Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 5, 2025

Creative Mindfulness Media is proud to announce the September 12, 2025 release of Queering EMDR Therapy, edited by Roshni Chabra (she/her). The book is now available for sale on most major outlets, and you can go to the book’s website for the latest information about availability and related book events: www.queeringemdr.com

Chabra, based in Long Beach, California, is an EMDR International Association-Approved EMDR Therapy training provider and is the Director of Training at Roots Training Group (formerly StartAgain Associates) as well as the Founder and President of Lavender Healing Collective, a clinical practice supporting BIPOC LGBTQ+ communities. Chabra’s vision for Queering EMDR Therapy was to bring together various Queer and Trans voices from the EMDR Therapy community into a single volume in order to forward discussion about making EMDR Therapy care more responsive and inclusive.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy was founded by the late Dr. Francine Shapiro at the end of the 1980s, and is now distinguished by many clinical organizations as one of the top psychotherapies for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other trauma-related or trauma-impacted diagnoses. While many people in the LGBTQIA+ communities have found tremendous healing through EMDR Therapy, there has also been a growing concern that many therapists offering EMDR Therapy can be too entrenched in protocols and procedures and not sufficiently attuned to the specific needs of the populations that they are serving. This collected volume, featuring 26 contributors in addition to Chabra, endeavors to provide needed depth and dimension to EMDR Therapy education. Although written primarily for EMDR Therapists, therapists of other traditions, and queer folx themselves, can also benefit from the contributions.

Queering EMDR Therapy features traditional academic essays (written from a scholarly personal narrative framework), tools for EMDR Therapists, poetry, personal narratives, visual art, and even a short graphic novel. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, Trans, neurodivergent, kink-afffirming, and polyamorous perspectives are all included in Queering EMDR Therapy. All of the contributors are EMDR Therapists themselves, with several being trainers and consultants.

Dr. Jamie Marich (she/they), founder and CEO of Creative Mindfulness Media (a project of the Institute for Creative Mindfulness (soon to be the Creative Mindfulness Network), serves as the volume’s production editor and also wrote the foreword. Marich, an out bisexual person in long-term recovery from addiction and a dissociative disorder, jumped at the chance to publish the volume, fearful that traditional publishing outlets might try to make the book conform to existing standards in EMDR Therapy and clinical publishing and strip out the needed, unapologetically Queer element.

Queering EMDR Therapy features three contributors from outside of the United States: Dana Kamin (Canada), Anna Clarke (Australia), and Mish-Kumar-Jonson (Australia). Irene Rodriguez, an EMDR Therapy trainer and native of Puerto Rico created the cover art, with the collaboration of our contributors. U.S.-based contributors include: Dr. Lanza, Dr. Steven Halady, Cash Waller, Tawanna Marie Woolfolk, horizon greene, Erin Kelly, Stephanie Brashear, Mariena Joy, Carmine Abigail, Earl C. Martin, The Unicorn System, Rev. Karla Fleshman, SarahRose M. Hogan, Amber Gordon, Sam Bergstein, Daniel (Danielle) Godfrey, Michael Kuffel, Dr. Jenn Kenedy, Somaly Nou, and A. Saucier.

Full biographies of the contributors are available on here.

Endorsements

“The Queering EMDR Therapy collection is a must-read for EMDR Therapists seeking to practice with authenticity, inclusivity, and anti-oppressive intention. This book is a groundbreaking anthology that brings voice, visibility, and validation to LGBTQIAA2S+ experiences in trauma treatment. With unflinching vulnerability and liberatory vision, Roshni Chabra and 26 contributors weave essays, narratives, and art into a resource that is both profoundly human and professionally transformative.”

Nedra Glover Tawwab, LCSW

New York Times Best-Selling Author

"Queering EMDR is a necessary, bold, and soul-stirring disruption of the status quo. This collection reclaims EMDR as a tool for liberation—centering voices, bodies, and truths too often sidelined in clinical spaces. It’s not just a book; it’s a call to practice with integrity, creativity, and fierce inclusivity."

Rebecca Kase, LCSW

EMDR Trainer & CEO of Trauma Therapist Institute, Author of Polyvagal-Informed EMDR and The Polyvagal Solution

“Queering EMDR Therapy distills what I have witnessed in clients, colleagues, and myself: the moment where healing requires not just clinical skill, but truth-telling. It captures the exhaustion of internal division and the urgency of becoming whole. There was a time in my professional life when I stood aligned with frameworks that excluded and pathologised identities now rightfully centred in this volume. Through study, reflection, and the labour of unlearning, my understanding has changed. What has emerged is a more compassionate, inclusive vision of EMDR Therapy and the people it serves. This anthology, edited by Roshni Chabra and shaped by the voices of 26 remarkable contributors, is a bold reclamation. It expands EMDR’s ethical and conceptual boundaries and invites us to practise trauma therapy not only with competence, but with courage.”

Professor Paul W. Miller, MD, MB, BCh, BAO, DMH, MRCPsych, FRSA

Author of EMDR Therapy for Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses