April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), a time to recognize the prevalence and impact of sexual assault, raise awareness about how to prevent sexual violence, and talk about the resilience of survivors. Sexual violence is a public health, human rights, and social justice issue. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center provides information for survivors and advocates, including research, tools, and resources to end sexual harassment, assault, and abuse.

We are featuring Robinson and Sanderson’s article on EMDR group work with sexual violence survivors to highlight this important population.

Survivors Reclaiming Their Future: Enhancing the Third Prong in EMDR Group Therapy with the Sexual Violence Survivors’ (SVS) Group Protocol

Guest Blog Post by Ceit Robinson and Emma Sanderson

 

What is the Sexual Violence Survivors’ (SVS) EMDR Group Protocol?

After training in Elan Shapiro’s EMDR Group Traumatic Episode Protocol (G-TEP), we were inspired by the immense potential of EMDR in a group format, particularly with our client base: sexual violence survivors (SVS). We saw that moderate to complex populations such as SVS could benefit from the trauma reprocessing and stabilization that G-TEP offered, and that there is a transformational healing power specific to groups. 

We began running EMDR Group Therapy for SVS in 2020 on a regular basis with a government-funded contract, and from our clinical-based practice and feedback from our courageous survivor participants, we soon realized that SVS participants needed the following from their EMDR Group Therapy: 

  • A structured program that sits within a wider course of care (ongoing individual therapy).
  • Separate and expanded grounding and stabilization as a session on its own before any trauma reprocessing begins.
  • After trauma reprocessing is completed, there is often a desire to connect more with the group, explore their identity shift from “victim” to “survivor” (Robinson, et al., 2023) and introduce their future selves in the context of the group.
  • To navigate future challenges and triggers with their own strengths and resources.

Thus, the Stabilization/Resourcing and Future-Focused sessions were born, to bookend the trauma reprocessing sessions and to provide a safe and effective framework for SVS to engage in their trauma reprocessing.

The SVS EMDR Group Protocol is structured as a six-session program. 

  • Session One is Stabilization and Resourcing for the EMDR reprocessing sessions.
  • Sessions Two-Five are EMDR reprocessing sessions using an adaptation of G-TEP. 
  • Session Six is the Future Focused Session.

 

How is the third prong of EMDR incorporated into EMDR Group Therapy? 

EMDR clinicians know that the 3-pronged approach is integral to successful EMDR Therapy: addressing past memories, present disturbances, and future actions. We drew from the future template in phase 8 of the standard protocol (Shapiro, 2018) to incorporate the third prong of EMDR therapy. We believe this is a crucial component of the healing process for survivors. 

Robinson and Treece (2023) describe the third prong in IGTP and G-TEP, structured in the protocols via future vision (Jarrero’s IGTP) and future cognitions about the self (Shapiro’s G-TEP). Building on this further, the SVS Protocol future session has a different perspective on incorporating the third prong. We sought to offer participants future-templating in a group setting, to support them to navigate and cope effectively with future challenges after they had completed their trauma reprocessing, much as participants would experience in individual EMDR therapy. Then, we extended our focus to make use of the group as a resource: actively scaffolding each participant toward their future self and sharing these resources collectively. 

We soon realized that the future-focused session in the SVS Protocol offered more benefits than standard future templating and ironing out the kinks of future challenges. First, it can provide an opportunity to explore future choices and a future identity as autonomous from the trauma. Often, with complex populations like SVS, participants have never considered their future selves. They are contending with the vast impacts of trauma on their daily life and functioning; frequent stressors, triggers, and crises which keep a focus on present stressors and a constant reminder of past experiences, with little thought or hope that the future could be different. 

Second, a participant’s ability to progress in their trauma recovery and to visualize themselves coping effectively in the future may be hampered by a range of survival strategies, for example, addictions, disordered eating, isolation and withdrawal, overworking, over-exercising, and many others. We realized that engaging in future-templating without addressing these concerns and the residual shame accompanying these past coping behaviors may result in pushing the shame further into the realms of secrecy for this population. Therefore, supporting survivors to gently shift the shame around some of these survival strategies and move towards healthy and sustainable coping strategies is a key component of this work: bringing all of themselves into the future. 

Third, the benefit of a future-focused session specific to a group context: the opportunity for participants to experience and visualize their future selves in a community of survivors. Not only do participants have the opportunity to experience “who am I in relation to others,” they also bear witness to others discovering and integrating these new strengths, and collectively reimagining their future. In a group context, the healing benefits of future-focused resourcing are amplified. Participants have described this process as “life-changing” (Robinson et al., 2023). 

