When EMDR Stalls: Somatic and Ego State Approaches to Complex Trauma

The Case That Won’t Move

You did everything the protocol asks for. History-taking was thorough. Resourcing was solid — the calm place held, the container worked. You picked a clean target, got a clear negative cognition, a SUDS of 7, a body location.

And then nothing. The set ends and the number hasn’t moved. Or it moves and snaps back. Or the client goes quiet, flat, far away, and you realize you have been reprocessing with someone who left the room three sets ago.

Every clinician trained in EMDR has this case. Usually more than one. And the standard troubleshooting — change the direction, shorten the set, check the target, try a cognitive interweave — sometimes gets you nowhere, because the block isn’t in the target. It’s in the system doing the processing.

EMDR training

Standard Protocol Assumes a System That Can Tolerate Processing

EMDR’s eight phases are built on an elegant premise: given enough safety and dual attention, the brain moves distressing material toward adaptive resolution on its own. The clinician’s job is largely to stay out of the way.

That premise holds when the client arrives with a nervous system that can tolerate activation and return to baseline. Complex trauma frequently doesn’t bring one. When trauma is chronic, early, and relational, what shows up in the reprocessing chair is not one memory network waiting to be integrated — it’s a system organized around survival, with parts of it committed to not going near the material at all.

So the processing stalls. And the stall gets read as resistance, or poor preparation, or a badly chosen target, when what’s actually happening is a protective response doing exactly what it was built to do.

Reading the Difference: Activation, Interference, or Protection

The clinical skill that changes these cases is discrimination — telling apart three things that look similar in the room and call for entirely different responses.

Trauma-based activation is the processing working. Distress rises, the body responds, and with dual attention it moves. This one you stay out of the way of.

Ego state interference is a different part of the system coming online mid-processing — a younger state, a state carrying material the target didn’t name, a state with its own negative cognition. Processing doesn’t stop so much as change hands.

Adaptive protective strategy is the system saying no. Shutdown, dissociation, sudden numbness, the client who reports “nothing” with a body that says otherwise. Pushing here does not produce breakthrough. It produces a client who doesn’t come back.

The body is usually where the difference shows first — before the client can name it, and often before the SUDS reflects it. Breath, posture, muscle tone, eye contact, the quality of stillness. Somatic indicators are the earliest reliable data you have about which of the three you’re in.

Advanced EMDR Strategies for Complex Trauma

On September 24 and 25, 2026, Megan Salar, MSW, teaches Advanced EMDR Strategies for Complex Trauma: Somatic and Ego State Approaches — two live afternoons for clinicians already working in EMDR who keep meeting these cases.

Salar is a consultant, trainer and author who earned her Master’s in Clinical Social Work from Northwest Nazarene University and specializes in complex trauma, attachment and addictive disorders. She has trained thousands of clinicians nationally and internationally in EMDR, trauma and addiction-based practice, and previously owned and operated an intensive outpatient treatment centre voted best in practice in 2019. She is the author of The EMDR Workbook for Trauma and PTSD (New Harbinger, 2023), The EMDR Flip Chart (PESI), and EMDR for Dummies (Wiley), with The EMDR Workbook for Addiction due from New Harbinger this year.

The training’s premise is that the block is information. Trauma is stored and expressed in the nervous system, and unintegrated ego states and protective parts disrupt adaptive processing in patterned, readable ways. Learn to read the pattern, and the stall stops being an obstacle and becomes the next intervention point.

What You’ll Walk Away Able to Do

• Identify somatic and ego state indicators of complex trauma that interfere with standard EMDR reprocessing.
• Differentiate between trauma-based activation, ego state interference, and adaptive protective strategies during EMDR phases.
• Apply somatic and ego state–informed interventions within the EMDR eight-phase protocol to enhance stabilization and reprocessing.
• Demonstrate the use of modified EMDR strategies, including titration, restricted processing, and targeted interweaves.
• Integrate advanced EMDR conceptualization skills into treatment planning to improve clinical effectiveness and reduce treatment stagnation.

Modifications Inside the Protocol, Not Instead of It

This is not a workshop about abandoning the eight phases. It’s about what you can adjust within them when the standard version is too much for the system in front of you.

Titration — reducing how much of the material is in the room at once, so processing happens at a dose the client’s system can metabolize rather than defend against.

Restricted processing — deliberately narrowing the field so the network doesn’t open wider than the client can hold.

Targeted interweaves — offered on the basis of what the block is actually made of, rather than as a generic nudge when the SUDS won’t drop.

Used well, these turn “this client isn’t ready for EMDR” into “this client needs EMDR delivered differently” — which, for a complex trauma caseload, is most of the work.

Who This Is For

Licensed mental health professionals — therapists, psychologists, social workers, counsellors, nurse practitioners, occupational therapists — and graduate students in accredited programs. It assumes working familiarity with the standard EMDR protocol; the content starts where basic training ends.

Workshop Details

• Training: Advanced EMDR Strategies for Complex Trauma: Somatic and Ego State Approaches
• Presenter: Megan Salar, MSW
• Dates: Thursday, September 24 and Friday, September 25, 2026
• Time: 1:00 – 4:15 pm ET each day
• Format: Live webinar
• CE: 6 hours of direct contact
• Tuition: $219 CAD early bird (regularly $259). USD available at checkout.
• Recording: One year of access, available the day after the live broadcast ends. On-demand viewers earn CE by passing an 80% post-course quiz.

Certificates list participant name, training title, presenter credentials, hours, date, and confirmation of attendance or quiz result. As always, verify CE requirements with your own regulatory college or board.

Register

If the cases that stall are the ones taking up your consultation hours, this is two afternoons aimed squarely at them.

Register for Advanced EMDR Strategies for Complex Trauma →