The Strategic Developmental Model for EMDR© with
Maureen Kitchur, MSW, RSW
A Creative Resourcing Model.
“The SDM advances a fundamental proposition that wherever possible and appropriate, effective psychotherapy should not simply alleviate a presenting problem, but should facilitate developmental catch-up. The SDM provides an overall strategy for addressing developmental deficits or fixation in order to bring healing to issues that underlie current symptomotology.”
“The SDM interweaves strategic structure, techniques, and language with a developmental orientation at every stage of therapy. This process results in psychologically older clients whose primary and secondary symptoms often tend to shrink or disappear before being directly targeted.”
“When we model complete comfort with intense affect, coach clients to express and articulate emotion, and teach self-soothing strategies as well as problem-solving and communication strategies, then we may facilitate the affect regulation that truly is, as Allan Score terms it, ‘the foundation of the origin of self’. This is what the Strategic Developmental Model for EMDR does.”
Perhaps the most important thing about the SDM is that while it encourages therapists to be directive and structuring, it requires them at the same time to be flexible, sensitive and nurturing. It is through an inter-play of developmentally sequenced targeting and therapeutic attunement that the therapist has an opportunity to apply the powerful effects of EMDR accelerated information processing in a manner that can facilitate profound developmental recapitulation and recovery. ~ Maureen Kitchur
The Strategic Developmental Model for EMDR and The New Quantum Interweave©
When: August 19-21, 2010 (Three Day Workshop) and August 22 (Optional Consultation Day)
Where: The Sanctuary ~ 27A Fox Street, Lane Cove, Sydney, NSW
Cost for the Three Day Workshop: Early registration (before April 30): $675 CAD
After April 30, 2010: $775 CAD
Optional Consultation Day: Sunday August 22, 10 am – 4pm (space limited): $125 CAD
(Consultation will focus on applying the SDM and/or the Quantum Interweave to your existing client cases)
All prices are in Canadian dollars and are processed through Maureen's Web site.
Accommodation: Lane Cove is close to Ryde and Artarmon in New South Wales
Please click here to register and pay online
Click here for printable brochure
Click here for more information about Maureen Kitchur and her courses
Email: roby@thesanctuarylanecove.com
Mobile enquiries: Roby Abeles 0419 231 789
What Clinicians say about the Strategic Developmental Model for EMDR©:
“Remarkably fast and thorough assessment organized around family structure; treatment planning structured around the personal events of psychological development, including the “memories one cannot recall”; and fast, comfortable, client-comprehensible implementation of the full power of EMDR protocols — these are the unmistakable hallmarks of the “Kitchur Model”. Tom Cloyd M.A. – Counselor / Psychotherapist – Bellingham, Washington
“Maureen Kitchur’s Strategic Developmental Model for EMDR is a meta-model for EMDR practice…she has created a clear order for EMDR processing, a way to process wordless, implicit experience, and the best intake system that I’ve ever used.” Robin Shapiro, MSW, LICSW, and editor, EMDR Solutions: Pathways to Healing
The first major element of Kitchur’s Strategic Developmental Model is a genogram-facilitated assessment of personal trauma history. Symptoms are understood not only as side-effects of trauma, but as markers of developmental interruption.
A focused set of assessment questions develops the genogram going back three generations, and looks at the client in a systemic, birth-order and generational context. The resulting clinical hypothesis very naturally yields a developmentally-ordered sequence of EMDR targets.
This approach is easily comprehended by clients. With the completed genogram assessment laid out in front of them, they can now make sense of the symptoms and disturbances which have caused their suffering. Psychopathology is thus “normalized” – reframed as a reaction to inadequate or injurious life experience. Psychotherapy has not “officially” begun, yet the “healing trance” is already in place. Strategic language maintains that positive expectancy and begins to awaken latent resources in the client.
The second major element of the Strategic Developmental Model is the attuned therapist-client relationship. Kitchur shows how the attuned relationship maintains a healing trance, and creates momentum in therapy, contributing to rapid developmental catch-up. She provides engaging illustrations of effective maternal emotional attunement, and offers rich stories of the developmental healing that results.
The final major element of Kitchur’s model is the systematic investigation of non-narrative memory, using several specific clinical strategies (articulated in her detailed workshop handout “First Order Processing”©). Pre-verbal, non-narrative memory occurs because of the immaturity of the child’s brain, before roughly the age of 8 or so. The sensory-motor processing in the right brain is not well connected to the verbal processing of the left brain. Until this connection is in place, “memories that tell stories” do not occur. And traumas at any age can shut down narrative memory, even in the developed brain.
Unhealed non-narrative memories can hugely influence perception, cognition, affect, behavior, and coping styles. And because they are invisible, these memories cause many clients to conclude that they themselves are at fault for whatever is wrong with them, thus adding one injury to another. Failing to attend to these “memories you cannot remember” leaves this distortion in place.
Kitchur teaches an efficient clinical process for healing non-narrative forms of traumatic memory, including dissociated, repressed and amnesic memories, whether from childhood or adult experiences.
“As effective parents have long known, well-attuned nurturing and strategic languaging, pacing, and use of self can create deep connections and powerfully support growth and behaviour change.”~~ Kitchur
