Here is a sentence I have said out loud, to another adult, in the middle of a Tuesday.

“I feel like something just happened between us, and I’d love for us to talk about it.”

There is no version of that sentence that sounds normal. It sounds like the opening of a breakup, or a statement from a complaint to HR. Said in a therapy room it also has a way of hanging in the air for what feels like a geological age while you consider whether you have just ruined everything.

It is also one of the more useful things I know how to say. The gap between those two facts is what this essay is about.

A fair complaint

I’ve had two pieces of feedback on this series that I want to put on the table, because they’re both correct.

The first is “so good, but heavy.” Yes. The second was “why are they so emotional,” which I have decided… to receive as a compliment.

But they’re pointing at the same real thing. I have now spent two essays telling you to turn around and look at the relational field, and approximately zero words on what to do once you’re facing it. Essay three said presence is part of the mechanism. Essay five said the conditions that made the meaning are running live in the room. Both of them stopped exactly where a working clinician would reasonably say: okay, and?

That’s an annoying way to write a series. So this one is the manual. I’m also going to try to keep it light, because the material is heavy enough without my help.

Why I don’t usually do this

Before I start handing out moves, a window into how I actually feel about handing out moves.

I don’t much like telling therapists what to do.

That isn’t modesty and it isn’t a style preference. I run consultation groups, have trained hundreds of clinicians in EMDR and Somatic Integration and Processing, have worked in higher education for the better part of a decade, and what I’ve noticed over the years is that almost nothing changes when I give somebody a technique. They write it down. They nod. Occasionally they try it once and report back that it went fine. And then we never speak of it again, because a move somebody handed you is a coat, and coats come off.

What does change people is slower and much stranger to watch. Somebody tells the story of a moment. Not the case conceptualization. The moment. What their client said, what happened in their own chest when it happened, what they did next, and how it sat with them on the drive home. And somewhere in the telling, usually about two-thirds of the way through, they hear themselves say something they didn’t know they knew.

I’ve come to think that isn’t a quirk of consultation. It’s the same mechanism this whole publication is about, pointed at us instead of at our clients. You reactivate an experience with enough fidelity to feel it again, in the presence of somebody who stays, and something gets to reorganize. That’s not an analogy for the work… it’s the work, with the chairs turned around.

Which is why prescriptive writing makes me itchy. A list of moves is a countable, teachable, operationalizable thing; and if you’ve read the last two essays you already know what I think happens when we mistake those for the explanatory ones. There’s a harder problem underneath it, too. The third essay in this series argued that a scripted presence supplies no disconfirmation, because the nervous system doing the reading was built to spot performance. That applies to me as much as to anyone. If you try one of these because I said so, while monitoring whether you’re doing it correctly, you will have executed the intervention perfectly and thrown away the part that works.

So here’s the deal I’ll make for the rest of this essay. Everything below is what I do. It is not what you should do. I’m telling you the story of how I work, including where it goes badly, and I’m making the same wager I make in a consultation group: that if the telling is honest enough, the what to do arrives on its own, in your hands, shaped like you rather than like me.

And if it doesn’t arrive, that’s information about my telling. Not about you.

The choice nobody offers you

Here’s the moment. A pattern surfaces. Maybe your client goes flat right as something matters. Maybe they get very agreeable. Maybe you notice you’re talking more than you were ten minutes ago, and faster, and you can’t quite say why.

Whatever it is, the session has quietly stopped being about the target.

Your training has a lot to say about targets and almost nothing to say about this, so what most of us do is one of three things. We note it silently and carry on. We interpret it at the client, which tends to go about as well as you’d expect. Or we get quietly anxious and reach for a procedure, because procedures are supposed to be supportive when you don’t know what else to do.

What I’ve come to do instead is offer a choice out loud. Because there are two places this can go, and they are not equally exposing.

Channel one is the world. We take the pattern and go looking for it out there. Your mother. Your supervisor. The friend who does this same thing. Your partner, last Thursday. It’s still relational work (we’re still tracking the pattern rather than the event) but the two of us are standing shoulder to shoulder looking at somebody else. That’s a comfortable posture. It’s also, frequently, exactly the right one.

Channel two is us. The pattern is happening here, between you and me, in the next four minutes, and I’d like us to look at that instead.

Channel two, in my experience, is enormously more powerful and enormously more expensive, and I want to be honest that I do not always choose it. Some weeks a client has nothing spare. Some weeks I don’t. Multiple laps of channel one before anyone attempts channel two is not a failure of nerve; it’s often just correct sequencing.

But the move that changed my work wasn’t picking the right channel. It was saying the menu out loud.

Say it before you do it

Something like: Here’s a pattern I notice us falling into. I actually think it’s related to some of what you carry. And in my experience there are two ways to get at it. We can look at the relationships across your life that built it. Or we can turn to the thing happening between us right now. Both work. But they feel different.

Three things happen when you narrate the choice instead of executing it.

The client gets agency in the most disconfirming place: the moment where every prior version of this happened to them. You get information either way, because which channel someone picks tells you a great deal. And if they spin out, you’ve said your piece; you can drop the frame and go be present, and the frame will still be there next week.

I’ll add the unglamorous part. Sometimes you offer the menu and they choose neither, and change the subject to their car. That’s an answer too.

Two timelines, four feet

Here’s the part I skipped, which is what’s happening in you while you make that offer.

Standard EMDR asks a client to do something faintly unreasonable: keep one foot in the memory and one foot in this room, on purpose, at the same time. Dual attention. It’s the engine of the whole thing.

Nobody mentioned in my training that we’re doing it too.

While your client is holding then and now, you’re holding a different pair. You’re tracking the enactment in front of you (the flatness, the agreeableness, the sudden speed of your own voice) and at the same time listening for what it’s an echo of. Not only in their history. In yours. That thing where a client goes compliant and you notice a small familiar relief, followed immediately by a small familiar dread. That’s two timelines, and one of them belongs to you.

Jen, Caleb and I have come to call this reciprocal dual attention, which is four syllables too long and I’m sorry about it. But reciprocal is carrying the weight. It’s the difference between observing a pattern and being one of the two people making it.

