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- Learn the core components of the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model of EMDR and how this applies to clinical populations experiencing trauma and anxiety
- Discover how early attachment injuries and chronic shame become embedded in the body—and how to apply 3 EMDR-related interventions for nervous system regulation
- Understand how to guide and support traumatized clients in safely connecting to their body’s sensations and expression
43 Responses
Its was very interesting, very practical, and insghtful, thank you for time and your work
Wow what the talk, thank you Dr. Chinwe. I feel so fortunate to attend your lecture. Be well!!!
Great session! Thank you for your sincere offering Dr. Chinwé Williams.
Such a great presentation! Thank you Dr. Williams. As an EMDR therapist, I learned so much from your review of the work and additional insights you shared in your session.
One session thoroughly covers complex trauma from early childhood. It addresses the shattered trust and the debilitating sense of sense that is somatically stored in the body. Chinwe emphasizes the importance of empowerment in the reversing the recall of traumatic experiences. Chinwe calls this Choice and Voice.
I am studying an historical person who suffered complex trauma. This person had the freedom and the resourcing to do some healing. He had freedom to choose. He knew how to give voice to whom.
Thank you so much!! This was excellent!!
Thank you so much. Appreciated the practical tips.
Thank you very much . Such a compedium of EMDR therapy and other approchaes in trauma treatment!
Excellent presentation! Thank you Chinwe.
EMDR was an approach I was aware of but I think Dr Chinwe’s explanation and context really brought it home for me. I really appreciated generally the grounding and context in which the techniques were presented. The message that we need to creating safety and building trust before we can embark on unpacking and properly filing the chaotically stored trauma memories really landed for me. Thank you Dr Chinwe for an informative and practically useful presentation.
Very interesting topic. Very well presented. Thank you very much
Thank you so much, Dr. Williams! I was impressed by your knowledge and professional approaches, but most of all, I liked the ease and calmness with which you presented these complicated issues. There is a compassion all around, and you can feel and sense it all the time. It’s wonderful, amazing!!!
Dr Williams , thank you so much for this clear, thoughtful, interesting and warm presentation. I really enjoyed hearing some new strategies and also confirming others in a way that left me feeling more confident about integrating them into my practice.
This session was very healing for me. I could easily relate to you and everything you offered. Very validating with my own form of therapy. I studied EMDR with Laurel Parnell but never found it to fit with who I am. On the other hand as a Certified Brainspotter, I can use my own body sensations and ability to attune to clients easily without having to follow any protocol. I love your integration of many therapies. Saying “Every part of you is welcome here” is beautiful. Thanks again.
And another great speaker, with lots of beautiful and useful tools. Thank you Chinwé
This was really amazing! I’ve learned so much. Thank you a lot, Dr. Williams! I feel very grateful.
Amazing! Thank you so much for reassuring what I am doing and also providing new skills and language to use. I am also an EMDR therapist and love seeing other BIPOC therapists present and share their wisdom/experience.
Thank you loved this teaching and presentation
Thankyou Chinwe this was so useful I am retired and have more time for me and my own healing and these are great tools. Your teaching style is lovely.
Thank you very much really enjoyed your talk. I am seriously considering EMDR now!
Thank you so much! Such a rich presentation.
Thanks to Dr. Chinwé Williams, for a professionally presented and profoundly educational and enlightening talk. Her video production is also professional (audio, video), thus respectful of the audience. As a documentary filmmaker and future therapist, I commend her.
Finally, language that allows me to understand why talk therapy alone has been insufficient! Thank you.
I found tapping stressful rather than down regulating (similar to hugs which are generally
stressful), whilst body scanning has always
been ‘meh’ and so will start with smaller time
increments for these practices. What I would like to learn more about is actual use of eye movements in therapy. Be well.
Your presentation was so well put together and supported with examples and case anecdotes. I felt that your thorough explanations supported my ability to draw clear connections between techniques and come away with valuable tools to assist my clients with processing through CPTSD in a much deeper and intrinsically connected means. Thank you for all of your time and gracious dissemination of your vast knowledge.
