I have a civilian trauma T who has done talk therapy using both Internal Family and a version of CBT. Her goal was to get me to see that my brain is still fighting to protect itself and how to discover the "parts" that keep me going. They started as defense mechanisms and now...well... not so much. Especially the "critic" who is the one who won't let me rest because its dangerous. I had a hard time with that because I was afraid the idea there were people running rampant in my brain meant I was schizophrenic - when in reality it's just an elaborate coping method. Generally civilian T helps me in day to day life, how my brain functions, what my mal adaptive coping techniques are, how to react to my symptoms, etc.
I have a VA therapist that I do EMDR with. There is some debate about if it should be used for the complex stuff, but if it's done by someone experienced it can be done successfully. EMDR helps me get to the bottom of what is causing my flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, blah blah. It digs up the traumas and walks me back through them so I can what my thoughts and reactions were then, what they are now and how to change what I believe about my role in the events. It is terrifying, awful, and physically painful and the achievements are counted in seconds rather than hours. But it is working and I am getting better. for me its an excruciatingly slow process because we are working on multiple traumas
One thing that may encourage him to look at EMDR is that it can be done fairly quickly. For people with individual traumas it can be successful in 8 to 12 sessions. So if he has gotten himself stable except for dealing with one or two bad memories/events it could be a relatively quick fix. And by fix --- it takes that horrible puking, angry, guilty, shame inducing event that seem like it is happening right now and turns it into an unpleasant memory that you can think about calmly as something in the past.