In practice it means listening to content and process at once. The content is what they’re telling you: the story, the target, the words, the thing that would go in your note. The process is what’s happening between you while they tell it. Content is a window; process is a mirror. Most of us were trained exhaustively on windows.

And this is what makes the menu possible in the first place. You can’t offer someone a choice between the world and the us if you haven’t been tracking the us. The offer isn’t a technique you deploy on cue. It’s what becomes available once you’ve had both timelines open for a few minutes.

It is also tiring, and I want to say so. Four feet in two rivers is not a restful posture and I don’t manage it every hour of every day. But if I had to throw out everything else in this essay, or in my own approach to this work for that matter, it’s the part I’d keep.

The whiteboard, and my dignity

I own a whiteboard. I use it for this. I’m aware of how it looks.

Here’s the problem it solves. Say last session went sideways: a rise in activation, then a peak where your client went somewhere else entirely, then a long slow return. You’d like to work with that. But asking someone to examine the thing that just overwhelmed them, while sitting three feet from the person they were overwhelmed with, is a big ask.

So I draw it. Literally: a bell curve on a whiteboard, with time along the bottom. I label the peak with whatever we both know it was (a label for the overwhelm, withdrawal, etc.). Then I say: this is my read of last week. Where would you put the rise?

And now the strangest thing happens, which is that it becomes tolerable. Because we are no longer two people inside an enactment. We are two people looking at a drawing of one. The thing has an outside now. It’s on a wall, in dry-erase marker, and it is frankly a little ridiculous, and the ridiculousness is doing more than you might think; while not impossible (shout out math nerds) you cannot be swallowed by a graph.

Once it’s mapped, you have something protocol-shaped to do with it. Pick the most tolerable point on the rise, not the peak. Ask what relationship taught this moment to be threatening. Float back from there. Then the next point up. Then the next.

Which means the whiteboard isn’t a detour from EMDR. It’s a way of finding targets that a history-taking conversation would never have produced, because these ones were built out of something that happened in your office.

Saying it in its sharpest form

This one comes with a warning label.

Sometimes I’ll say a thing in its most pointed version, not because I believe it, but because I want to see what it turns up. After a preface, where I describe the intention of the pointed version, I’ll say something like: I wonder if you’re worried I’m going to get tired of you. I wonder if you think I need you to do this well.

I always flag that I’m doing it. The preface matters more than the line: I sometimes say things in their sharpest form to see what else shows up.

What comes back is the useful part. Do they deny it fast? Do they get curious? Do they correct me, and in correcting me hand me the accurate version, which is always better than mine? The strategies show up in abundance when the provocation is that explicit, and the strategies are what we’re actually after.

It also, sometimes, just clunks. You say the sharp thing and your client looks at you like you’ve started speaking in a different language. That has happened to me more than once and the invitation I’ve learned to make next sounds something like: does it feel like that misses the mark or misrepresents some part of how you feel?

Missing out loud, it turns out, is itself a disconfirmation. Not the one I planned. Still counts.

The rhythm

None of this replaces going back. The shape I’ve landed on is a rhythm rather than a method:

Back to the past to find the pattern. Forward to the present to work it between us. Back to the past again, now that we know what we’re looking for.

Past. Present. Past. It sounds tidy written down and it is not tidy in practice, but it does give a treatment plan a spine; and it means the relational work and the reprocessing aren’t competing for the hour. They’re feeding each other.

And then, the practical question

Once the conceptualization is genuinely shared, once you’re both seeing the pattern and not arguing about whether it exists, there’s one question I lean on more than any other.

What’s keeping change from happening?

Ask it sincerely and you’ll likely get a flood of “why nots”: It won’t go well. I’ve tried that. It’s easier not to. He’ll be impossible for a week. My mother would never speak to me again. My in-laws. My kids. The house.

And every one of those is another enactment, wearing a coat. Each one is a live prediction about what happens when a person advocates for themselves or attempts to authentically express what they feel or what they’re thinking about, which means each one is a doorway back to where that prediction was built, and a place to notice what resilience got skipped.

But let’s be careful, because this is where therapy can turn into homework nobody assigned. It isn’t our job to tell someone their life has to change before they can feel better. Plenty of people are inside arrangements where authenticity carries genuine cost, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of abandonment. The question isn’t why haven’t you changed. It’s what would need to be true for change to feel possible; and then treating the answer as clinical material rather than an obstacle.

Looking at shoes

Here’s the frame I keep coming back to, and it’s an old psychodynamic one: the relationship is the training ground. Not the performance. The practice.

Which means the point of channel two is not that your client goes home and has a transformative conversation with their father on Sunday. The point is that they get to try being slightly more honest with one person, in one room, for fifty minutes, and find out that the ceiling doesn’t come down.

I say this out loud too, because clients are ambitious and will absolutely attempt the marathon in week three. We’re not training for the race yet. We’re looking at shoes. We’re standing in the store, picking them up, checking whether they’re the kind of thing a person like you could wear.

That’s it. That’s the whole method. Two channels, named out loud. A drawing on a wall. A sharp sentence with a warning label. Past, present, past. And one honest question about what’s in the way.

If you only do one

Say the menu out loud. Once, this week, with one client.

You don’t have to work channel two. You don’t have to be that brave all the time. Just let them know the door is there, and that you’re willing to go through it with them, without blame or criticism.

I would imagine almost nobody has ever offered them that, which is, when you think about it, the entire problem.

The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. If you’d rather listen, each essay is read aloud on the Notice That podcast. Subscribing is free.

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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I was a philosophy nerd in college. Four years of ancient Greek and Latin, which has been directly useful roughly twice since. Who cares.

While both are technically dead languages, the time I spent studying and translating them did something I wouldn’t trade for the world (besides making me pretentious and “uppity,” which makes me insufferable at most parties). The time I spent with those texts and worlds fundamentally populated my symbolic consciousness. They gave me furniture to think with. Dynamics to measure and calculate. Physics. Suffering. Death. And life.

When you spend that long translating, you lose the ability to believe that words are containers you pour meaning into. Translation makes it impossible. You sit with one sentence for an hour and find that the word you want doesn’t exist in English, not because English is impoverished but because the world that made the Greek word sayable is gone. What you’re translating is never really vocabulary. It’s a set of conditions. I came out of those four years with far more reverence for language than I went in with, and a permanent suspicion of anyone who treats a word as a container.

