Hey everyone, how’s it going? This is David Archer. I just wanted to speak about a topic that’s near and dear to me, which is anti-racist EMDR therapy. If you pay any attention to the news, you might know that things are getting a little hectic out there.

Not only are there threats of violence, not only is there racism, xenophobia, and just to know these things have always been there, but some people who you might work with—whether these are your clients that you’re working with, whether these are just people that you know—they might be more aware of these things. Just check out your social media. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, there’s a chance that racism and this type of discomfort might increase over the next few weeks and over the next few months, and maybe even years.

And so that is the reason why those who are EMDR therapists, I implore you to think about using this approach from an anti-racist perspective and not just any anti-racist perspective. One that is intersectional.

One that is also caring about where people come from. One that is also against the rising scourge of fascism that is approaching. We want to make it so that we are able to have people who care about those who are LGBTQ+, care about those who are neurodivergent.

When I say race, I’m talking about the socially constructed idea. So, we need one that’s going to also equally fight against patriarchy as well. You’ll find that when a person is oppressed based on their gender, it’s not so different from a person being oppressed based on their race.

These are not biological things. These are socially constructed things. And it turns out that even the idea that someone is greater than another person is also socially constructed.

So, we have to fight back against that oppression and that foolishness by any means necessary. And it just so happens I’m a psychotherapist, just so happens I’m an EMDR therapy trainer. Link is in the description. If you’d like more information like this, check out my videos, post, subscribe, share all of that stuff. Let’s get into what anti-racist EMDR therapy is all about. So, I’m not arguing to change the standard protocol.

The Phases of Anti-Racist EMDR Therapy with the Standard Protocol

EMDR standard protocol is working as it is, and it’s working just fine. But here are some considerations that can help to supercharge your EMDR therapy standard protocol so that it comes from this intersectional, anti-racist, anti-fascist, no BS way of being able to help people, regardless of where they’re from, what country they come from, and all of these things. I speak about this in Anti-Racist Psychotherapy, so I’m just going to go through it. So, we know about the eight phases of EMDR therapy.

Phase 1: History Taking and Treatment Planning

First, history taking and treatment planning. We’re talking about preparation, assessment, desensitization, installation, body scan, closure, and reevaluation. Phase one usually looks different depending on who you’re talking to and depending on who you’ve trained with, but basically, we want to get to know our client. But remember as a therapist, if we’re not comfortable asking certain questions, the client might not be comfortable answering certain questions.

Many people who have complex trauma and dissociation, they’ve been betrayed by so many people in positions of power. So why would you be any different? They’re going to hold back and maybe not share everything. So this is the reason why the therapist needs to provide the context for people to be able to share about these things.

I have assessments that I give when I’m asking about dissociation. Dr. Maryann Kate, who was an ISSSTD fellow award winner along with me as well—we were recently done, we did that in 2026. The thing is I give my trainees the MID-60, which is the Multidimensional Inventory for Dissociation, the 60-question condensed version. We want to ask about dissociation.

We want to normalize dissociative symptoms. If a person is saying they have intrusive thoughts, if they’re saying that they have these angry intrusions, these persecutory intrusions, we want to validate the fact that your nervous system is doing everything that it can to cope with the stresses it’s going through. And that it’s not that you’re crazy. It’s just you’re adapting to a society that looks like it’s losing its mind. You know what I mean? So we want to let people know these are ways of adapting to stresses.

Not that there’s something wrong with you, but you’re in the therapy that’s going to help to make you have the choice of whether to dissociate or not. Instead of you feeling as if you have to get out of your body, maybe there’s other ways you can deal with these stresses. And once your responses are less triggered by the trauma history, then you can make decisions that are more in line with your integrity.

We also want to do a genogram in this phase one of just knowing what are the legacies that have been inherited. A genogram is a graphical representation of a person’s family system. We want to know, were there things inherited from the mother’s side of the family? Were there things that were inherited from the father’s side of the family? These could be based on race. These could be based on gender roles that you feel as if you’re reliving or that were handed down to you. But the fascinating thing is that once you’re conscious of these roles, you can make changes to them.

We don’t want to say that one side of the family is the good one and the other one is the bad one. We know that there are adaptive legacies from both sides and maybe maladaptive legacies from both sides. Rather than the binaries of racism, the binaries of sexism, of patriarchy, of homophobia, and all of these things, we’re looking for the gray area in between. We’re trying to say that maybe there’s positives and negatives, even for the difficulties that you’ve inherited. So we have a balanced perspective.

