ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Most of us meet EMDRIA as a set of requirements. Consultation hours, credentialing pathways, standards documents that arrive in the inbox already decided. That impression is fair, and it is incomplete. This week Viviana Urdaneta Melo, Deputy Executive Director of the EMDR International Association, joins us to put faces and reasoning behind the acronym.
Viviana came to this work by an unusual road. Born in Colombia, she trained as an electronic engineer and kept noticing that she spent her volunteer hours with children and families rather than with circuits. Three degrees later — engineering, a Master of Divinity, and clinical social work — she found EMDR during her internship by sitting in on another clinician's sessions and watching what happened. She trained in 2011, worked with survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence at a domestic violence center and later in university mental health, became certified and then a consultant, chaired EMDRIA's inclusion task force during the pandemic, and joined staff in 2021. Her account of what changed when she moved from member to insider is quietly disarming: mostly, she kept discovering resources the organization had already built that she had never known existed.
The heart of the conversation is the consultant standards. Viviana walks through how they were actually made, through focus groups, member surveys, and a read of the consultation literature, and what the three consultant roles mean in practice: educator, motivator, evaluator. She draws the line most clinicians blur, between the clinical path toward certification and the educational path toward consulting and training, and offers a metaphor for consultation worth keeping. Helping a therapist develop is like helping someone fly a kite. There are steps. There is also the wind that day. Along the way: why the association runs both a virtual summit and an in-person conference, what the IDEA framework has changed about how EMDRIA builds everything from toolkits to slide templates, the UPSIDE program that turned out to be less about money than about connection, and an image of a 20,000-member organization that is honest about still building the plane in flight.
In this episode
Viviana Urdaneta Melo, LCSW-S, CAE, is Deputy Executive Director of the EMDR International Association. She is also a Colombian-born former electronic engineer, an EMDRIA Certified Therapist and Approved Consultant, and a clinician who has spent her career with survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. She joins the hosts to do something the show has wanted to do for a while now: give EMDRIA a voice instead of an outline. What comes through is an organization of seventeen people making decisions for twenty thousand, in the open, and mostly by asking.
Key themes
- From engineering to the therapy room to the association. Viviana volunteered with children and families while working as an engineer in Colombia and noticed where her attention actually went. She came to the U.S. to study, met EMDR during her social work internship by sitting in on a clinician's sessions, and trained in 2011. She sees continuity rather than three careers. Engineers solve problems. Clinicians accompany people toward solving their own. Associations gather people so problems can be worked at a scale no one manages alone. As she puts it, association comes from associating.
- The institution people imagine. The hosts name the thing directly. EMDRIA gets held as a kind of big brother, an entity with opinions about your work. The correction is almost funny in its scale: seventeen staff, distributed across U.S. time zones, serving a membership that has passed twenty thousand. There is no skyscraper.
- The resources you already have. Viviana's most consistent experience on joining staff was discovering things EMDRIA had already built. She names the reason without judgment. Clinicians look for material when a specific client puts the need in front of them, which is exactly when it is hardest to search. The EMDRIA Library exists to close that gap.
- What membership is actually for. Asked to make the case, Viviana declines the obvious answer and goes to the pillars instead: pursuing excellence through professional development, and building connection. Toolkits that break large concepts into pieces a clinician can adapt. Go With That magazine for practice-level tips. The journal. Events, online communities, the people who think about this work the way you do. She adds, with good humor, that we all do need CEs.
- Zoom in, zoom out. Therapists zoom in. They sit with one person in a vulnerable moment and, in Viviana's framing of EMDR, get to be the first witness while the client's own brain leads. She calls this sacred work. The association's job is to zoom out and resource the people resourcing those therapists — consultants, trainers, supervisors — so the zooming-in can hold.
- How the consultant standards were actually built. This is the section to send to anyone who experienced the rollout as rules from above. Focus groups. Member surveys. A review of what the consultation literature already knew. The output is a floor, not a ceiling: the minimum the community itself named as necessary. Viviana's defense of standards is disarmingly ordinary. We all use traffic lights, because we know we need guidelines in community.
- Educator, motivator, evaluator. The three roles the standards name. Educators share knowledge and strategy. Motivators encourage a consultee toward the processing they would rather avoid, which Viviana treats as a normal and human tendency rather than a failing. Evaluators provide accountability through feedback. The roles are complementary, not a sequence. One host names the fear underneath honestly: consultees hear evaluator and brace for a verdict on whether they are good enough, and every piece of old education pain comes with it. Holding all three roles at once is what makes the work generative instead of frightening.
- Two paths, not one ladder. The clinical path moves toward certification and deepening skill with clients. The educational path moves toward consulting and training, which is teaching. Both require clinical skill. They are not the same discipline, and the question after certification is not automatically "when do I become a consultant." It is which path you want, and what intentionality that path asks of you.
- The kite. Viviana's image for consultation. There are steps for getting a kite in the air and you can teach them. It still depends on the wind that day, and you change what you are doing as you go. So does the therapist with a client. So does the consultant with a therapist.
- IDEA, and what it changed. Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access, adopted about five years ago as language people could actually remember. What matters is where it shows up: speaker applications ask presenters how they have considered it, and EMDRIA's presentation template exists because it was checked against accessibility patterns for vision and neurological impairments. Viviana connects it back to the room. We do not hand a client a plan; we ask their goals and work toward them. Consultees and trainees deserve the same. She is candid that access is never finished.