Julia Kristeva named something inside this in a way I’ve never stopped using. She distinguishes the symbolic, the ordered shared system of syntax and reference, the part of language you can look up, from the semiotic: rhythm, cadence, breath, the bodily pulse within a sentence that doesn’t reduce neatly to what its words denote. Her argument is that poetry is one place the second one breaks through and unsettles the first. If you have ever felt what a client meant in their tempo a full sentence before you understood their words, you already know the distinction. She just gave it a name.

And that’s the case for old ideas generally, as far as I’m concerned. Not that they’re old, which confers exactly nothing. It’s that a small handful of them have gone on being useful for two thousand years across wildly different worlds, and that’s a real result. Most ideas don’t survive a decade.

So here’s one that stayed with me, and it plowed through my consultant brain in the middle of a consultation session this past week.

Y’all remember Plato? While problematic in some ways that could be discussed at length, Plato is one of those figures whose fingerprints are all over Western thought. Whether or not he deserves quite as much credit as history has given him, he stands out as someone who helped shape the questions we have spent more than two thousand years trying to answer: What is real? How do we know what we know? What happens when what we can see is only part of what is actually happening?

And that last question is where I want to spend some time. Because Plato gave us an image for it. The cave.

Plato asks you to imagine people who have been chained in a cave since childhood. Chained so they can only face one wall (hold your head still for a second and let the edges of the room go; that). Behind them, up a rise, a fire burns; and between the fire and the prisoners there’s a walkway where figures pass carrying objects. The prisoners can’t see the fire, the walkway, the figures, or the objects. What they can see are shadows thrown on the wall in front of them. They hear echoes and assume the shadows are speaking.

That’s their whole world, and they’re not being stupid about it. Given what they can see, the shadows are a perfectly reasonable account of reality. They have names for them. They get skilled at predicting which one comes next. Plato says they’d give prizes to whoever was best at it.

Then one of them gets unchained and made to turn around. And here’s the part that I’ve been haunted by most this week: turning around hurts. The fire is unbelievably bright and existentially terrifying. Everything is blurry and confusing, and Plato is explicit that the freed prisoner would believe the shadows were truer than the things now in front of them. Given the choice, they’d turn back.

This scene and its dynamics poured into my mind this week in a consultation group, when a clinician described what it feels like to work within the therapeutic relationship with presencing; to be truly vulnerable and transparent in the intersubjective encounter of the therapeutic third. She said it was like going into a cave. And she made a distinction I’ve been thinking about ever since: there’s going in with a flashlight beamed in one direction, moving forward, looking for the next thing; and there’s going in and just being in the space, trying to work out what it’s made of. She said the second one made her curious. She also said, in the same breath, that it made her scared.

I want to spend this essay on that, because I think Plato’s allegory says something exact about our culture as therapists, what we do as EMDR therapists, and what can happen when we choose a target. And I want to be honest that I’m going to end up disagreeing with Plato about almost everything, which is more fun to me than just agreeing with him (again, I’m aware of how pretentious this sounds…but hang with me).

The shadows are real

Let’s be careful right at the start, because the cheap version of this argument is available and I don’t want it.

The cheap version says traditional EMDR looks at shadows and relational work sees reality. That’s rhetorically satisfying and intellectually lazy, and it makes the target memory sound unreal. It isn’t. The shadow is real. The prisoner really sees it. The SUD is real. The memory really hurts, and it hurts in a body, on a Tuesday, in a chair in your office.

More than that: SUD-based history taking is genuinely good at what it does. It gives you a shared object. It converts a diffuse, overwhelming, hard-to-name suffering into something a client can point at, rate, and watch move. That conversion is not a small clinical gift. For a lot of people it’s the first time their pain has held still long enough to be looked at. And a target that moves from an eight to a two teaches a nervous system something it did not previously believe: this can change.

I would not hand any of that back. What follows isn’t a case against the flashlight. It’s a question about what the flashlight is pointed at, and why.

What’s easiest to point at

Here’s the sentence I keep circling, and it’s the one I’d want you to take with you if you take nothing else.

We have mistaken what is easiest to operationalize for what is most explanatory.

The last essay in this series made the case that we assess in a currency we didn’t mint; that our sense of what counts as clinically relevant was issued to us, tested until it felt like competence, and then forgotten as an issue because we’d internalized it and now perceive it as our own intuition. This is that argument arriving at the thing it most affects.

Because look at what our currency can price. A discrete event. A visual image. A negative cognition from a list. A number between zero and ten. A location in the body. All of those are countable, teachable, trainable, and rateable, and every one of them belongs to the wall of Plato’s cave. They’re what shows up when the light is aimed straight ahead.

Now try to price the other thing. A family in which anger had a particular meaning. A developing nervous system learning what proximity costs. A social world teaching which parts of a person had to stay hidden for connection to continue. Thousands of microexperiences of misattunement, some repaired and most not. There’s no number for any of that. There’s no line on the intake form. And often there isn’t even a shared language for how to capture it, much less explore it. So it doesn’t get targeted; not because anyone was careless, but because it never reaches the scale or the observation floor. The shadow gets chosen because the shadow is denominated in the currency we were handed; it’s what we were taught to look for, measure, weigh, and “work on”.

Turn around

But let’s try turning around.

Behind “Dad screamed at me” is not, first of all, an earlier memory of Dad screaming. Behind it is an entire relational world. A child whose attachment system depends on the person frightening them. A household with rules about whose distress was allowed to take up room. A learning, running for years underneath language, about what closeness costs and what has to be given up to keep it.

Trauma is not devastating simply because something bad happened. Its meaning emerges inside a relational ecology. The event casts the shadow; the relational world determines its shape.

This is why I’ve come to think that every negative cognition is a storybook of relationships. Look at any of them on the standard list. I am powerless. I am not good enough. I cannot trust anyone. It was my fault. These are not conclusions a person draws from one event. They can’t be. A statement that global, about the whole self, requires thousands of confirmations before a nervous system will accept it as simply true. One experience of powerlessness produces a memory of being powerless. I am powerless requires a world.

