Conceptualizing Countertransference through the AIP Model

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Bringing Relational Depth to EMDR Consultation

Traditionally, Eye Movement and Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) consultation has been understood as a process focused on technique, protocol, and case conceptualization. Consultees bring their cases, consultants offer guidance on the Eight Phases, and the consultant helps guide toward stronger case conceptualization and the next steps for treatment. What often goes unexamined is the consultee’s internal experience of the work. The recently updated EMDRIA Approved Consultant™ Standards make explicit what many consultants have long practiced instinctively: consultation is a developmental, relational, and reflective process in which the consultant moves fluidly between the roles of Educator, Motivator, and Evaluator (EMDRIA, 2026). Notably, the updated standards name the consultant’s specific responsibility to “identify and address any issues of transference and/or countertransference” as a core competency of ethical and professional practice (EMDRIA, 2026, p. 25).

The therapist’s work with populations experiencing complex trauma and dissociation routinely evokes countertransference in the treating clinician due to the relational complexity implicit in the work, regardless of modality. And often it is the cases of complex trauma and dissociation that consultees bring with them into consultation. What EMDRIA’s updated standards are pointing toward is that countertransference can no longer be a peripheral concern in EMDR consultation. The experience of countertransference is to be expected, named, and incorporated as a natural part of the work and experience of learning, practicing, and mentoring EMDR therapy.

This shift aligns naturally with what the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model has always told us: it’s all just information. The internal experience of the therapist is not a problem to be ashamed of, but is human, and offers meaningful data about the client and the therapeutic relationship. Clinicians come to the consultation space as whole humans, shaped by their past experiences, self-beliefs, professional histories and training experiences. Just as clients hold maladaptively linked memories that shape their functioning, the memory networks that belong to the therapist shape the experience of the therapeutic process and, therefore, clinical decision-making. Left unexamined, these networks can affect treatment outcomes for the very clients those consultees serve. This article will examine some traditional perspectives on countertransference and propose a strengths-based framework to help EMDR consultants and consultees identify and understand countertransference reactions through applying the AIP Model to the process of EMDR Consultation.

History, Culture, and the Therapeutic Self

 The experience of countertransference is to be expected, named, and incorporated as a natural part of the work and experience of learning, practicing, and mentoring EMDR therapy.

More recently, scholars like Dr. Thema Bryant have challenged the trauma field to examine this structural inheritance. Bryant (2024) argues that traditional psychological models have been treated as culturally neutral when they in fact reflect the values and power structures of the dominant culture that produced them. Clinician neutrality is never truly neutral; it defaults to dominant cultural norms and, in doing so, can conceal bias.

Clinicians carry socialized identities, beliefs, and experiences that shape their perceptions, ideology, and emotional responses to those they work with, often unconsciously. When these factors remain outside of conscious awareness, they do not disappear, but become unprocessed material in the clinician’s adaptive information processing system, shaping their approach to psychotherapy. Unexamined countertransference can become not only a missed clinical opportunity but a potential reenactment of the very dynamics that brought the client to therapy in the first place.

How Dominant Culture Shapes Clinical Culture

Traditional psychotherapy models can unintentionally replicate the very power imbalances they were designed to address and reenact the cultural or institutional betrayal that clients have already survived. This replication operates through the ordinary language of clinical culture. Phrases like “she hasn’t done her work” and “therapy shouldn’t be about you” sketch the parameters of how to behave as a “good therapist” in broad, moralized strokes. In doing so, they push the clinician’s realtime experience out of view, along with potentially valuable clinical information.

EMDR Basic Training has the potential to introduce its own version of this tension. Early learners of the standard protocol are taught to “stay out of the way” yet “stay attuned,” a paradox that, if not appropriately nuanced throughout the development of the EMDR clinician, can be confusing and unintentionally train therapists to mistrust their inner experience.

