed EMDR Course is for you!

Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy offers us a helpful framework to navigate these complex blocks and defenses by honoring and welcoming these parts of self. IFS is a beautiful companion for EMDR. If you’re eager to dive deeper into how to practically use “parts work” and IFS along with your foundational EMDR skills – this course is for you.

Internal Family Systems and EMDR are powerful on their own. When you weave them together, you give clients with parts work, attachment wounding, and structural dissociation a way through that the standard EMDR protocol on its own often cannot reach.

This on-demand training is built for EMDR clinicians who already know what it feels like to hit a wall in session: the client who flips into a protector the moment you approach a target, the part that refuses to let processing move forward, the exile that floods the system the second you make contact.

By the end of this training, you will learn how to:

• Map a client's internal system using IFS language (parts, protectors, exiles, and Self) and translate that map into AIP-informed EMDR case conceptualization.
• Identify which part is in the room before you choose a target, so you are no longer guessing why processing is looping, blocking, or shutting down.
• Negotiate with protectors in ways that honor their role in the system, build trust, and earn permission to move toward exiles and trauma targets.
• Use unblending and Self-energy interventions during EMDR preparation so your client can stay connected to Self while reprocessing, instead of getting taken over by a part.
• Modify Phase 3 target setup for parts work, including how to identify a part as the target, hold the part in awareness during BLS, and track shifts at the parts level rather than the memory level alone.
• Adjust pacing, BLS, and channels of association when a part becomes activated mid-reprocessing, including what to do when a protector steps in, an exile floods, or the client loses access to Self.
• Recognize when to pause EMDR for parts work and when to return, so you are not abandoning either modality or forcing them together when the client is not ready.
• Hold space for clients with structural dissociation using a parts-informed lens that supports stability, internal cooperation, and gradual access to traumatic material.

Crystal Hines is a licensed professional counselor, TTI trainer, and founder of Align Therapy and Consultation in Firestone, CO. Her clinical work focuses on complex trauma, and she brings expertise in both EMDR and IFS to her practice, consultation, and training.

Through Align Therapy, Crystal and her team support therapists moving from surviving to thriving, offering EMDR consultation, IFS consultation, LPCC supervision, therapy for therapists, and process groups for therapists. She brings a brain-body-heart approach to her clinical work, grounded in her own lived experience as a complex trauma survivor and her commitment to doing her own healing alongside her clients.

Crystal is known for her direct, compassionate facilitation style and her gift for connecting with the parts of people that do not often feel seen. She teaches IFS not just as a model to apply, but as a way of being with clients.