- UPSIDE, and the surprise inside it. The EMDRIA Foundation's Uplifting Populations Support Initiative — Delivering EMDR supports clinicians working with communities facing structural barriers, including therapists of color, LGBTQ+ clinicians, and clinicians with disabilities, in reaching certification and consultant credentials. The financial aid was the design. The connection turned out to be the point. Monthly peer consultation groups formed, and consultants sought the program out because they wanted to learn alongside people whose clinical worlds differ from their own.
- Why both a virtual summit and an in-person conference. After the pandemic the honest question was whether to keep the virtual event at all. The answer came from watching who showed up. Different learners want different rooms, and so do presenters — some want to walk through clinical video side by side in person, others prefer the virtual format. The 2025 in-person conference had to close registration early.
- Building the plane in flight. Viviana's own metaphor for running a 20,000-member organization, offered without defensiveness. Some stretches fly smooth. Some do not, and not every issue can get attention at once. Her standing invitation: if we are doing well, tell us, and if there is something to improve, tell us that too.
- Inside the conference. Proposals grew from roughly 100 to 140 in a year, reviewed by member volunteers who are not presenting. Sessions span the standard framework, applications, innovations, integrations, and research — with an explicit interest in where an integration fits and where it does not. There is a deliberate push to help clinicians become better consumers of research, a skill Viviana notes most of us got little of in graduate school. Sessions are kept shorter on purpose, a menu rather than a meal, so you can find where you want to go deeper. And the small things are engineered: a community wall, a community puzzle, exhibitor tables, all of it built so people talk to each other.
Practical clinical takeaways (what you can bring into your next session — and your next consultation hour)
- Before you pursue CIT hours, sit with the actual question. Do you want to deepen your clinical skill, or do you want to teach? Both are legitimate. They ask different things of you, and treating the second as the automatic sequel to the first is how consultants end up in a role they never chose.
- If you consult, name all three roles to your consultees out loud in the first session. Most people arrive braced for evaluation only. Telling them you are also there to educate and to motivate changes what they are willing to bring you.
- Take the kite seriously as a supervision frame. Teach the steps, and say plainly that the steps meet weather. A consultee who expects to adapt in the moment is less likely to read their own adaptation as failure.
- Notice when a consultee's avoidance of a hard target is treated as a character problem. Viviana frames it as the ordinary pull away from difficult places, the same pull we honor in clients. Motivating is part of the role precisely because that pull is normal.
- Differentiate your instruction the way you differentiate treatment. Some consultees want the metaphor. Some want the citation and the handout. Ask which, rather than defaulting to your own favorite mode.
- When you hit an unfamiliar population, search the EMDRIA Library before you build from scratch. The recurring theme of this episode is clinicians rebuilding what already exists.
- Widen your referral map at events, not just your skill set. Viviana's point about learning EMDR was used with psychosis is not that you should take that work on. It is that knowing it exists tells you who to send someone to.
Why this episode matters
Standards arrive in our inboxes looking like verdicts. Someone has decided what counts, and now we comply. This conversation offers a different account of the same documents: hundreds of clinicians, asked what they had learned about accompanying another therapist, and their answers gathered into a floor we agree to stand on together. That reframe matters beyond credentialing, because it is the same move we make in the room. What looks like a rule usually started as someone's hard-won care.
And it does something quieter for the listener sitting with a consultation packet, wondering whether they measure up. Your consultant is not there to render a verdict on you. They are there to teach, to encourage, and yes, to give you honest feedback — three things that belong together, and that fall apart when we let the third one stand alone.
Viviana Urdaneta Melo
- Private practice, consultations & workshops: https://vivianaurdaneta.com/
- EMDR consultations: https://vivianaurdaneta.com/emdr-consultations/
EMDRIA — what we talked about
- EMDRIA membership: https://www.emdria.org/
- EMDRIA Library: https://www.emdria.org/library/
- Go With That Magazine: https://www.emdria.org/publications-resources/go-with-that-magazine/
- Journal of EMDR Practice and Research: https://www.emdria.org/library-copy/publications-resources/journal-of-emdr-practice-research/
- Updated Approved Consultant Standards (implemented February 2026): https://www.emdria.org/updatingconsultantstandards/
- IDEA in EMDR Therapy (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access): https://www.emdria.org/course/idea-inclusion-diversity-equity-and-access-in-emdr-therapy/
- EMDRIA 30th Anniversary — "Honoring the Past. Shaping the Future.": https://www.emdria.org/30th-anniversary/
EMDRIA Foundation
- UPSIDE program (Uplifting Populations Support Initiative — Delivering EMDR): https://www.emdriafoundation.org/support-initiative/
- UPSIDE program FAQs: https://www.emdriafoundation.org/support-initiative/upside-program-faq/
Events
- EMDRIA 2026 Annual Conference — Anaheim Marriott, August 21–23, 2026 (Trainer & Consultant Day August 20): https://emdriaconference.com/
- EMDRIA Virtual Summit — held April 24–25, 2026 (see the accuracy check before referencing this one)
Also mentioned
- Paul Miller, EMDR Therapy for Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses (Springer, 2015): https://www.springerpub.com/emdr-therapy-for-schizophrenia-and-other-psychoses-9780826123176.html
- Our earlier conversation with EMDRIA Executive Director Michael Bowers: https://emdr-podcast.com/unlocking-emdrs-potential-a-deep-dive-with-emdrias-michael-bowers-on-building-community-advocacy-and-excellence/
- Bridger & Jen's book, EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread
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