Which means the negative cognition has been telling us this the whole time. We just read it as a label to install against, rather than as a summary of a relational history.

Going deeper is not the same as turning around

Here is where I think the cave becomes a really special and dense focal point, because it exposes something about a move most of us were taught to trust.

When a target won’t move, we’re trained to go back. Float back. Find the earlier one, and the one before that, and the feeder memory beneath that. And the assumption underneath the technique is that depth is chronological; that if we keep going back far enough, we’ll arrive at what’s really underneath (shout out to touchstone memory seekers).

But chronology isn’t depth. You can travel all the way back to age three and still never turn around.

The earlier memory can give us chronological depth. What I’m after here is organizational depth: the relational conditions that taught a nervous system how to interpret what happened.

You’ll have found the earliest shadow. That’s genuinely useful information and I’m not throwing it away. But the earliest instance of I’m not safe is still an instance. It’s still on the wall. The clinically richer question isn’t which shadow came first; it’s how safety, recognition, dependence, shame, and belonging got organized, repeatedly, inside relationships, such that this shadow means what it means.

Going further into the cave and turning around inside it are two different motions. Our training is very good at the first one.

Where I break with Plato

Two places, and both matter.

The first is what happens after the turn. In Plato, the freed prisoner is dragged up a rough ascent, out of the cave, into sunlight, and eventually looks at the sun itself. They come back down knowing what’s real, and everyone else is still watching shadows. That structure gives you somebody who has escaped, and it makes the therapist that somebody.

I don’t believe there’s an outside. There’s no vantage from which a clinician surveys a client’s relational world and announces its true meaning; we established as much in the last essay, and it holds here. What’s actually available is stranger and better: two people, inside the same cave, investigating together the conditions under which these meanings became possible. The therapist isn’t returning from the sun. The therapist is a second person in the dark who is willing to look at what the other one has always had their back to.

The second break is bigger, and it’s the reason I chose this metaphor rather than a friendlier one.

Plato’s larger architecture privileges the abstract and intelligible over the particular, embodied, sensible world. The world we can touch and inhabit sits lower in the hierarchy; what can be grasped beyond it is treated as more fully real. That hierarchy is the ancestor of the demotion this publication keeps arguing against, the one that puts mechanism in the primary tier and the felt relational texture in the secondary. So I’m knowingly borrowing one of the most anti-relational metaphors in Western philosophy to make a relational argument, and the borrowing only works if we invert it.

Because in the version I’m describing, the fire is not a lesser light on the way to a truer one. The fire is the relational world, and it was throwing everything on that wall the entire time. There’s no sun. There’s just what’s been casting it, finally in view.

And the motion isn’t up and out. It’s the one that the clinician in my consultation group named: down, and in, to stay.

What this looks like in a room

Let me make it concrete, with the example I’ve probably used more than any other because of how sadly frequent it is, and how tragically misunderstood those who survive it are. Also, this is a triggering image so pause here if you’d like.

Someone is assaulted. They come to therapy, and the assault is the target, which is correct and obvious and where anyone would start. When we’re ready, we process it. The SUD comes down. And it stalls somewhere around a two or a three, and stays there across sessions, and the client starts to wonder whether they’re doing this wrong, or whether EMDR works for them.

Now ask what happened after the assault. They told someone. A parent, a sibling, a partner. And that person, after showing a swirl of conflicting sublimated emotions, changed the subject, or didn’t believe them, or made it about themselves, or asked what they’d been wearing, or was kind for a week and then never mentioned it again.

The assault is the shadow. The abandonment is closer to the fire.

And I want to be precise about what I’m claiming, because this gets misheard as saying the assault wasn’t the real trauma. That’s not it. The claim is the opposite, and it raises the stakes rather than lowering them: what happened was traumatic, and one reason it may still be organizing this person’s life is that it exploited something they already carried in. It proved a template. It confirmed a thing they’d been braced for since long before that night, or whenever it happened, that when the worst happens they’ll be alone with it. That’s not a smaller injury than the assault. And sometimes, it’s the injury that keeps the assault alive.

Trauma so often gains its organizing power by exploiting an internal working model. A traumatic event doesn’t land on empty ground; it enters an already organized relational world, and its most devastating meaning can come from what it confirms there. The event is where that organization becomes visible: tangible proof that can become a composite representation of every moment like it.

I believe this is why the stall at two or three isn’t a failure. The residue is relational incoherence: how do I hold that this terrible thing happened to me and nobody could stay with me in it? You can’t desensitize your way out of that, and a client who’s been told they should be able to will conclude that either something is wrong with them, or that there’s no hope in EMDR, therapy, or any practice. I’d rather they knew the number stopped where it did for a reason.

The fire is lit again in here

There’s one more turn, and it’s the one this whole publication exists for.

Those organizing expectations aren’t only historical. They’re not sitting in the past waiting to be excavated. They arrive in the room, with you, and they’re at work in the first ten minutes of the first session.

Will you believe me. Will my distress be too much for you. Will you need me to do this correctly. Will you go somewhere else when I get difficult. Will you choose the protocol over what I’m telling you right now.

So this stops being archaeology. We’re not only reconstructing what cast the shadow then; the light is moving in here, now, between us, and it’s throwing something on the wall while we work. That’s what an enactment is. It’s the conditions that made the meaning, running live, in a room where for once somebody can say so out loud.

And that’s the whole argument for working this way. History matters enormously; I’m not proposing we stop going back. But the thing we have been trying to reach through history is also available in the present tense, in the only place any of us can actually intervene.

The part that’s frightening

I don’t want to arrive at that and skip past what the clinician in my consultation group said next, because she was right and she said it better than I would have.

Curious… and scared.

It is a more vulnerable way to work. You’re choosing to be more relationally transparent, more explicit about what’s happening between you, and that’s exposing in both directions. You may be the first person who has ever named this out loud with your client, which is a strange kind of intimacy and not always a welcome one. Some clients respond by understanding, for the first time, what therapy is for. Others find the contrast with the rest of their life unbearable, and the honest ones say so.