We also want to ask about intergenerational racial trauma. We want to just know a little bit about—there’s a link in the description as well—it’s called the racial trauma target history. There are questions that I’m going to ask my clients, even if they look white as snow. There are questions I’m going to ask my clients, even if they look so masculine with the big muscles and the tattoos. It doesn’t matter for the white person, they may be white-passing.

I’m still going to ask them about race for the guy that you think is on the motorcycle, looking like a tough guy. Guess what? Men are less likely to report experiences of sexual or gendered violence or being aggressed in a sexual way. And also, therapists are less likely to ask them. So then they do under-report. This is why we want to make sure we’re asking questions regardless of what a person looks like. And I put race in brackets so that you understand, even if your client doesn’t seem to have a race, they all have a socially constructed identity. So we want to ask these questions anyways.

Phase 2: Preparation in Anti-Racist EMDR Therapy

Moving on when it gets to phase two for preparation. Yes, there’s the calm scene. Yes, there’s the container. Yes, you might want to do the light stream. Some people do a tree meditation, all kinds of things. I developed a resource development installation by Korn and Leeds, highly recommend. And I found that working in Montreal, in Toronto, and the indigenous communities, I needed to make some adjustments on how I did that approach so that it would respond with the global majority.

And that it would respond for people who might want to access things like concepts, characteristics of the self, ancestors, and even forces of nature. When I widen the scope like that, once in a while, the client is going to bring in their ancestor, who’s their grandmother. And if we have a resource of the grandma, when we’re confronting a target that seems really intimidating, guess what? Grandma’s undefeated. Anytime a client is having difficulty processing stresses, you can call upon grandma and everything’s going to be all clear.

These types of resources relating to your ancestors, relating to Orishas, relating to any spiritual truths, this is what makes it so that therapy can then become something more than just a cookie-cutter machine that we’re putting the client into. Now the client can bring their favorite video game into the session.

I’ve had clients who had some difficulty processing trauma targets, and they just happened to be fans of Legend of Zelda. They can now bring in the Triforce. They can bring in the sword. They can bring in the shield. They can bring in their culture into the therapy session. When we are able to get them to use their language and their mother tongue to fight off against the trauma and the fear and the constriction that’s associated with trauma and mental health of keeping people in a static form, it cannot even survive a minute against the power of one’s true spirituality, the power of one’s infinite creativity, the power of one’s ancestral grandma.

We want to make sure that these are part of the client’s entire culture, of their social identity. So not just focusing on the suffering, but the strengths that is within each and every one of us for assessment. It’s a standard protocol.

Phase 3: Assessment

It’s like an airplane assessment is on the runway. We’re getting ready for liftoff. And then after those wheels are getting tucked in, we’re about to fly. There are no real changes there just to know that. There are times where a person might have a negative cognition that’s not about the individual but might be about their entire collective.

I’ve also written about this as well. I’ve had clients who would say things like—an indigenous person might have a belief referring to themselves saying “we are bad” and referring to the racial group. I’ve had a client who said, “I’m a bad Indian,” or even a person who was speaking about their sexuality as being defective, like the identity that they have.

Just know there are some adjustments because of language differences where we might have first-person language, second-person, and third-person. There are some languages that have deeper depths of how they would express these things. So, it may not always be a first-person belief and “I am worthless” thing. It might be something like “my family is worthless,” or “I’ve brought shame to my family” and referring to the collective. So just being aware of that.

Phase 4: Desensitization

Again, we’re not doing any major changes, but just know that for cognitive interweaves, there’s times if a client is stuck and for some reason, they’re looping and nothing’s changing, well, we can give a different perspective. Have they thought about it in this way? Would they feel the same thing if this happened to their niece? Would they say the same thing if this happened to their nephew? Give a different perspective on how they’re looking and sometimes that can make it so that we break that looping. And in some other cases, that’s where we might need the resources to come in.

I told you, think things might be a little stuck? Guess what? Grandma’s coming in with the superhero outfit. You know what I mean? And she’s dealing with the whole situation. Sometimes the option for a cognitive interweave might be a resource. It might be a limiting belief about oneself, about one’s culture. And that resource is able to save the day.

