Interweaves That Work

Every EMDR therapist knows the moment: the processing rate decreases, the client keeps repeating the same association, or the room goes quiet in a way that says the work has halted rather than reached a conclusion. The automatic response is to use an interweave, often the first one that comes to mind.

Here is the difficulty: the interweave that actually restores movement is rarely the cleverest question. It is the one that addresses what is preventing adaptive processing in this client, in this moment. Most of us left training with a handful of memorized scripts and no framework for choosing among them under pressure, which is why so much interweave use runs on habit rather than formulation. Attachment injury, dissociation, shame, nervous system overwhelm, developmental deficits, and protector parts each stall processing in different ways, and each calls for a different response.

This session is about building that framework. Amanda Marks has spent close to two decades working with complex trauma, dissociative disorders, and clients whose processing does not move in straight lines, and she is bringing a working decision sequence to the room: observe what is happening, identify what is blocking the work, and match the intervention to the block. Then we put it to use on real cases.