This way of working asks something of us. If the light in the room is coming off both people, then some of what lands on that wall is ours; our own templates, our own bracing, our own need for the session to go well. That’s not a reason to avoid the work. It’s a reason to be in our own.

I don’t want to sell this as a technique upgrade. It’s a different relationship to what you’re doing, and it costs more.

What to do with this on Tuesday

Four practices, not a protocol.

Take the history you already take, then stay in the room longer. You found a moment. Before you shape it into a target, camp out in it. Who else was there. Who wasn’t. Who did this get taken to afterward, and what happened when it was. What did this moment prove, and what had already been half-proved before it. The target list you get from that is a different list.

Read the negative cognition as a history rather than a label. When a client lands on I am powerless, treat it as a summary of a thousand confirmations rather than a belief to be swapped. Then ask, genuinely curious, where the confirmations came from. That question tends to open a door the NC list tends to close.

When you’re tempted to float further back, ask which direction you’re going. Backward and inward aren’t the same move. Sometimes the earlier memory is exactly right. Sometimes the more useful question is what relational world made this one mean what it means, and that question doesn’t live earlier. It lives behind, underneath, within.

Let a stall be a story. When a target settles at two or three and won’t move, resist the reflex to call it ecological and move on. Ask what remains relationally incoherent about the event. Often, the answer is a person, and what they did or didn’t do when they were told.

What’s casting it

The prisoners in the cave weren’t foolish. They were doing excellent work on the only thing they could see, and they were rewarded for getting good at it. That’s most of us, most of the time, and the training that got us there was good training, good consultation, a good heart and mind.

But the fire was always behind us, and it was always relational, and nobody has to leave the cave for it to come into view. Someone just has to be willing to turn around, in the dark, with company.

The target isn’t the trauma. It’s one place the trauma became visible.

The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. If you’d rather listen, each essay is read aloud on the Notice That podcast. Subscribing is free.

Mentioned: Plato, Republic, Book VII; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974).

This essay offers another possibility, by way of a cave. Using Plato's allegory — and then breaking with it in two specific places — it argues that EMDR has become extraordinarily good at working with what is easiest to point at, and that we have mistaken what is easiest to operationalize for what is most explanatory. The target memory is real and the SUD is real; the question is what's casting them. Along the way: why every negative cognition is a storybook of relationships, why going further back in the float-back is not the same as turning around, the difference between chronological depth and organizational depth, and why the residue at a two is usually relational incoherence rather than failure. Plus four things to try on Tuesday.

Read the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week): https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_Essay05_Therapists_Summer_2026

The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage.

Content note: this episode includes a clinical illustration involving working with a sexual assault survivor, at roughly the midpoint.

Mentioned: Plato, Republic Book VII; Julia Kristeva.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Together they take apart the ideas most of us absorbed without ever being asked to examine them. That the ideal therapist is a blank slate. That neutrality is kindness. That adaptive information looks the same for every nervous system. That some clients are "special populations" who need a deviation from the standard. In their place, the guests offer something warmer and more precise: belonging as clinical ("who can sit next to you quietly after a hard session?"), resourcing that reaches for ancestors and community ("what if you saw yourself through your ancestors' eyes rather than the colonial gaze?"), and healing defined by the client — your favorite self, self-determined — rather than by adjustment to the world as it is.

Along the way: what to do when the trauma you're treating is ongoing and the client walks out of session into the next headline, why "you'll absolutely make mistakes" is better clinical preparation than pronoun paralysis, how to repair a misgendering without asking the client to take care of you, and the question underneath the whole conversation — who created the standard, and who gets to decide what healing looks like? The book, with 26 contributors spanning chapters, poetry, art, and a graphic novel, is available now.

In this episode

Roshni Chabra, LMFT (she/her) — editor of Queering EMDR Therapy, founder of Lavender Healing Collective in Long Beach, and an EMDR trainer — joins with two of the book's contributors: Lisa Hayes, MSW, LISW-S (she/her), a Columbus, Ohio clinician and EMDR trainer who directs an EMDR training program built by and for BIPOC clinicians, and Mish Kumar-Jonson (they/them), an EMDR consultant in Naarm/Melbourne working in a neurodivergent, community-led practice. The book gathers 26 contributors — chapters, poetry, art, even a graphic novel — and this conversation carries its central move into the session room: queering as a lens for the whole of EMDR, not a checklist for part of it.

Key themes

• Queering is a lens, not a checklist. Each guest defines it differently on purpose — there is no single definition that serves all people in all situations. For Lisa, it's navigating outside dominant normative spaces whose restriction functions as silencing — and finding a path toward liberation and authentic engagement. For Mish, it's contextual and political: resistance, joy, and authenticity inside a world not built for you. For Roshni, it comes from queer theory's reading practice — looking at anything from outside the default, which is a lens anyone can pick up, not only queer and trans clinicians.

• Healing is self-determined. Queering also asks who gets to decide what healing looks like. It is not "becoming functional capitalist members of society" — it's the client's own favorite self, which is not the same as a true self or core self someone else defines for them.

• It starts with the self of the therapist. Not another task for the protocol — a deconstruction of what we absorbed in training: the "therapist paragon," the blank slate, the gray rock. Lisa's chapter is deeply personal (her own EMDR work around the death of her mother), and what it modeled is the risk the whole book asks of clinicians: showing up as a human in professional space.

• Belonging is clinical. We don't experience trauma in a vacuum and we don't heal in one. The intake questions that follow: who knows you're doing EMDR therapy? Who can support you — who can sit next to you, quietly, after an intense session? A client without community isn't disqualified from EMDR; connection becomes part of the work.

• Queering before phase one, and after phase eight. EMDR starts the moment someone says hello. Getting-to-know-you forms can ask what role community plays in identity and healing; phase-eight re-evaluation can check whether connection happened — that dinner, that event — as adaptive information in its own right.

• Structured, not rigid. Fidelity to the model matters, and the model was built to be tailored. Consultees keep asking "am I allowed to do that?" — this episode is a sustained answer to where that question comes from and why the permission was never anyone else's to grant.

