Attachment-Focused EMDR for the Repair of Early Childhood Separation and Loss

In this session, Laurel Parnell shows how to use Attachment-Focused EMDR with trauma from early childhood separation and loss. Laurel Parnell is a certified EMDR therapist who is dedicated to motivating clients and clinicians in gaining understanding, balance and healing. You will walk away inspired to follow through with the concepts in your personal and professional lives.

In this video the client presents with anxiety, trouble sleeping and irritability related to a future move. She was distressed and tearful as she described her fears and concerns about leaving her friends and family to move to a city only three and a half hours away by train. Though she realized her fears were irrational-she knew she could and would keep in touch with the people to whom she was close-yet was still wracked with anxiety and fear of separation. She believed her anxiety was linked to early separation from her mother as an infant when she was taken to India to live with her grandparents, and then later returned to live with her parents when she was around two years old, losing her grandparents and extended family in India to whom she was attached. The client believed that her mother had a hard time attaching to her in part because of the early separation and also because she was working intensively in medical school during the client’s childhood. As a result of her mother’s lack of availability, the client reported feeling abandoned, lonely and angry as a child, even having temper tantrums and biting other children.

You will learn the EMDR techniques Laurel Parnell uses in order to find the target and help the client to feel grounded and at peace.