Phase 5: Installation

After that, when it comes to installation, when we’re having a person state a positive belief, of course we do want it also to just be a belief. If the negative belief is this absolute that says “I am bad,” the positive belief can be, “I am awesome.” We just don’t want it to be “I am perfect.” We don’t need it to be the opposite binary.

Sometimes if a person has a difficulty deciding what the positive belief is, putting the word can usually gets over that hump. If a person has the negative belief of “I can’t trust myself” or “I can’t trust others,” the positive belief can be, “I can learn to trust others. I can learn to trust myself. I can learn.”

The operating word of can gives a possibility rather than the stuckness of the negative cognition, the binary, the absolute negative. That gray zone is usually the response that we would want. And so, I’m not too picky about a person’s positive belief because I know that many of them fought decades to be able to believe this about themselves. So I’m a little more lenient than most people are with what they want to say about themselves, provided that it is something that’s going to be helpful for them and something that’s not going to backfire.

Phase 6: Body Scan

A body scan, not much of a difference we’re going to do again. We just want to make sure though, because we were talking about complex trauma, complex racial trauma. We just want to make sure that all parts of the self are in agreement, are okay with us believing this about ourselves when we think about this original target.

Phase 7: Closure

And then lastly for closure. In my book, I did speak about flash technique as a way that’s really reliable of closing a target. But since then, there’s just been some advancements. Thomas Zimmerman’s predictive processing flash, AKA the four blinks approach to flash. And then I developed a derivative of that approach called the RAP technique. Again, check the links in the description.

If you want to get with it, because again, we’re using predictive processing as a framework. We’re using memory reconsolidation as a theory, state of the art stuff. We just want to make sure that whether we’ve cleared the target or not, if there’s a little bit of dysfunctional material that’s still there, some material that hasn’t been fully reprocessed, we are able to bring in a client’s favorite image, client’s favorite music video.

Just yesterday I had this client who was using music videos from the eighties, from the nineties, and then using the bilaterals for the flash technique, but now with the RAP technique with predictive processing flash, you don’t need the bilaterals anymore. You can just be blinking your eyes. You can be tapping your fingers. You could be dancing. You could even be searching for numbers while attending to the thing that is of value to you.

And that can be enough to be able to reconsolidate and clear out some of the noise that’s there. We can also make adjustments to make it so all parts of the self can love something about the stimulus that’s being presented so that you’re feeling this whole-body calmness in a way that’s pretty rapid, in a way that’s pretty effective, and in a way that’s just pretty awesome.

Then the client, once again, knows that they have this tool that they can use in between sessions rapidly to put that stuff away so that they can save it for the next session. And that’s why we use RAP technique, predictive processing, flash, and other approaches to flash to end sessions when they’re incomplete and in between sessions. So we can reduce those stresses.

Phase 8: Reevaluation

And on reevaluation, I just want to check to see, was everything all good? If it wasn’t, we get right back to it. If it was, we go on to the next one. And when we do a racial trauma target history, we got a nice Excel spreadsheet that’s available. So then we can choose what is the target that the therapist decides might be a good idea. What is it that the client thinks that they should deal with based on their belief that they want the therapy to be highly successful?

What do they think they would need to complete for the therapy to be successful? We have it lined up so that the client can then choose. Maybe they could consider what the therapist wants, but that’s unnecessary. We want the client to always choose what target they’re going to deal with.

Concluding Anti-Racist EMDR Therapy

We are validating the agency. We are making it so that their voice matters and ultimately, we are helping them to know this is a therapy we co-create. This is what anti-racist psychotherapy is all about. It’s not as if there’s a therapist who’s greater than the client. It’s actually that we want to make it a bit more balanced. We want to make it so that the client also takes up the charge of taking care of their mental health.

This is anti-racist EMDR therapy. Just know that if you need any support with this, we got consultation groups. We got books. We got workshops coming up. We got EMDR training. If you’d like to learn more about it, maybe you’re an EMDR trained therapist and you need a refresher. Contact me and let’s make this thing happen.

I just wanted to say many blessings. I know things out there can be a little tough. It’s up to us as therapists to take care of ourselves because we are often charged with taking care of others. And the most important thing is just to do the best that you can, rest up when you can, but also cultivate a revolutionary joy. They might be able to take some sadness, add some stress once in a while, but they cannot take that joy from your heart. We got to keep fighting. All right. That’s what’s up. Peace.

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