Defining Countertransference

Totalistic countertransference refers to the relational process co-created by the therapist and client, encompassing the therapist’s affective, somatic, visual, and cognitive reactions. These reactions are commonly unconscious but can be brought into awareness through self-reflection and present moment attention (Kernberg, 1965).

Countertransference can include positive or negative reactions toward the client, and both carry the potential to be harmful or helpful. Across all types, a common thread runs beneath the surface: a struggle with helplessness, shame, uncertainty, and inadequacy (Berg, 2026).

Types of Countertransference (Gelso et al., 2007):

Concordant Countertransference: The therapist identifies with the client’s internal state, feeling what the client feels, often before the client has named it. The client unconsciously externalizes an unbearable internal experience, and the therapist’s nervous system receives and registers it as their own.

Complementary Countertransference: The therapist identifies a significant figure from the client’s relational history. The client unconsciously casts the therapist into a familiar role, and the therapist begins responding in ways that replicate how others have treated the client in the past.

Subjective Countertransference: The therapist responds to the client as though they are someone from the therapist’s past. This type arises from the therapist’s unresolved material, personal history, or current life stressors. The reaction belongs more to the therapist than to what the client is presenting, and its intensity or quality will often exceed what the clinical material objectively warrants.

Objective Countertransference: The therapist’s reaction is a response to something the client is putting into the room, something that most clinicians would likely experience in the same situation, revealing information about the client rather than about the therapist.

Over time, what can take shape in practice is a constraint around a specific emotional territory: dread before a session, frustration with a client who is not making progress, envy of a colleague’s caseload, despair about whether the work is helping. Rather than registering these moments as data points and clinical information to explore, they become an accounting of the clinician’s failure of character, implicitly communicating that a sufficiently developed therapist would not feel these things.

There is a persistent cultural pressure on therapists to have “done their work,” as if countertransference were a problem that, once resolved, never returns. The reality is that regardless of experience level, countertransference can and will emerge across the lifespan of the therapist. That is the nature of the therapeutic process. The therapist’s job is not to be immune to it but to notice it and respond with intention.

And so, therapists do what ethically-motivated clinicians are trained to do: they suppress, manage, and compensate, then come to consultation in search of a modified protocol that might help with this client’s depression, panic, or attachment trauma. Some traditional consultation models have inherited the same messages from the dominant power structures that prize neutrality, exclusive positive regard, rationality and logic while devaluing the therapist’s own inner emotional experience.

They have learned to answer the question on the surface and may fail to attend to the more important subtext: What in the therapist’s internal experience is driving the need to know? Is it a gap in skill or clinical knowledge? Or is there something deeper seeking attention, something that a protocol adjustment will not reach?

When Countertransference Goes Underground

As every AIP-informed therapist understands in their work with clients, unwanted feelings do not resolve simply because they are deemed inappropriate or unwelcome. The same holds true within clinical work: the therapist’s experience of emotion, sensation, or other associations do not disappear simply because they may have been taught they do not belong. That experience persists or shifts form, emerging in ways that are recognizable to most therapists across the professional lifespan. These might include moments of over-preparation: arriving to a difficult session with a carefully constructed plan, multiple protocol variations, a last-minute resource, and a list of potentially helpful interweaves. Impulses to rescue: slowing or shortening the bilateral stimulation when intense affect rises, checking in too frequently mid-reprocessing, inviting grounding at a flicker of negative emotional expression. Moments when a session slides into psychoeducation just as something challenging begins to surface.

On the surface, in clinical notes and case presentations during EMDR consultation, these responses to the therapist’s internal experience can look like careful, competent EMDR practice. They are conceptually justifiable within the Eight Phases and will likely yield satisfactory results. But a deeper internal inquiry might reveal crucial information about what is driving that intervention. One might ask in those moments:

• Who is that intervention serving?
• What does it soothe in the clinician to move in that direction?
• Is it a grounded clinical decision, or an attempt to manage the emotional intensity of the session, or to avoid the aspects of the work that land the therapist in the unknown?

