Our spring regional networking day on Racial Trauma in EMDR Practice, held online on Saturday 18 April 2026, brought together a large and engaged group of EMDR colleagues from across East Anglia and beyond. The day was led by Carlyn Boyce, a CBT and EMDR therapist with seventeen years of clinical experience across NHS primary, secondary and inpatient services, and most recently as clinical lead of a West Yorkshire staff wellbeing service. Carlyn also teaches on the Clinical Psychology Doctorate at the University of Leeds and was Highly Commended in the 2025 HSJ Patient Safety Awards for her work in this area.
Carlyn brought a generous mix of teaching and dialogue throughout the day. She framed her workshop from the outset as a foundation rather than a comprehensive account, naming the impossibility of covering every form of racism in a single day, and inviting colleagues to take responsibility for the longer journey of their own learning. Her approach drew on power, structural context and lived experience, both as a clinician and as a Black woman.
Psychological safety, language and the conditions for dialogue
Carlyn opened by setting the conditions for the day. Talking about racism in a professional space, she said, almost always involves discomfort, and that discomfort is part of the work rather than a sign something has gone wrong. She invited participants to notice their own responses, to step away if they needed to, and to respect that colleagues in the room would be at very different points on their own paths.
She spent time on language: how it changes, why it changes, and the difficulty of getting it right. Her own service has moved from BAME to global majority or ethnically diverse, while acknowledging that no single term suits everyone, and that some colleagues from those communities themselves resist the newer terms. The important thing, she said, is to remain in conversation, to ask, and to be willing to be told you have got it wrong.
One distinction she returned to repeatedly was between discussion and dialogue. Discussion, she suggested, has an end point. Dialogue stays open, allowing for the possibility that one might cause harm without meaning to, that intent and impact are not the same thing, and that the other person’s response is itself information rather than an inconvenience.
Microaggressions, colourism and code switching
Carlyn went through the core concepts that shape much of the contemporary literature on racial trauma: microaggressions and their cumulative weight, colourism as the differential treatment of people perceived as closer to or further from whiteness, and code switching as the often-exhausting adjustments people make to fit into spaces not built with them in mind. She illustrated each with examples from her own life and clinical experience, including being followed in shops, the receipt-checking that her family has come to expect, and issues in her son’s classroom, and was clear that she spoke as one Black woman whose experience does not stand in for any other.
The morning included a substantial dialogue on intersectionality, drawing on the Duckworth-style wheel of power and privilege. Several participants, Carlyn included, observed that any such diagram is partial. Categories are missing, hierarchies shift by context, and reducing complex human lives to a chart risks the very flattening it sets out to address. Even so, Carlyn made the case that such frameworks can usefully open a conversation that might otherwise not happen at all.
Critical race theory, history and structure
After the first break, Carlyn brought in critical race theory as one framework for understanding why racism is more than individual prejudice, pointing to how it becomes embedded in laws, institutions and the everyday language we inherit without examining. She used the well-known doll-test video as a way into a discussion of self-worth, early memory networks and how children come to internalise images of themselves and others. One participant added that the word race itself carries racist origins and should be approached with caution.
AIP, memory networks and racial trauma
Moving into EMDR territory, Carlyn went through how the Adaptive Information Processing model can be applied to cumulative racial experience. A single overt incident may be obvious enough as a target. Far harder, she suggested, is the slow accretion of microaggressions, each one lighting up the same network of meaning — I am not safe, I do not belong, there is something wrong with me — until the network itself becomes the target.
The phases of EMDR with racial trauma in mind
Carlyn worked methodically through the eight phases, with adaptations she finds useful.
In history taking, she encouraged colleagues to map not only individual experiences but the institutional and structural context: services accessed, professionals encountered, workplaces, schools, the criminal justice system, and to hold cultural humility alongside the standard history. She returned often to the power held by the therapist in the room, the more so where the client has not chosen them, as in much NHS work.
In resourcing, she encouraged adaptation. A colleague had offered her the word sanctuary in place of safe place, safety being a word that does not feel true for many clients who experience racism daily. Attendees offered their own variations: figures from family or faith, smells, sensory objects, animals (one colleague’s rescue dog earning a particularly warm reception). A participant gave the example of working with young asylum-seeking clients for whom imagination itself was sometimes unavailable, and sensory anchors had to do the work.
For target selection, Carlyn cautioned against trying to process every incident. Better to identify the worst, the first or the most representative, and to attend to the shared meaning that connects them.
On cognitions, she made a point that drew strong agreement in the chat. A rigid positive cognition such as I am safe may simply not be true for a client returning to the same world after the session. Bridging cognitions — I am learning, I have worth, I can get through this, this is not my fault — are often more honest and more useful. These may be installed in stages as the work develops.
For processing and interweaves, she offered examples specifically tuned to this work: Whose responsibility was it to keep you safe?, What does this say about the system, not about you?, How might your ancestors view this experience? The intention is to keep systemic context in view alongside the individual story.
She referenced The Body Keeps the Score, noting its value while observing the gap: racial trauma is not its central frame, and there is a wider need for more EMDR-specific research and writing in this area. Participants named further resources, including the Black and Asian Therapy Network, Eugene Ellis on the race conversation, Resmaa Menakem on the body and intergenerational racism, and Joy DeGruy on post-traumatic slave syndrome.
Defence, repair and the therapist’s own work
The afternoon turned towards what tends to happen when these conversations are opened. Carlyn named the patterns she sees most often: silence, minimisation, intellectualisation, and the centring of white feelings to the point where the original concern is displaced. None of these, she suggested, need be fatal to the conversation, provided the therapist can stay with their own discomfort long enough to keep dialogue open.
Rupture and repair received careful attention. Therapists, like anyone else, can cause harm without meaning to. The question is what we do next: whether we can acknowledge it, repair it, take it to supervision, and continue.
A participant raised a point that drew sustained agreement: where do Black therapists take this material in supervision, when supervisors are most often white? Carlyn acknowledged the structural difficulty honestly, and the conversation moved to networks, peer support and the slow work of changing what services and supervisory arrangements look like.
Closing reflection: lean back, lean forward, jump in
The day closed with a reflective task built around three positions: lean back (noticing, listening, examining one’s own biases); lean forward (active participation, asking, reading, supervision); and jump in (taking action, naming racism in the room, changing what we write, advocating for clients and for change in services).
Carlyn was clear that not everyone is the person at the front of the march, and that the value of small changes should not be underestimated: a note written differently, a question asked in a team meeting, a conversation begun in supervision. The person on the receiving end may experience it as anything but small.
A grateful regional thank-you
Our thanks to Carlyn for a day delivered with such warmth, honesty and clinical generosity, and to the many participants who brought their own experiences and reflection into the conversation. The day invited people to think, continue the dialogue and read further. We look forward to welcoming colleagues to our next regional gathering in due course.