Thank you for all of the techniques you presented – very practical and useful information.
So interesting to have learnt integrating Somatic practices into EMDR. And the most important thing to remember that just like we take care of our clients we also need to take care of ourselves
Wonderful, informative presentation. I really enjoyed. Thank you.
Wow, Chinwé, your presentation was insightful, inspiring and so practical. I’m a foster carer to 11 children and some now adults. So much of what you shared tonight is very useful and relevant to our therapeutic parenting. Thank you….I wish I could replay your session to my husband over the next few weeks to digest old and new ideas….but sadly the cost of accessing the talk after the summit is prohibiting for our family. But I will to start to implement whatever I’ll remember. I’m excited to see trauma shift in our kids, young and older, and their kids. So again: thank you for a wonderful, warm and clear message.
Does she virtual consultations? If she does how do I get in contact with her?
Thank you for a clear, informative lecture.
Brilliant! Thank you… practical, loving and greatly informative!
Absolutely loved the presentation, the practical and integrative tools, and the facilitator was dynamic and presented everything so beautifully. I will definitely be following her work moving forward. I really appreciated the content!!
What a dynamic speaker! Dr. Williams packed in so much valuable information in a concise and thorough way that was easily understood. Definitely one of my favorite presentations of the summit.
Thank you very much for your awesome presentation! It taught us a lot!
Thank you! I took lots of notes. It reinforced some things I knew and brought it a stronger place to use with my clients.
Thank you Dr. Wiliams for this amazing presentation. The explanations and techniques you mentioned.were very helpful . Building safety and trust is the best place to start. Love your calm and thoughful manner.
Incredibly grateful for this session. So many different techniques to expand our toolbox. Thank you!
Thank you for the most thoughtfully organised and presented content, Dr Chinwé! I watched your presentation twice to make sure it lodged in the right file in my filing cabinet. Awesome!
The “top-down vs. bottom-up” dichotomy often sounds compelling, but it collapses under scrutiny when viewed through a lens of integrative neuroscience. As you rightly point out:
– All experience is processed through the brain, and even the so-called “body” signals (interoception, proprioception, autonomic cues) are interpreted by cognitive systems. The notion that one can work “purely” bottom-up without engaging cognition is neurologically untenable.
– What’s often called “bottom-up” is really just working with pre-reflective or pre-verbal material, not bypassing cognition—but this subtlety is often lost in the marketing.
In practice, CBT already engages with the body when it uses behavioral experiments, exposure therapy, relaxation training, or attention to physiological cues (like panic symptoms). These activate the same neural systems that somatic therapies claim exclusive access to.
The more accurate distinction might be:
– What is foregrounded in session? (e.g. felt sense vs. thought patterns)
– What language is used? (e.g. “track the sensation” vs. “notice the automatic thought”)
So perhaps rather than “bottom-up vs. top-down”, a better framing is “implicit vs. explicit processing” or even “non-verbal vs. verbal channels”—terms that avoid dualistic fallacies and stay closer to the neurocognitive truth.
Also, the body scan technique was not developed within sensorimotor psychotherapy. It predates sensorimotor psychotherapy as a formal system. The body scan, as it’s widely known in therapy and health programs today, comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) starting around 1979. Its important to give credit where credit is due!
A final observation if I may – the comparison of the human memory to being like a computer, where a file is encoded, stored, and retrieved is an outdated model. This was an overly generous comparison for the human mind, as what is retrieved is often not what was initially stored (Plous, 1993). Evidence-based therapists have long been using a newer model that compares human memory to being more like a compost heap (Randall, 2007), where memories will layer, degrade, and intermingle.
This was a highly informative, accessible and inclusive talk from Dr Williams as I’m not EMDR trained but still gained alot of ideas and knowledge to bring to my trauma work with clients. Thank you so much for another great session.