Most clinicians will recognize themselves somewhere in these scenarios, which points beyond individual responsibility toward the inherited culture of professionalism that has hidden behind the myth of neutrality and handed clinicians a dual directive: maintain emotional distance, and if something does arise, ensure that it is unconditionally positive. That structure does not produce clinicians who stop having internal reactions with their clients. It produces clinicians who have learned not to recognize them for their usefulness, and consultation models that have learned not to ask about them, reinforcing the norm and patterns of avoidance in the process. It is within the exploration of that discomfort, and the reactions that arise in session, where the divided therapeutic self becomes most visible, and where the possibility of developing the whole therapist begins.

The Neuroscience of Connection

The therapeutic relationship is paramount in EMDR therapy (Hase et al., 2022). And yet the pull to retreat into rigid protocol adherence is real, particularly for clinicians who are newer to EMDR practice or experiencing their own elevated anxiety. Suddenly, the therapist is doing EMDR to someone rather than withthem.

The premise that the therapist can be neutral, opaque, or affectively separate from the client runs counter to what neuroscience reveals about how human nervous systems function in proximity to one another. Two bodies in a room are not two closed systems exchanging verbal information. They are two open systems engaged in continuous, mostly subconscious, communication

Mirror neurons are a neural mechanism whereby observing another person’s actions, expressions, and emotional states activates corresponding circuits in the observer’s brain (Gallese, et al., 2007). The therapist sitting across from a client may be, at a neurobio-logical level, partially simulating that client’s internal state, and the client may be doing the same in reverse. Gallese and colleagues described this as “intentional attunement:” a felt understanding of another person that arises beneath deliberate cognition and forms part of the foundation of empathic relating (Gallese, et al., 2007).

Allan Schore’s regulation theory extends this further, describing psychotherapy as a right-brain-to-right-brain process in which therapist and client engage in ultra-rapid, mostly nonverbal communication of facial expression, voice tone, gesture, and autonomic state (Schore, 2022). Recent hyperscanning studies, in which the brains of both members of a therapeutic dyad are imaged simultaneously, have begun to confirm what relational clinicians have suspected all along: when therapist and client are in the room together, nervous system synchronization is measurable (Schore, 2022).

This collective neurobiological experience has particular clinical weight when the client is a trauma survivor. Exposure to interpersonal trauma, especially in childhood, recalibrates the nervous system toward heightened detection of threat-related social cues (McLaughlin, et al., 2020). Survivors of abuse and neglect tend to interpret neutral or ambiguous expressions as threatening compared to securely attached individuals. From a polyvagal perspective, this is the work of neuroception: the autonomic nervous system’s continuous, subcortical scanning for cues of safety and danger in the environment, including the faces and voices of others (Porges, 2022), which has been refined to help protect them in historically unsafe environments. Survivors of relational trauma do not set aside this learned attunement at the therapy door. They bring it in and direct it, with finely tuned precision, toward the therapist.

This means the therapist who is noticing delight in a client’s intelligence, suppressing dread, or masking frustration and working hard to appear unaffected is not producing neutrality. They are producing incongruence, a mismatch between what their autonomic state is communicating and what their words and face are saying. For a client whose nervous system was shaped by environments in which the people closest to them said one thing and meant another, that relational incongruence may not register as unconditional positive regard. It may register as unsafe.

It is within the exploration of that discomfort, and the reactions that arise in session, where the divided therapeutic self becomes most visible, and where the possibility of developing the whole therapist begins.

The AIP model has long under-stood that what does not get integrated remains active. The neuroscience of connection extends this principle: what the therapist does not integrate within themselves does not remain contained within them. It travels, through micro-expressions, shifts in tone, and nervous system state, into the relational field the client is continuously scanning. This is not a reason for therapists to be ashamed of their reactions, but to take those reactions seriously as unavoidable clinical material. The neuroscience does not leave room for the myth of the neutral therapist, but makes room for a different model entirely.