• Who decided what's adaptive? The episode's deepest reframe, anchored by Krishnamurti: it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Rage and grief at something horrific can be the appropriate response — regulation isn't about calling clients to the therapist's calm from across the room, but moving alongside them through truth-telling.

• Specific, not "special." Lisa rejects the language of special populations and minorities — she teaches "specific," and "global majority." Protocol adaptations shouldn't other whole communities out of the standard of care; they should widen the standard until it includes them. The distress isn't automatically about the client's queerness, either — sometimes it's about their football team.

• When the trauma is ongoing. Oppression trauma doesn't resolve on a schedule: a client can process transphobia in session and see a transphobic law pass on their phone an hour later. Name it — including its violence — rather than performing a neutrality the client can't afford. And balance it: there is no tragedy in queerness itself. Oppression is tragic — queerness holds joy, community, and connection worth resourcing toward.

• Mistakes as method. You will misgender someone eventually. Correct yourself, get it right the next two or three times, and don't put it on the client to take care of your feelings. The work is within.

Practical clinical takeaways (what you can bring into your next session)

• Add community to your intake: "What role does community play in your healing? In your identity?" Then treat the answer as case-conceptualization data, from before phase one onward.

• Ask the belonging questions before reprocessing: who knows you're doing this work, who can support you, who can just sit with you after a hard session? If the answer is no one, connection becomes a treatment target — even homework as small as one conversation about the weather.

• Widen phase eight: alongside checking the target, check for connection. Did they speak to someone? Go to the dinner, the event? That's adaptive information — log it as healing.

• Try Mish's resourcing questions with clients holding oppression trauma: What if your heroes had lived — who would your elders be? Can you see yourself through your ancestors' eyes rather than the colonial gaze?

• Swap "special populations" for "specific," and notice where your language carries a worldview you didn't choose — including "minorities" for the global majority.

• Prepare your mistake protocol now: correct yourself briefly, get it right going forward, skip the extended apology that asks the client to reassure you.

• Audit your neutrality: for clients surviving active oppression, an office that pretends to sit outside their reality doesn't read as safe — being transparent about where you stand can be a safety measure, not a boundary violation.

Why this episode matters

A lot of EMDR training quietly teaches two things at once: the protocol, and a posture — careful, rule-bound, personally absent. This conversation separates them. The protocol survives just fine; the posture is what gets examined. What the guests offer instead is a version of fidelity that includes the therapist's humanity and the client's whole context: their community, their ancestors, their ongoing reality, their own definition of a healed life. For a show whose center of gravity is the body in relationship, this is the argument in full voice — the relationship doing the work includes the world both people live in.

RESOURCES & LINKS

Queering EMDR Therapy — official site: https://queeringemdr.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026

Contributor consultants directory: https://queeringemdr.com/about-the-book/contributors/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026

The book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Queering-EMDR-Therapy-Roshni-Chabra/dp/B0FMK76GP3

Roshni Chabra, LMFT — Lavender Healing Collective: https://www.lavenderhealingcollective.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026

Lisa Hayes, LISW-S — EMDR Therapy Training for BIPOC Clinicians: https://lisahayescounseling.com/emdr-therapy-training-for-bipoc-clinicians/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026

Mish Kumar-Jonson — Niram EMDR and Trauma Counselling: https://www.niram.com.au/mish?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026

Our conversation with Mark Nickerson: https://emdr-podcast.com/emdr-cultural-humility-and-doing-your-own-work-conversation-with-mark-nickerson/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026

EMDR basic training & case conceptualization (SIP) with Beyond Healing: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/thinkbeyondhealing

ABOUT NOTICE THAT

Notice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage — co-authors of EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread. The show explores the real clinical practice of EMDR therapy: attachment, ego states, somatic processing, resourcing, complex trauma, and the relationship doing the work. Subscribe for conversations that treat both you and your clients as human.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the fourth essay of The Relational Thread, Bridger turns around and looks at the ground the first three essays were standing on. The Relational Thread describes the alliance as a braid of two strands: the macro alliance that accumulates across sessions, and the micro alliance that lives inside single moments. Both are real. Both, he argues here, are measured from inside the room — and neither person arrives empty. The social and historical field that shaped what your client expects from you was never a treatment team. It was the world you were each raised inside, and it does not stop at the door. This is not a third strand set beside the other two. It's closer to the medium the other two are spun in.

The essay lands somewhere unexpectedly practical, and somewhere more hopeful than it starts. It follows how an interpretive frame gets installed through belonging and then examined until it feels like competence rather than a commitment. It names the maneuver by which a claim made from a location becomes simply how things are. It makes the case that the objectivity most of us were trained to practice is a fiat currency — real, useful, and issued — and that the error was never in spending it, but in forgetting it was issued. And it argues, against what the author expected when he started writing, that saying where a model came from makes it stronger: cast iron is brittle, pure critique bears no load, and situatedness is the carbon in the steel. Plus four things to try on Tuesday.

Read the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week): relationalthread.com

The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage

Mentioned in this essay: Donna Haraway; Sandra Harding; Alfred North Whitehead; John Locke; Judith Herman; Laura Brown; Renee Linklater; Arthur Kleinman; David Archer.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before next session, try a set of questions that will sound almost too simple.

What is actually happening in this room? What is the room made of? Who is in it…not by name, but by history? How did the two of you come to be here at the same hour on the same day, and what did each of you carry in without deciding to? And when you encounter each other, in the ordinary minute-by-minute of it rather than in the moments either of you would think to mark, what is that encounter made of?

Most of us were trained with real care to attend to one half of that. Symptom picture. Presenting circumstances. Precipitating events. Developmental history. What happened to this person, and what it did to them, and which of it belongs on a target list. That training is good and I would not hand it back.

But so few of us were trained to consider the encounter itself. The histories that brought both of us here. How free each of us feels, this week, to show up as much of ourselves as the work needs. What the dynamics of the room are doing in our bodies while we are busy doing something else (and something is happening in yours, right now, as you read a paragraph about it). And how all of that is shaping every exchange we have, including, especially, the ones too quiet, buried, or normalized, for either of us to notice we were having.

You have had the experience of a room being different this week than last, with the same person, for no reason either of you could name.

We have a rich vocabulary for the first half. We have almost none for the second.