 

The components of the Future-Focused Session

The future-focussed component of the SVS EMDR group work introduces the all-important third prong of EMDR therapy, with a focus on survivors reconnecting and remembering parts of themselves and resources that provide a connection with their innate strength and reintegrate their rediscovered self, themselves, and their community, so they may move toward the future. 

When we designed the Future-Focused worksheet (see Fig. 1), it was important to us to focus on the existing strengths of participants, to help them move toward their positive and sustainable coping strategies, and to use future-templating to support them in this process, and to use the group as a resource for all participants. 

The components are as follows: 

  • Step One: We begin each session with 4 Elements Grounding Exercise. (Shapiro, 2013) 
  • Step Two: Identifying survival strategies and naming some new, more sustainable coping strategies. New coping strategies are shared as resources for the group. 
  • Step Three: Installing a positive belief about the future self. 
  • Step Four: Using art therapy to draw the future template. 
  • Step Five: Running the future template with self-BLS. 
  • Step Six: Attending to any challenges in the future situation, via art therapy and self-BLS. 
  • Step Seven: Using art therapy to introduce their future self in a facilitated group process. 

Figure 1. The Future-Focused Worksheet

Bilateral stimulation (BLS) is an important component of this session, and as participants move away from trauma reprocessing, we use alternative forms of BLS to give a sensory change and sense of progression. Depending on the future-focused task, participants will either squeeze each hand and follow with their eyes or use butterfly hugs. 

After weeks of trauma reprocessing, the future-focused session offers participants a chance to connect in their new identity as survivors – to separate themselves from the trauma and to foster a collective sense of hope for the future. This session can offer participants the recognition that “the trauma is not who I am” (Robinson et. al., 2023; Sanderson & Robinson, 2024) and is often bittersweet: hopefulness and positivity for the future, but simultaneously providing a collective opportunity of shared grief. 

 

Future-Focused Session: Enhancing the third-prong of EMDR in EMDR Group Therapy 

Reflecting on the three prongs of EMDR – the past, the present, and the future (Shapiro, 2018) – we realized we had become so involved with enhancing the reprocessing experience for SVS group participants, that we had neglected the essential third prong of the group process. Just as survivors often lose focus on the future as a resource, we recognized that our EMDR group work had parallelled the process of not sufficiently drawing from the future as a resource. 

Deep in the depths of our psyche lie the innate strengths and resilience that every human being possesses yet so many of us lose touch with as life events and trauma take their toll. Reconnecting and reclaiming this essence of who we are, in the aftermath of trauma, is the focus of future-focused sessions. 

Once the reprocessing has cleared the complex fog of the trauma, the future-focused worksheet and group process provide the scaffolding for survivors to consolidate this connection with themselves, draw it into their present, and reimagine their futures. This future-focused process empowers survivors to reclaim hope and rewrite the narrative that the trauma imposed as an uninvited overlay on the narrative they didn’t choose. 

 

Emma Sanderson and Ceit Robinson are registered psychotherapists, Accredited EMDR Therapists and the co-developers of the Sexual Violence Survivors (SVS) EMDR Group Protocol, based in Aotearoa New Zealand. They are passionate about sharing their love of EMDR Group Therapy as an effective and relational trauma recovery option for moderate to complex populations such as sexual violence survivors. They offer online training in the SVS EMDR Group Protocol and invite clinicians from all around the globe to join them on their mission for collective and collaborative healing. 

 

References

Robinson, C., Sanderson, E., & Heaney-Yeatts, E. (2023). You are not alone: Sexual violence survivors EMDR group protocol. In R. Morrow Robinson & S. Kemal Kaptan (Eds.), EMDR group therapy: Emerging principles and protocols to treat trauma and beyond. Springer Publishing Company. 

Robinson, R. M., & Treece, Y. A. (2023) From 1:1 to Group EMDR: Theory of EMDR and EMDR in Groups. In R. Morrow Robinson & S. Kemal Kaptan (Eds.), EMDR group therapy: Emerging principles and protocols to treat trauma and beyond. Springer Publishing Company. 

Sanderson, E., & Robinson, C. (2024). SVS EMDR group protocol: A collaborative approach to trauma therapy. Journal of the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists, 34(1), 100–111. Open access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10939179

Shapiro, F. (2018). Chapter 8: Incorporating a Future Template. In F. Shapiro, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd Ed, pp. 204-207).  The Guilford Press .

 

 

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Additional Resources

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If you are an EMDRIA™ Member:

 

Date
April 4, 2025

Contributor(s)
Ceit Robinson and Emma Sanderson

Topics
Sexual Trauma

Practice & Methods
Group

Audience
EMDR Therapists

Language
English

Content Type
Blog/Blog Post

Access Type
Open Access

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