The AIP Model and the Whole Therapist

“The past affects the present even without our being aware of it.” –Dr. Francine Shapiro

The AIP model extends what neuroscience suggests, offering a clinically coherent interpretation of the whole therapist’s experience that does not pathologize or suppress what naturally arises in the therapeutic relationship, but instead invites clinicians to notice it and attend to it.

Our idea echoes what EMDR therapists encounter in basic training: the same model that explains why a client loops in unprocessed material, activates protective responses, and loses access to adaptive information under stress applies equally to the therapist sitting across from that client. The therapist also maintains their adaptive information-processing system, carrying their personal and cultural history, epigenetic imprints, attachment patterns, and a nervous system continuously scanning for safety. Under the AIP model, whether the response arrives as thoughts, images, emotions, or sensations, all of it is useful. What is experienced in and by the clinician is not, in itself, good or bad. It is inherent part of the therapeutic process.

This reframe asks the field to extend to clinicians the same non-pathologizing stance that EMDR therapists are trained to use with their clients, offering curiosity over judgment and trust that what arises carries important information that has a function. AIP reinforces the belief that experience, when attended to within a safe enough container, moves toward integration.

It also asks the field to give clinicians permission to have a reaction, notice it, and bring it into EMDR consultation without first translating it into something more acceptable or more aligned with what makes a “good therapist.” So much of what shapes a therapist’s silence about their inner experience is not a lack of insight, but a learned anticipation of shame: the sense that to name what one is feeling is to expose oneself as professionally unfit. The impact of shame is familiar terrain in this work. It pushes toward constriction, isolation, and the driving of experience underground. EMDR consultation has the potential to provide the container that is spacious enough to hold the experience of the whole therapist. The antidote is not more vigilance but more relational safety, a felt experience of being met without judgment in the place where judgment was expected.

Countertransference as a Clinical Tool

Taken together, the neuroscience and the AIP model point toward the same conclusion: The therapist’s experience of therapy is not a clinical liability but is the instrument itself. As the field increasingly turns to technology to support clinical efficiency and documentation, conversations are moving toward what those tools cannot recreate: the therapist’s internal experience. Technology cannot replicate the felt sense of deflation in session that turns out to be a finely tuned relational signal, or the quality of dread before a particular appointment that, when examined, begins to illuminate a pattern the client may never have been able to articulate.

So much of what shapes a therapist’s silence about their inner experience is not a lack of insight, but a learned anticipation of shame: the sense that to name what one is feeling is to expose oneself as professionally unfit.

Taken together, the neuroscience and the AIP model point toward the same conclusion: The therapist’s experience of therapy is not a clinical liability but is the instrument itself.

Countertransference is not a potential contaminant to the therapeutic work. It is a key clinical tool when approached with humility, selfreflection, and ethical discernment.

What if the lived experience of the therapist could be viewed as a source of wisdom, available to every clinician who can make the shift away from the good therapist construct and toward permission to bring more of themselves into the process? Not as a liability to be managed before entering the room, but as the most consequential clinical instrument available to the work.

It Is All Just Information

The AIP model holds that experiences naturally move toward adaptive resolution. What blocks that movement is not the feeling itself, but the absence of a safe enough container in which to attend to it. This holds as true for the clinician’s internal experience as it does for the client’s. The reframe asks clinicians to extend to themselves the same non-pathologizing stance the AIP model asks them to extend to their clients: there are no wrong reactions, no shameful emotions, no disqualifying associations, only experience that has or has not yet been attended to.

Dual Awareness as a Clinical Skill

The clinical skill required to notice and work with countertransference ethically is not new to EMDR therapists. Dual awareness, or the capacity to simultaneously experience and observe oneself while remaining present to the other, is the same capacity the therapist is tasked to develop with clients during Phase Two preparation and monitor during the reprocessing phases. The invitation here is simply to apply it in the other direction: to notice what is arising internally, hold it with curiosity, and neither act it out nor drive it into the shadows.

