Phase 2: Preparation and resourcing

There's a moment many EMDR therapists recognize: a client is eager, the target is clear, and everything in the room says go. And the disciplined choice is to wait — to spend another session, or three, in preparation. Phase 2 is where clinical patience pays for itself.

Phase 2 has two aims: to prepare the client to tolerate reprocessing, and to establish the resources they'll lean on when it gets hard. It is not throat-clearing before the real work. For complex trauma, it is much of the work.

Explaining the process

You orient the client to what's coming: the dual-attention stance, the "just notice" instruction, the stop signal, the fact that they remain in control throughout. You use a metaphor — the train passing the window, the road with scenery going by — so that when material surfaces during desensitization, they can let it move rather than grip it.

Installing the core resources

Two resources are near-universal:

• The Calm (or Safe) Place — an imagined location the client can evoke, strengthened with slow, short sets of bilateral stimulation and anchored to a cue word.
• The Container — an imagined vessel for setting aside disturbing material at the end of a session or when something is too big to process yet.

Note the pacing: in resourcing you use slow, short BLS to strengthen the positive state, the opposite of the longer, faster sets used to reprocess distress. Fast BLS on a resource can accidentally link it to disturbance.

A resource that hasn't been tested under mild stress is a resource you don't yet know the client has.

Resource Development and Installation

For clients with thin internal resources — often those with developmental trauma — you may extend Phase 2 with Resource Development and Installation (RDI), deliberately building mastery, connection, and protective figures before going near a trauma target. This is where dissociative clients spend real time, and rightly so.

Knowing when Phase 2 is done

Preparation is sufficient when the client can access a calm state on cue, come back from mild activation, and trust the process and the relationship enough to begin. Then — and only then — you move to Phase 3: Assessment. If a client can't stabilize, that's information: return to Phase 1 and reconsider the plan.