What the braid got right

Jen and I have spent an entire book proposing that the therapeutic relationship is not one thing, and that “the relationship matters” is where the conversation should begin rather than where it should end. Our field has never suffered from a shortage of reverence for the relationship. It has suffered from a shortage of specification. That is a more solvable problem, and a more interesting one.

So we draw a distinction in The Relational Thread. There is the alliance that accumulates: the remembered relationship, built across sessions out of reliability and repair, the one clients are summarizing when they rate a working alliance inventory, and the one we’re often recalling when we see a certain client’s name show up on our calendar that day. And there is the alliance that lives inside single moments: the therapist’s voice softening as affect climbs, the pacing that neither pushes nor retreats, the shame that spikes and is metabolized without collapse. Macro and micro. Not competing constructs. Two layers of one field, running on different clocks, braided.

I still think that is right, but it’s also incomplete, in one specific way. Both of those strands are measured from inside the room.

The strand we walked in with

Neither of us arrive empty.

Our client comes in carrying a lifetime of learning about what happens when someone like them says a thing like that to someone like us. So did we. And those learnings were not assembled privately. They were built in families, and also in classrooms, in waiting rooms, in every room where belonging had conditions; inside a whole social world that was already sorting whose perceptions get to count as “real”, or “valid”, long before either of us scheduled our first appointment.

That world does not stop at the door. It comes in with both of us and goes on operating in the room, named or not.

We came close to this. In the chapter where we define the braid, Jen and I allowed that the macro alliance need not be dyadic, that continuity can be distributed across a treatment team and held by the coherence of a system rather than by any single relationship. I think that was the right instinct aimed at too small a system. The field that shapes what your client expects from you was never a treatment team. It is the one you were each raised inside. Unlike a treatment frame, no one person is coordinating it. But it would be naive to call it conditions or weather: parts of that field were built on purpose, by people with agenda, and they have been sorting whose account of reality counts ever since.

How it gets in

In my opinion, this can be the hardest part to understand, and it is the reason this cannot be handled by good intentions.

For many of us, nobody sat us down and explicitly told us which of our perceptions were allowed to be real, or counted as valid. That is precisely what makes the teaching effective. It arrives through belonging. A child learns, long before language is of any use to them, which observations make the room warmer and which make it colder, and prunes accordingly; not as a decision, but the way any developing system prunes what goes unreinforced. Adolescence sharpens it against peer groups and schooling. And then, for those of us who went into this work, professional training arrives at exactly the moment when belonging is most expensive, and does the same thing again with a syllabus. Unlike the family, it also tests you. Grades, comprehensive exams, licensure, fidelity ratings, a consultant signing off on your tapes. We were not simply raised inside an interpretive frame. We were measured on our mastery of it, repeatedly, by people with the power to decide whether we belonged in the room at all. And the measuring is what made the frame feel like competence rather than a commitment.

I have come to call this nonconscious insidious adoption, and each of those words is carrying weight. Nonconscious, because it never surfaces as a choice. Insidious, because it works without coercion: nobody has to forbid a way of knowing if the people trained inside the system will quietly police themselves. And adoption, because at some point the borrowed frame stops feeling borrowed. Philosophers and social theorists alike have described the DNA and maintenance of this reality, but they all point to this: by adulthood, most of us no longer experience our adoptions as adoptions. We experience them as our own intrinsic way of making sense of things.

The cost is not only that we believe some wrong things. It is what the field calls foreclosure: the loss of the capacity to perceive an alternative as a live option at all. Not disagreement. Blindness with the lights on.

Which brings us back to the first essay in this series, and to the internal ledger I described there: the one that quietly decides which of your perceptions count as real clinical material and which get filed under soft. I framed that as something training installed. That was too kind to training. Training inherited a ledger that was already running, sharpened it, and then made professional credibility contingent on not questioning it.

And your client walked in with theirs.

The move nobody names

There is a companion move that happens not inside a person but inside a construct, and once you can see it you cannot stop seeing it.

A construct is produced somewhere. By particular people, in a particular history, under particular pressures, serving particular interests. And then at some point that is almost never marked, it gets promoted. It stops being a claim made from a location and becomes simply how things are. After that the construct enjoys a strange immunity: to question it no longer looks like questioning a claim, it looks like denying reality. The burden of proof flips. The person asking produced from where, and for whom? is suddenly the one who has to justify the faintly impolite suggestion that the self-evident might have an address.

I have come to call this ontological promotion, and our field is fluent in catching it. In one direction. When a clinician says that a culturally neutral therapy is not neutral but a situated practice carrying the unmarked assumptions of the people who built it, that clinician is reversing a promotion. Dragging a construct back down to its address. That is the core competency of anti-racist, feminist, and critical theory in clinical thought, and it is the same competency Herman, Brown, Linklater, Kleinman, and Archer have each been exercising, tellingly, from outside our usual citation habits.

The trouble is what we do with our own mechanisms.

The oldest form of the maneuver is John Locke’s: some qualities are primary and really in the object, and some are secondary and only in the mind of the perceiver. Shape is real; the redness is an effect in you. Alfred North Whitehead spent a career arguing that this two-tier split is not a discovery about nature but a decision about what to promote, followed by a forgetting that any decision was made: the fallacy of mistaking a useful abstraction for the concrete thing it was abstracted from.

Let’s consider Relational Thread from this perspective. Macro and micro alliance get treated as primary: really in the object, measurable, mechanism. The social and historical field gets treated as secondary: real enough as experience, but downstream, contextual, an effect in the mind of the perceiver rather than a feature of the thing itself. And the demotion feels like plain sense rather than a commitment, which is the maneuver’s signature. The most successful promotions never feel like arguments. They feel like…breathing. That’s what makes them insidious.

I should be specific about my own exposure here. The last essay in this series leaned hard on prediction and memory reconsolidation, and I introduced that material in a noticeably different register from everything around it. The oppression was situated. The wound was relational and historical. But the mechanism arrived clean: as computation, as substrate, as the placeless ground the situated story plays out on. I did not ask of it what I ask of everything else. A publication whose whole insight is that neutrality is a disguise cannot go on granting neutrality to its own favorite mechanism, protocol, or “neuroscience”.