It bears naming that the permission to notice is not the same as permission to act. A pull to rescue, a flicker of attraction, a wave of contempt, a desire to terminate prematurely: these are data points. The ethical obligation is not to be free of such experiences, but to recognize them clearly enough that they inform clinical decisions rather than drive them unexamined. The clinician who cannot acknowledge an internal reaction is most at risk of enacting it. Dual awareness, then, is not only a clinical skill in service of the client’s processing; it is also a safeguard, the mechanism by which countertransference becomes information rather than behavior.

Countertransference in Consultation: An AIP-Informed Framework

Research identifies consultation as among the most effective approaches for working through countertransference (Hayes et al., 2018). When clinicians bring their emotional reactions to trusted colleagues, they create the conditions to examine what they are experiencing, where it may be coming from, and what it might be telling them about the client, the relationship, or themselves. The task is to bring unconscious patterns of relating into conscious awareness, which requires someone outside the clinician’s perspective, someone close enough to the work to understand it and far enough away to see it with greater clarity.

The invitation here is simply to apply it in the other direction: to notice what is arising internally, hold it with curiosity, and neither act it out nor drive it into the shadows.

What happens in practice, however, is more complicated. Research suggests that over 90% of supervisees withhold clinically relevant information from supervisors, and that clinicians are more likely to attempt to manage personal reactions independently even when consultation would be more effective (Ladany et al., 1996; Ertl et al, 2023). The material most needed in the consultation room is often the least likely to arrive there, held back by the supervisee’s fear that it is too personal, a sense that it will not be received well, or the absence of a sufficiently safe relational alliance (Ladany et al., 1996; Min & Kim, 2024). Creating the conditions in which that material can be named is one of the consultant’s most essential tasks.

When training is focused primarily on what to do and when to do it, clinicians can find themselves technically proficient but conceptually adrift. They learn the steps but lack the rationale driving clinical decisionmaking, and when a client responds in an unexpected way, there is no internalized framework from which to make sense of it. The updated 2026 EMDRIA Approved Consultant™ Standardsoffer a correction to this problem, describing the consultant as someone who “helps consultees explore the rationale behind their clinical decisions, rather than focusing on what they did ‘wrong’ and who fosters ‘a safe, inclusive, and affirming learning environment where con-sultees feel supported to take risks, make mistakes, and develop new skills.’” (EMDRIA, 2026, pp. 26–27). What this article proposes is consistent with that updated framework.

In our consulting experience, the AIP model already gives consultants the vocabulary they need. Just as EMDR therapists are trained to explore the components of a client’s memory network, the same framework offers a familiar map for understanding where a consultee is stuck:

• Cognitive stuck points, such as rigid thinking or persistent misinterpretation of protocol
• Affective stuck points, such as anxiety, fear of harming clients, or shame around not knowing enough
• Somatic stuck points, such as freezing, shutting down, or feeling overwhelmed during or after sessions.

Any examination of countertransference in consultation would be incomplete without naming the parallel process that exists within the consultant-consultee relationship itself (Morrissey & Tribe, 2001). EMDR consultants bring their personal and professional histories into the room, shaping what they notice, avoid, and how they respond to a con-sultee’s vulnerability. A consultee who feels anxious around authority figures may present as overly competent, masking uncertainty and shame. A consultant who fears getting it wrong may default to technical instruction, avoiding the relational dimensions of the consultee’s experience. Effective EMDR consultation is bidirectional, and invites open conversation about bias, including the consultant’s own, recognizing that these dynamics are not disruptions to the work but are essential to improving its outcomes.

