If you’ve been doing EMDR for a while, you know the moment. You’ve taken a thorough history, built a calm place, set up a container and a restoration team, and moved into reprocessing. Then you hit a client where the standard resources just won’t hold. The calm place gets intruded on. The container leaks. And you’re left wondering whether you’re doing something wrong.
You’re not. Some clients arrive with so little lived experience of safety, mastery or comfort that the three resources most of us were trained on simply aren’t enough.
This is where Phase 2 stops being a box you tick before the “real” work and becomes the work. Megan Salar makes the case that resource development isn’t a one-off setup stage. It’s an ongoing process, and for complex clients it’s often where the lasting change actually happens, in the building of new positive states and brain pathways, not just in the desensitising.
Across this course Megan walks through how she develops resources with hard-to-resource clients: treating resourcing as safety, working through the lens of adaptation and strengths, and using frameworks like the four E’s and modified RDI to expand what a client can access. She’s candid about what to do when it goes sideways, including a real example of a calm place that turned dark mid-set when the client’s father appeared in the image, and how she stayed creative rather than abandoning the resource. She shares the practical toolkit she reaches for: positive cognition lists, the five senses and the body, AI-generated images of a client’s resources, asking trusted people to contribute positive memories, and simply focusing a resistant client on the next right thing.
The back half is all case material. You’ll sit with several complex cases, including a 15-year-old who’d cut contact with a problematic father and was struggling with how she saw herself, and watch how Megan thinks through where to even begin resourcing when calm place and container haven’t worked.
If you’ve ever felt stuck at the resourcing stage with a client who needed it most, this course gives you more places to go.
You’ll walk away with
- A clearer view of why Phase 2 resource development is ongoing work, not a one-time setup before reprocessing
- A way to treat resourcing as building felt safety in the nervous system, drawing on the SAFE (somatic attachment-focused EMDR) lens
- The four E’s framework for exploring, expanding and experiencing a client’s existing and missing resources
- How to use the modified RDI approach to develop and install resources with clients who have few positive experiences to draw on
- Practical adjustments for when resourcing is challenging: slowing and shortening the sets, changing the mechanics, and shifting the image
- A reframe of intrusions as useful information rather than failure, and steps to work with them creatively
- A toolkit for setting up resources from strengths, positive cognitions, the five senses, the body, AI imagery and the people in a client’s life
- Worked case examples with complex, hard-to-resource clients, including how to choose a starting point when the usual resources fall flat
Watch the course trailer
CPD Information For Mental Health Professionals
Enjoy complete flexibility with 100% self-paced learning you can access anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Pay once for lifetime access.
Course Duration: 1 learning hour
Certificate and CPD hours: On completion you’ll receive a Certificate of Completion to support your CPD records.
Assessment: Complete a short quiz at the end (80% pass mark), which you can resit as many times as needed.
Lifetime Access: Your access to the course does not expire, so you can revisit main concepts anytime you want a refresher for practice.
CPD Eligibility: This program may be suitable for CPD for professionals such as:
- Psychologists
- Counsellors and Psychotherapists
- Social Workers
- Community Workers
- Mental Health Nurses
- General Practitioners (GPs)
- Occupational Therapists
CPD requirements vary between professional bodies, so please check with your association or credentialing body to confirm you can claim CPD hours/OPD points for this program and what evidence they require.
