For the 17th year, the Western Massachusetts EMDR Network is offering our Annual Spring Conference, scheduled for Saturday, April 6, 2024, in Holyoke, MA. Please mark your calendar now and plan to join us for a warm, collegial, innovative, and inclusive day of learning and connecting with EMDR Therapy friends and colleagues.
As is our tradition, the conference will feature morning and afternoon workshops on a range of EMDR Therapy topics. We are actively seeking strong, well-conceived, well-organized, interactive workshops to include in our 2024 conference program.
And that is where you come in…
The Western Mass EMDR Network sponsors and organizes the conference and invites proposals for 90- and 180-minute presentations and workshops. We are eager to receive proposals for engaging, up-to-date treatment and practice-related presentations that feature topics of recognized relevance and importance to our community of EMDR clinicians. We are most interested in fresh, accessible, well-articulated, user-friendly workshops featuring experiential learning opportunities and a practice-related focus.
In line with what we consider to be critical areas for the growth and development of the EMDR community, we are particularly interested in proposals that highlight issues of equity, inclusion, and social information processing, including identity, culture, diversity, cultural competence, cultural transference and countertransference, implicit bias, internalized stigma and work with socially marginalized or underserved populations.
We invite proposals addressing the use of EMDR Therapy with specific populations (ex., neurodivergence) and in specific clinical situations, such as working with depression, addictions and compulsions, attachment trauma, developmental issues, embodied experience, dissociation, behavioral dysregulation, children, adolescents, eating, grief, somatization, medical problems, and other topics of clinical interest. Experiential presentations on clinician self-care and proposals, including spiritual or neurobiological perspectives on adaptive information processing related to clinical practice, are also welcome. We will fully consider proposals relating to other essential topics in EMDR Therapy, including clinically relevant research, mechanisms and processes of change, protocol-based work, and other topics. Proposals dealing specifically with work with veterans and military personnel are encouraged. So now is the time to pick your passion and develop a proposal based on your research activities, clinical experience, and knowledge of EMDR Therapy.
All proposals will be evaluated for the coherence and clarity of conception, articulation of learning objectives, quality of focus and organization of the proposed program, experiential learning opportunities, attention to issues of diversity and culture, and presentation skills of the workshop leader. All proposals will be submitted for review and approval by the EMDRIA Standards & Training Committee and must meet approval criteria for EMDRIA Credits, which include evidence requirements for experimental or innovative protocols. So that you know, all proposals must be submitted online.
Online submissions are now open.
The deadline for proposal submissions is February 15th, 2024.
Proposal Considerations: Whatever the topic of your proposed presentation, please consider carefully how you conceptualize your proposal, as feedback from conference participants suggests that presenters should generally try to cover less material and focus on clarity, the take-home message, time for questions and dialogue, and opportunities for experiential learning, including use of video examples of relevant work.
We welcome proposals for 90-minute or 180-minute workshops. A proposal must include the workshop title, a brief 50-word description of the program content, a 250-word abstract, 3-5 learning objectives, a statement of consideration of issues of culture and diversity, and a required identification of the learning level of the presentation (General, Intermediate or Advanced).
This learning level identification helps to indicate whether your proposed workshop is best suited for a General EMDR-trained audience, for Intermediate-Level therapists actively practicing EMDR, or for Advanced-Level EMDR practitioners. This is important information for our conference participants to use in selecting the workshops that best meet their learning needs and interests.
Feedback from previous conferences indicates that participants are most satisfied with presentations that match their learning level. Therefore, we strongly encourage prospective presenters to think carefully about their proposals and the learning level they want to address. With this, workshops can be designed to meet the needs of participants at one or more of these levels, so please indicate all the levels for which your proposed presentation will be a good fit. During the proposal review process, you may be asked for additional information to clarify this or other aspects of your proposal.
Please also indicate if EMDRIA has previously reviewed the proposed material for continuing education credits or if the material is alternative or experimental. Non-standard EMDR protocols are considered experimental if evidence of the rationale, specificity, and effectiveness of the strategy and interventions, particularly those related to Phases 4-8 of the Standard Protocol, have not been reviewed by the Standards and Training Committee of EMDRIA.
Additionally, as has become our practice, all workshop proposals must be formulated explicitly to issues of culture, diversity, equity, and privilege. These are essential considerations in all our clinical work, but especially so for us as EMDR practitioners seeking to develop a more inclusive community and to improve both the efficacy and accessibility of EMDR Therapy among underserved populations. Every proposal must include a statement of how culture, diversity and equity have been considered and will be included in the proposed presentation.
To increase your chance of having your proposal accepted for the conference program, the workshop description should contain a clear and specific indication of how you will include the following elements:
● Concepts grounded in clinical experience and illuminated by case examples.
● Preparing participants to leave the workshop with usable skills and relevant knowledge
● Multimodal learning opportunities such as videos, brief experiential exercises, role plays, case reviews, practical handouts, etc., to enrich and enliven more conventional didactic presentations
● Clear and succinct statement of learning objectives
● Slides that are short, simple, and easy to read with bullet points and brief statements that summarize the material presented rather than blocks of text that the presenter reads out
● Images that illuminate or illustrate the main points rather than lengthy expository texts
While we are very grateful for all submissions, we have limited space and cannot accept all proposals. If your proposal is accepted, you will be asked for additional materials to satisfy EMDRIA and multidisciplinary CEU requirements.
If you would like to discuss a proposal idea or seek clarification of the proposal guidelines stated above, please get in touch with the Western Mass EMDR Network at [email protected].
The Western Mass EMDR Network is a registered non-profit group of local EMDR therapists dedicated to disseminating knowledge about EMDR and otherwise strengthening our regional EMDR community. We award stipends to presenters. Whether you submit a proposal or not, we look forward to seeing you next spring in Holyoke!
Please find the proposal template below. Please copy and paste the template into a word document. When you are ready to submit your proposal please email your proposal to melysafriedman@
The Western Mass EMDR Network
Proposal Template WMass EMDR Spring Conference
Name:
Title:
Degrees:
Licenses:
EMDR level (trained, certified, consultant, etc.):
Address:
Email:
Phone:
Website (if any):
- Short biographical statement (Max of 250 words)
- Brief description of relevant experience
About the presentation:
- Format (90 minutes)
- Percentage of EMDR Content
- Level of appeal (Introductory-Intermediate-
Advanced) - EMDR Relevance (EMDR Theory / EMDR Practice / EMDR Research / Other than EMDR)
- Format: lecture, audio/visual, powerpoint, case presentation, group work
- Any technical requirements
- Has this program been approved by EMDRIA or approved for LMHC or LICSW ceus in previous years?
- * If the program content for your presentation has been reviewed and already approved by EMDRIA within the past 3 years, you will need to provide the year of initial EMDRIA Credit program approval issued and the program approval number.
In order to meet the EMDRIA Credit requirements, you must also include:
- Title of the workshop
- Topic Area (Example : Children, couple, complex trauma…)
- Workshop Abstract (Please provide a description of your presentation that will be posted on the program) – (Max of 75 words)
- Workshop Description (expanded) – (Max 300 words)
- Learning objectives (Submit at least 3 but not more than 5 specific objectives regarding new skills.) – (Max of 250 words)
- Timeline and Content (Outline of program content and time schedule in 15, 30 or 60 min-long segments)
- Multicultural consideration
- Application to field of Social Work or LMHC practice
