When every session becomes the crisis of the week
Your client comes in with this week's thing, and then next week's thing, and you never get to the pervasive history underneath it. A 12 CE hour advanced training on Phases 1 and 2 for survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive control. On demand, self-paced, APA, NBCC and EMDRIA approved.
Where these cases stall
The crisis of the week is not the case
ne of the biggest ways I see a narcissistic abuse case stall is when you get caught in the present moment. Caught in the crisis of the week, rather than the crisis of the relationship, rather than the pervasive history.
Your client wants you to work on the thing that is happening right now, when the thing you need is what has been happening from the beginning.
I have had clients bring me text chain after text chain after text chain, wanting me to read all of it, because they want their feelings validated and what they are seeing confirmed. My job is not only to validate them. It is to help them see the patterns so that they can see them themselves. So we go through the chains, and instead of "here is one thing," it becomes here is how manipulation is showing up, here is where you can see DARVO. The client starts thinking that way, instead of me being the one who has to point it out every time. And then you are out of the crisis of the week, because now they are seeing the pattern of the relationship.
Why the targets will not sort
A pervasive history does not break into incidents
With pervasive histories, you are dealing with acts of omission and attachment wounds. And attachment wounds work differently in adults than in standard childhood developmental trauma.
Narcissistic abuse is developmental trauma. It just starts in adulthood. Once you look at it that way, you start asking how attunement, nurturing, protection, predictability, guidance, and play fall into it. (Morgan, 2025)
And if you are working with a history of unpredictability, you are looking for a representative memory of a string of events, not asking the client to identify every single thing that happened. Miss that, and you are not finding the memory networks correctly in the first place.
Two things this course will change on Monday
Here is how this usually goes in consultation.
Is your client finding it hard to focus on the resource? When you try calm place, what comes up? And the consultee says, oh, they bring up this and this and this. So I ask, what have you talked about with your client regarding keeping others away from that space? And they say, well yeah, but they keep coming in.
This is not the container. We are not trying to contain the calm place. We are asking what the specific mechanisms are.
Think about your own apartment or house. You have a lock on the door. Not because you do not want the people you love and trust to come in. You have a lock on the door because you do not want the things you do not want coming in, coming in.
Contamination looks like the calm place suddenly being flooded. Sometimes the answer is stepping back and asking about a space from before this person existed. What was a resource, or a calm place, from before that time?
Resource contamination
Containment, and who gets to hear the story
Think of the story as saffron.
The price of your client's story was enormous. It cost them so much that it is like saffron, one of the most expensive spices there is. And you do not just put saffron on everything. You do not hand it to the kids, or to anyone who walks through the door, or to someone who is allergic to it.
With saffron you wait until you know somebody actually understands it. Understands the cost. Understands what you are giving them.
It is the same with stories in therapy. We contain what we can, because not everyone is safe to hear it. Including the partner they are with, even if they do not see that partner as a problem yet.
What is in it
Three modules, 12 hours
Module 1
Clinical foundations
Clinical readiness and ethical foundations. What narcissistic abuse actually is, defined clearly enough to work with. Developmental trauma occurring in adulthood.
Module 2
Systems of self, partner, and everything around them
Clinical readiness and ethical foundations. What narcissistic abuse actually is, defined clearly enough to work with. Developmental trauma occurring in adulthood.
Module 3
Into Phases 1 and 2
History gathering and identifying adaptive information. Preparation as a clinical tool. Including a Narcissistic Abuse Assessment
Also Included:
The narcissistic abuse assessment, which I built so you can take all of this and put it into an attachment-based lens for developmental trauma in adulthood.
Real clinical session video, not role play.
10+ fillable PDF worksheets you can use with clients immediately.
Lifetime access, no expiration.
Post-separation abuse
Death by a thousand cuts
A life stressor is something happening in your life beyond your control. Post-separation abuse is a life stressor. But it is not something idly happening to your client. It is connected to every other component of the relationship, and every small piece feeds the next one.
It becomes not only the abuse that happened inside the relationship, but the maintenance of isolation after it ended. Wondering what is being said where, and who is getting what.
Treat post-separation abuse as one thing and you miss that it is actually accounting for multiple stressors at once, alongside constant re-triggering and genuinely traumatic events: financial abuse, legal abuse, parental alienation.
This is for you if:
You are EMDR trained and your narcissistic abuse cases are the ones that stall.
You want assessment tools specific to coercive control, not general trauma frameworks stretched to fit.
You are willing to sharpen what you already do rather than learn a new protocol.
This is not for you if you want a protocol. There is no full Phase 1 through 8 protocol for narcissistic abuse, and there is a reason for that. The history taking we do in complex cases already shifts to get the right information. The feeling states shift too, and the interventions that do exist for them are firmly Phase 3 through 8, not Phase 1 and 2. When you come at narcissistic abuse through a complex developmental lens, you are already catching most of those strategies.
If you want a protocol for this, my honest answer is that I would send you back to standard protocol first. Not as a brush-off. The issue is usually not the words you are saying in session. It might be the order you are doing them in. It might be that you need more time in one area than another. It might be that your Resource Development and Installation is not as effective as it could be.
Requirements: current professional license, or pre-licensed / graduate student with supervisor approval. Completed EMDRIA-approved basic EMDR training including the 10 consultation hours.
The certification track
Where this course can take you
On its own this is 12 CE hours. It is also the entry point to a narcissistic abuse and coercive control certification track inside Precision's Pathway 1.
Curriculum track: this course only.
Extended track: Decoding Complex Developmental Trauma Part 1, plus this course.
Advanced certification track: Part 1, this course, and Part 2.
Groups run two hours every four weeks, $150 per session, kept small on purpose. Ten group hours count toward EMDRIA certification. Group and individual hours both count toward Precision EMDR Advanced Certification, which I can sign off on as faculty.
First cohorts: the two Curriculum cohorts start mid-November 2026. The two longer tracks start January 2027.
Your Questions, Answered
-
Maybe, and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise. I built this by pulling together what I learned from Ramani Durvasula, Sandra Brown, Susie Morgan, my own basic training, my own practice, and the current research, and making a coherent space out of it. It is a consolidation and a re-up on the most recent research. Some of it lives in other places, and that is part of why it works, because I am compounding a lot of material gathered over a long time. What does not live anywhere else is the narcissistic abuse assessment I built, which takes all of it and puts it into an attachment-based lens for developmental trauma in adulthood.
-
That is fine. You do not have to take this course. Know that it is out there if you get stuck.
What I will say is that if you work with even one or two, this lets you see the full breadth, and it lets you start noticing it in places you were not looking.
Narcissistic abuse has become a very social-media-y term and a lot of people are searching for it. After this, a client with this history walks into your office and you know it, and you know more about what to do. If you decide you do not need it, you are right and that is your call. I would just ask whether having it in your back pocket helps a future client.
-
Yes. 12 EMDRIA CE credits, EC Program Approval No. 18001-DL12. Also 12 APA CE hours and 12 NBCC hours, ACEP No. 7911. This is sponsored through Precision EMDR Academy.
-
No expiration. Lifetime access.
-
Only if you need the credit. The content is the same either way. The certificate is $50 and requires passing the post-test at 75% within three attempts.
-
Not yet, then. This assumes you can already run the protocol, so basic training comes first.
-
No. Separate purchases. The course stands alone.