As part of EMDR supervision, I also offer IFS-informed EMDR supervision.  Internal Family Systems (IFS) is currently one of the most sought-after trainings. Many of my EMDR supervisees are either trained in IFS or have an IFS-informed approach.

As an EMDR consultant supervisor with Level 2 IFS training, I encourage the incorporation of Parts language into our case consultations. This approach provides an alternative lens for understanding blocking beliefs, identifying the client’s traumatized part (NC), and facilitating the unburdening and reprocessing of trauma during the desensitization phase of EMDR. By integrating the unique qualities (PC), clients can relinquish the roles or beliefs they previously held and begin to live in a healthier way, as if the trauma had not occurred.

EMDR’s Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model promotes the development of the internal working model, scaffolding the client through a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms causing them to unconsciously re-enact their trauma.

IFS assumes that when we experience trauma parts are organised around our lived experience and are forced to respond in a certain way or in a role.  Parts organise themselves to protect the person and IFS enables us to look at why these parts are showing up the way they are and identifies their protective component.  All parts make sense within the context they were created.

EMDR’s adaptive information processing model is akin to what IFS refers to as ‘Self Energy’—the healing force that acknowledges the client’s inherent capacity for self-healing.

The Science Bit

The ultimate goal of IFS, like EMDR, is memory reconsolidation. Memory is formed implicitly and nonverbally, based on emotionally significant life experiences. It is a learned construct shaped by how a person interprets and feels about an experience. This implicit knowledge from the past drives present behaviours, thoughts, and emotions, that generate a wide range of symptoms in the present.

The ability to alter implicit beliefs provides a theoretical foundation for embodied trauma therapies like EMDR and IFS.  Memory reconsolidation occurs when the following conditions are met:

• Accessing and Reactivation: The retrieval of the emotional and embodied experience tied to an implicit belief, or the energy that caused the experience is activated.

• Mismatch: Experiencing an emotional and embodied reality that contradicts previous learning. This process unlocks the synapses related to the implicit belief for up to five hours.

• Transformation/Erasure: Rewriting the belief with new learning, potentially leading to ‘effortless permanence of symptom cessation’.

When memory reconsolidation takes place, the factual content of memories remains intact, but the emotional charge and meaning associated with them are transformed.

Integrating IFS into the standard EMDR protocol provides additional perspective for the IFS-trained EMDR therapist in terms of ego states, defenses, and relational phenomena, which can cause blocking beliefs and resistance to trauma processing.

Please note – I am not an IFS supervisor, but I am supervised by an IFS approved consultant clinical psychologist.