Recognizing Countertransference in Consultation

Countertransference rarely presents as something obvious or easily named. It emerges more often as a pattern: a lingering feeling after session, reactions that seem disproportionate to the situation, or a pull toward or away from a particular client that is difficult to explain. These experiences tend to surface indirectly, embedded in clinical decision-making or the way a case is presented. The following are common ways this emerges in EMDR consultation.

Piedfort-Marin in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research (2018) proposes that some countertransference responses can be understood through the AIP model as activations of the therapist’s maladaptively stored memories. The concept of memory networks and associative channels of information (Shapiro, 2018) can be a useful and familiar framework through which to identify countertransference reactions visual, cognitive, affective, and somatic, with the addition of behavioral and relational categories to account for what can emerge within the relational field.

These presentations, understood through an AIP lens, reveal the therapist’s internal experience making itself known in the only language available to it at that moment. The consultant’s role is not to eliminate these responses but to create enough safety that they can be named, examined, and understood. This means pacing the process to honor the consultee’s developmental stage, maintaining curiosity about what is emerging, and resisting the pull toward premature resolution. An AIP-informed consultation actively invites the bidirectional exchange of feedback and reflection, including an acknowledgment of how each person’s identity, history, and lived experience shapes what they bring into the room. Consultees who feel safe enough to bring their full selves into consultation, not only their clinical questions but their reactions, uncertainties, and lived histories, tend to develop not only stronger technical skill but more durable self-awareness and clinical confidence.

Supporting Countertransference Exploration in Practice

Moving Toward Rather Than Away

Before addressing an unfamiliar countertransference reaction directly, therapists are encouraged to pause, self-reflect, and bring the material to consultation (Hill et al., 2018). In practice, approaching your experience with curiosity opens doors to deeper meaning and more expansive relational practice. The following questions offer a starting point:

• What do I not enjoy experiencing in myself in this work? Am I fearful of encountering incompetence, uncertainty and the discomfort of not being helpful?
• If I can’t be helpful in this treatment right now, how does that bump up against the way I prefer to see myself as a clinician?
• What clinical information might be available if I move toward this discomfort rather than around it?
• Is this client replicating a relational dynamic in which the people around them eventually withdraw? And am I beginning to do the same?
• Is the treatment stalled because my energy is going toward managing my frustration, rather than examining it for what it might be mirroring?
• When I experience boredom with a client whose history is anything but boring, can I get curious about what it might be protecting me from feeling, and what might it be communicating about where the client is right now?

None of this requires making the therapist’s internal experience the subject of the session. It makes it the subject of one dimension of the dual awareness the work requires. Under the AIP model, this capacity deepens the clinical frame, expanding what is available to both the therapist and the client in the room.

Developing a Practice for Self-Exploration

Developing a sustained practice of self-reflection is one of the most effective strategies for noticing and understanding countertransference and requires therapists to study themselves with the same depth and curiosity they bring to their clients.

Madere and Coy (2026) suggest that developing mentalization, defined as ‘the ability to notice what I am thinking and feeling and discerning what is mine and not mine,’ can guide EMDR therapists toward more conscious and intentional navigation of countertransference within consultation contexts. Research indicates that mentalization reduces the risk of the therapist’s unresolved issues impacting the client negatively (Abargil et al., 2021).

All therapists are encouraged to find their own practices that support them regularly reflecting on their emotional responses toward their clients. Below are practices that are referenced in the literature that can assist in developing mentalization (Hayes et al. 2018):

• Mindfulness or meditation
• Parts mapping
• Journaling
• Reflective consultation
• Record your sessions for your and your consultant’s review
• Peer consultation
• Within session: grounding, body scans, breathing
• Between session reflection
• Personal therapy.

Before, during and after a session, ask yourself:

• What feelings is this client bringing up for me?
• Where is it coming from—me or the client? Does this client remind me of something in my life?
• Is this feeling familiar to me with this client? Is this familiar to me in contexts outside of this therapeutic relationship?
• Did something happen right before this session that influenced how I’m feeling?
• Is there a personal situation happening in my life/workplace that’s interfering with my work?
• What cultural and institutional systems have trained and shaped me to feel this way?
• What do I need to do to take care of myself given this information?
• What does this reaction tell me about what might be happening between us, in me, or in my client?
• Is there an intervention I need to make with my client based on this information I have?

