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Ep 50: Shared Decision Making in Trauma-informed Therapy

Anyone else feeling irritated by how clinicians love to tell each other what is right or wrong? Ever notice how scripts often don’t thoroughly address client preferences or the process of client engagement? Where is the role of autonomy for the client?

To remedy our irritation, today we zoom out and get curious about how we make clinical choices, and how we engage with our clients about making those clinical choices.

For EMDR clinicians, this can be tricky. Questions may already be coming up for you like: How do we make a shared decision with our clients when we have a protocol, step-by-step process, and/or script that we are to follow to do it right and be effective?

Herein lies the balancing act between positive health outcomes and patient autonomy. How and when do we make clinical choices with our clients? How do we follow the script or protocol, and stay client-centered? What’s important to the client? How do we triage what is clinically relevant? The questions are important, and the answers feel challenging.

Good news: physicians have been researching this for decades. And it’s time for us to catch up with the rest of the healthcare literature. Today, as we talk about shared decision making, we realize that we cannot say we are trauma-informed if we are not client-centered. I said what I said.

You deserve to have richer conversations with your clients, in consultation, and even in Facebook groups. As we dive into models of shared decision making, get clarity on which shared decision making model you’re using when you make clinical choices. By identifying your orientation along the shared decision making spectrum, you'll get to have more productive conversations with your colleagues and clients.

And you can finally understand how to make EMDR a client-centered therapy. Perhaps you were also clinically trained in a paternalistic model of shared decision making. I was, and boy did it mess me up. The paternalistic model tells us the rules about EMDR, like talking during Phase 4, what target to start from, and what form of BLS to use.

Let’s get curious about how to translate the gold of EMDR into the deliberative model of shared decision making so we can serve more clients effectively. What does EMDR in the deliberative model look like? Listen in to find out!

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Learn more about Zero Disturbance: 

Zero Disturbance offers comprehensive resources for therapists on EMDR-informed clinical reasoning, intensive design, passive income systems, & teaching excellence. 

  • Ready to get started in the Zero Disturbance community? Access our favorite free resources in The Zero Disturbance Welcome Bundle, full of free videos and downloads to help you develop your clinical reasoning skills, as well as ways to feel like an intentional designer of high-value offerings like intensives and passive income. Use these free resources to make the seemingly impossible feel absolutely accessible!
  • Ready to set up intensive therapy options in your practice? It's time to get you out of back-to-back, 50 minute sessions and experience real financial freedom. We supported hundreds of therapists make this successful transition, and are excited to help you, too! Design an intensive model that works best for you with The Intensive Design Kit! 
  • Ready to go all in and work with Kambria? You should be surrounded by life-long learners who are encouraging, learner-centered, and transparent about the success of their business as you build yours. All therapists are welcome, and EMDRIA hours available for those with EMDR focused practices. Whether you're seeking Certification, AC, or already a Consultant, we encourage you to get clinical and business strategies in The Consultation Program because there's nothing like it. 

With a Masters in Education from Vanderbilt, Kambria has been creating trainings and teaching adult learners for 20 years. As Director of Education and Quality Improvement at Stanford Medical School, her job was to decomplicate and consolidate complex systems and topics, thereby giving medical trainees successful learning experiences. Now, as a busy mom of fraternal twins, dedicated business owner of Zero Disturbance, and EMDRIA Approved Consultant, Kambria knows what it means to do things efficiently, effectively, and in a learner-centered way.