KEYNOTES
Bjørn Aasen
Is this an EMDR patient ? How understanding AIP opens unseen possibilities for reprocessing
Bjørn Aksel Aasen is a Norwegian clinical psychologist and EMDR Europe Accredited Senior Trainer. He has practiced EMDR since 1994 and has been a trainer since 2006. Aasen has served as an active board member of EMDR Norway and was a long-standing member of the EMDR Europe Standards Committee.
He has provided basic EMDR training in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Tanzania, as well as numerous presentations and specialized workshops across Europe and Asia. His teaching covers a wide range of topics, including dissociative disorders, addiction, ongoing trauma, recent events, achievement, and supervision. More recently, his focus has been on sharpening the understanding of the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model and broadening the scope of EMDR therapy applications.
Helinä Häkkänen
EMDR therapy with clients in legal processes: Safety, stability, and empowerment
Helinä Häkkänen, PhD, is a psychologist, psychotherapist, and EMDR Consultant from Finland. She is the founder and managing partner of Mindroot Ltd, a private psychology and psychotherapy company, where she works with clients and provides supervision and training in EMDR therapy and trauma-informed practice.
Helinä holds adjunct professorships in criminal psychology at the University of Helsinki and in legal psychology at the University of Eastern Finland. She has led the Legal Psychology Research Team at the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Medicine for two decades. From 2002 to 2011, she served as a senior researcher for the Academy of Finland at the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, and from 2011 to 2020 she was the founding partner and CEO of a law and psychology firm.
Her scientific work includes more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and several books, including Psychopathy and Law: A Practitioner’s Guide (Wiley, 2012) and the bestseller Profiler (Bazar, 2025). Helinä’s research and teaching have focused on violent behavior, trauma, witness psychology, psychopathy, and the application of EMDR in legal and clinical contexts. She has been an invited expert to the Finnish Parliament in drafting the anti-stalking legislation and has served as an expert witness in numerous criminal cases, including the Liberia war crime trial. She also consults the International Criminal Court on the use of EMDR in witness preparation.
Bo Søndergaard Jensen
Enhancing EMDR Reprocessing
Bo Søndergaard Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and specialist in adult psychotherapy and psychotraumatology with over two decades of experience in the assessment and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), complex trauma, and refugee mental health. He currently works at the Clinic for PTSD and Anxiety at Aarhus University Hospital, Skejby, where he provides advanced psychological care for Danish veterans, trauma-affected refugees, and individuals with severe PTSD.
Bo holds a Master of Science in Psychology from Aarhus University (2003) and has earned specialist and supervisory certifications in evidence-based trauma therapies, including EMDR (Supervisor), Prolonged Exposure (Trainer and Supervisor), Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET), and psychotherapy supervision at the specialist level.
His clinical and research work integrates neurobiological, psychotherapeutic, and innovative digital interventions for trauma. He is co-developer of a clinical study on the use of intermittent Theta Burst Stimulation (iTBS) as an adjunct to EMDR for treatment-resistant PTSD and has contributed to pioneering research on Virtual Reality Mental Hygiene (VRMH) as a tool to reduce psychosocial stress during long-duration space missions, including the ESA Huginn mission.
Bo has co-authored several peer-reviewed publications on trauma assessment and treatment, including studies in the Journal of Space Exploration, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Case Reports in Psychiatry, and The Journal of the Danish Medical Association. He has also contributed to the development of the Danish Trauma Database for Refugees (DTD) and served as an independent assessor in PTSD clinical trials.