When a reaction is uncharacteristic and its source is not immediately apparent, that is precisely the moment to bring it to consultation for further exploration and support.

For clinicians seeking a more structured approach, the Therapist Response Questionnaire (TRQ; Zittel Conklin & Westen, 2003) is a 79-item measure designed to assess the range of reactions and responses a therapist may experience during psychotherapy with a particular client.

The Line Between Consultation and Personal Therapy

Within an AIP-informed framework, the therapist is the instrument of the work, and the capacity to differentiate one’s triggers from those brought by the client makes the therapist’s own healing and psychological health a matter of clinical priority, not a peripheral concern.

The updated EMDRIA Approved Consultant™ Standards make this distinction explicit: consultation is “focused on enhancing clinical skills, and it is not psychotherapy” (EMDRIA, 2026, p. 25). When countertransference exploration in consultation begins to surface, a consultee’s own unresolved material, the standards direct consultants to encourage the consultee to engage in personal therapy with a different therapist, outside the consultation relationship (EMDRIA, 2026). This boundary is not a limit on the depth of consultation; it is what makes that depth possible. Consultation can hold the space to notice a pattern, name a reaction, and trace its function in the room.

What it cannot and should not do is become the place where that pattern gets resolved. Resolution belongs in the consultee’s own therapeutic work.

Clinicians earlier in their careers, or those without a dedicated practice of self-exploration, are more likely to struggle with recognizing countertransference and navigating it with intention. A consistent practice of self-exploration creates the conditions for bringing awareness to one’s internal process, modeling the same commitment to emotional health that therapists ask of their clients.

Making Space for the Whole Therapist

EMDR consultation offers a vital container for developing the selfawareness and relational capacities that sustain effective clinical practice. Greater insight into the therapist’s mental states, and those of their clients, expands the capacity to tolerate and navigate the strong emotions that countertransference can activate. Deep, integrated knowledge of the AIP model further supports this: when clinicians truly know their framework, they can hold all available options in mind and respond flexibly rather than reactively.

Navigating countertransference is a practice of ongoing discernment, asking not only what is being felt but whether it needs to be named at all, and if so, when and how it enters the room in a way that serves the person across from them. This is where EMDR consultation becomes critical. When a safe learning container is established between consultant and consultee, the opportunity to explore this terrain with depth and care becomes possible. The consultee develops a more sophisticated mentalization practice, held by a consultant who approaches their process with curiosity and openness. Over time, this increases tolerance for uncertainty, deepens attunement, and expands the capacity to be fully present to the therapeutic relationship. 

Associative Memory Networks in Countertransference 

Jessica Downs, LCSW, is an EMDRIA Approved Consultant™ and EMDR Basic Trainer in Grand Junction, Colorado. She is founder of Live Well Counseling Center and co-founder of Iris Training Collective, where her training focus integrates EMDR and Ego States therapy treating complex trauma, dissociation, and deeper self-discovery.

Cassie Krajewski, LCSW, LAC, CST, is an EMDRIA Approved Consultant™ and EMDR Basic Training Facilitator based in Denver, Colorado. She is co-founder of Iris Training Collective and founder of Inner Atlas Therapy, where her clinical and teaching focus spans complex trauma, eating disorders, body image, addictions, and sexuality. She also hosts the Taking Up Space podcast.

Laurel Thornton, LPC, is an EMDRIA Approved Consultant™ and EMDR Basic Training Facilitator in Morgantown, West Virginia. She is co-founder of Iris Training Collective and founder of Whole Brain Solutions, where her clinical and training focus centers on complex trauma, neurodiversity, and high performers.

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