Calm Place Resourcing for Remote EMDR Sessions

A calm place is one of the first resources you build with a client, and one of the most useful when things get hard mid-session. Building and strengthening it over video takes a little more intention than doing it in the room, but it holds up just as well once it's in place. Here's how to make Phase 2 resourcing work when you're on a screen.

Why resourcing deserves extra care remotely

Resourcing — sometimes called Phase 2 preparation — is where you and the client build the coping and self-soothing tools that make reprocessing safe to attempt. The calm place is usually the first of these: an image or scene the client can bring to mind that reliably settles them. For the full context of where this sits in the standard protocol, see our walk-through of the eight phases.

In the room, you can read a client’s breathing and posture at a glance, and a hand on the arm or a slower voice does a lot of the settling work. Over video, you’re relying on a smaller image, sometimes a lagging connection, and your voice alone. That’s not a reason to skip resourcing or rush it — if anything, it’s a reason to build it more deliberately, so it’s dependable later when you need it fast.

Building the calm place on a call

The basic exercise doesn’t change: ask the client to bring to mind a place, real or imagined, where they feel calm, safe, or at peace. Walk through the senses one at a time — what they see, hear, smell, and feel in their body — so the image gets concrete rather than staying vague.

A few adjustments help this land well on video:

• Slow down more than you think you need to. Without the shared physical space, silence can feel awkward sooner online. Let it sit. Rushing the imagery-building undercuts the resource before it’s even installed.
• Ask the client to describe out loud, not just imagine silently. You lose the small physical cues you’d pick up in person, so narrated detail gives you the same information a different way and keeps you both anchored to the same image.
• Watch the face and shoulders, not just listen. A good camera frame that includes the client’s upper body (our teletherapy tech setup guide covers framing and lighting) lets you catch a softening jaw or dropped shoulders as confirmation the image is working.

Once the client has a stable image, pair it with a cue word — something short they can say silently to themselves to recall the whole scene quickly. Test the cue word alone, without walking through the full imagery, to confirm it reliably brings the calm feeling back on its own.

Strengthening the resource with bilateral stimulation

Many therapists reinforce a resource with short sets of bilateral stimulation, pairing the calm image with slow, brief stimulation to help it settle in more securely. If you use the moving dot for this, keep the speed slow and the sets short — this is reinforcement, not desensitization. The controls guide covers how to adjust speed and switch between movement patterns on the fly, which is handy for keeping resourcing visually distinct from processing work.

Some clients respond just as well, or better, to a tactile option here. A client-led technique like self-tapping or the butterfly hug can feel gentler for resourcing than watching a moving dot, and it has the advantage of not requiring the client’s eyes to stay on the screen.

Building a second resource: the container

Alongside a calm place, many protocols also use a container — an imagined box, vault, or other holding place where the client can mentally set aside disturbing material they aren’t ready to process, so it doesn’t intrude between sessions. The same video adjustments apply: slow pacing, out-loud description, and a test run before you rely on it.

A container is particularly worth having ready for remote work, because a dropped call or a session that has to end abruptly leaves less room for a slow, in-person wind-down. If a session runs long or gets interrupted, asking the client to place unfinished material in the container gives you a fast, practiced way to close things down safely.

Keeping resources ready between sessions

Because you can’t hand a client a written script to keep on their desk in the same way you might in the office, it helps to say the cue word and a one-line reminder of the image out loud at the end of the session, and suggest the client jot it down themselves. A resource that only exists in the room during your call is far less useful than one the client can call on independently during the week.

If you’re working with a client who also uses grounding techniques between sessions, our guide to grounding techniques for remote EMDR covers orienting and breathing exercises that pair naturally with a calm place — together they give the client more than one way back to steady ground.