EMDR Europe: Update on support for Ukraine

10 March, 2022

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From: EMDR Europe Executive Committee

As announced in our last mail we had a meeting with the Ukrainian National Association and the representatives of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Lithuania as “border countries“ to Ukraine to understand the present situation, reflect on the things already done, learn from each other’s experiences, support, above all, Ukraine and talk about further needs.
It was an inspiring and at the same time a touching meeting.

There were several outcomes regarding necessary and useful trainings/workshops and also material that can be translated. We would like to inform you about the first and the next steps:

There has been a workshop by Roger Solomon on ”EMDR in Acute situations as an overview” that has been recorded with a Ukrainian translation.

  • EMDR Europe will fund the translation of the workshop into the languages of the border countries in the next few days. The recording is now available. Other National Associations can also have the workshop translated at their discretion if required.
  • EMDR Europe will fund two workshops in the next few days for the border countries and Ukraine.  The first one is “Working with EMDR with children escaping from war“ with Umran Korkmazlar and Berfin Bozhurt from Turkey, who have a lot of experience working with refugees and especially children escaping from war (please note that colleagues from these border countries and Ukraine can directly take part on Saturday, March 13th, 9-5). This seminar will also be available via recording for the other National Associations later.
  • A seminar with Gary Quinn about ERP (Emergency Response Protocol) will follow (date will be announced later). Gary Quinn is also busy adapting his Self-Care Procedure (SCP) (created for Corona virus ) to the war situation.
  • Simple material for refugees written in English on Psychological First Aid will be translated into Ukrainian and other languages for use by countries where there are already many refugees and distributed to all who need it for their work in informing and supporting refugees.

EMDR UK stands firmly behind EMDR Europe and supports them in their efforts to date. We would like to suggest that this stage any donations that members would like to make should go to the Polish Red Cross and other Red Cross organisations working in ‘border countries’ supporting refugees from Ukraine.