The currency we were issued

This is where it stops being philosophy and starts being Tuesday.

The frame does not sit in the background of your clinical thinking. It is the instrument you assess with. Somewhere in training you learned, and were then examined on, a set of conventions about what counts. Which observations belong on a target list and which are context. What a channel of association is, as opposed to a tangent. When a client is processing and when they are avoiding. Which of the things that happen in a room get written down.

You use that frame hundreds of times an hour, and almost none of those uses are conscious. A client cries, and something in you registers meaningful. A client laughs in the same place, and something in you registers defended. A SUD drops and it lands as movement. A client spends nine minutes on a landlord, or a border crossing, or what her grandmother would have said about all this, and something in you begins quietly pricing it: is this on target, or is this the thing I warmly bring us back from?

Notice the verb. Pricing. Every one of those calls is a valuation, and a valuation requires a currency.

Here is what I have come to think about the currency we were issued. It is fiat.

That is not an insult. Fiat money is not counterfeit money. It buys real things, settles real debts, and coordinates the work of millions of people who will never meet. What makes it fiat is only this: its value does not come from the material it is made of. It comes from an authority having declared it, and from the rest of us agreeing to act accordingly.

Objectivity, as most of us were trained to practice it, works the same way. Not fake. Genuinely useful. It buys reliability across clinicians, it makes a case legible to a supervisor and an insurer and sometimes a court, and it lets a field accumulate something. And its value comes from a declaration and a long agreement, not from a reserve of placeless fact sitting in a vault under the building.

Which is a very different claim from nothing is real, and I want to refuse that version in advance, because it is the version this argument gets mistaken for. Everything that passes between you and your client is subjective in the strict sense: it happens in and between subjects, it is perspectival, it has an address. None of it is therefore meaningless. None of it is therefore worthless. A currency backed by agreement rather than gold still buys the groceries. The error was never in spending it. The error is in forgetting that it was issued, by someone, at some point, for reasons.

Because that forgetting is what turns a valuation into a perception. When you have forgotten the currency was issued, this is on target stops feeling like a judgment you are making and starts feeling like a property of the moment you are observing. And what your client brought in from their field (the landlord, the border, the grandmother) does not get weighed and set aside. It never reaches the scale.

Not a strand beside the others

There is a claim I keep returning to in my own work, and I am going to put it in plain terms rather than in the vocabulary it came to me in. People become who they are inside relationships. Those relationships are made of language somebody else built, seated in a history nobody consented to, shaped by who held power in it, felt in the body well before any of it is thought, and never fully visible to either person standing inside them.

Five claims, and every one of them refuses a promotion. Made of language refuses the promotion of any construct to the status of the given. Seated in a history refuses the erasure of the address. Shaped by power refuses the laundering of politics into fact. Felt before it is thought refuses the demotion of feeling to a secondary quality. And the fifth does the hardest work of all, which I will come back to.

This is what complicates the title of this essay. I called this a third strand, and that was too generous to the metaphor. A strand implies another circle drawn beside the first two, another content area to be added to the assessment. It is closer to the medium the other two are spun in. The macro alliance and the micro alliance are both real, and both are already made of this material. You do not add the social field to the braid. You notice that the braid was always being twisted inside one.

Which changes the register of the claim. If subjects emerge through relations, then a genuinely new relational experience is not merely corrective. It is constitutive. It does not only revise a belief a person holds about themselves; it participates in who they are in the process of becoming.

Why this is mechanism and not backdrop

So ask where a prediction like if you see the whole of me, you will leave was actually built.

Some of it in the family, certainly. The developmental literature has mapped that ground with real care. But some of it was built by a world that confirmed the same lesson from a thousand directions and was still confirming it on the drive over. If a prediction was built in part by a social field, then a disconfirmation supplied entirely inside a dyad is being asked to outvote that field alone.

Sometimes it can. This is not an argument that the room is powerless, and I have watched one relationship revise what decades of evidence had installed. But the odds seem to shift considerably depending on whether the therapist knows which field they are contradicting, and how active that field is in perpetuating the woundings it carries.

What neutrality costs here

There is a version of steadiness that treats the room as though the outside world waits politely in the hall. It reads as professionalism. So many of us were taught it as such.

But a therapist attending only to the two strands inside the room is not being neutral about the third. They are leaving the client alone with it. And the absence registers: the client’s system is reading for whether this can be brought here, and it finds an answer in what you do not ask about, in what you do not appear to know, in the small flatness that arrives when you would rather return to the target. The slate is not blank. It never was. Here, too, the erasure is something the client pays for.

So the practice is not to become a sociologist in the chair. It is smaller than that, and harder. …let the room stay permeable.

The strand cuts both ways

I have been describing this as though its only contribution were bad predictions, and that is not honest.

The same field that installs you will not be believed is also where a great deal of a person’s most potent disconfirming material lives: a language, a practice, a landscape, a lineage of people who survived the same thing. In my own work on potentiation I have argued that what makes a disconfirming experience hold is salience. And salience is not something a therapist can manufacture from outside a person. It is usually something the client walked in already carrying, out of the same field we have been treating as the problem.

Which is a more hopeful way to say what this is. It is not only the source of the prediction. It is often the only place with material strong enough to contradict it.

The strongest metal

Now the fifth claim, the one I set aside: never fully visible to either person standing inside them.

You cannot fully see the field your client is inside. You cannot fully see your own, which is the more uncomfortable half, because adoptions do not present themselves as adoptions. Donna Haraway had the sharpest name for the alternative fantasy: she called it the god-trick, the pretense of seeing everything from nowhere, the gaze that claims the power to see without being seen. The opacity clause is what makes that trick unavailable to everyone in the room, therapist and theorist and mechanism alike. If nobody is fully transparent, no construct gets the view from nowhere either.

The obvious worry is that this leaves us with less. It does not, and this is the part I most want to land.

Haraway’s own answer to the god-trick was never relativism, which she called its perfect mirror twin, a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. Being nowhere is what happens when you decide that a fiat currency is therefore counterfeit and refuse to spend anything. Sandra Harding gave the better alternative its proper name: strong objectivity. Ordinary objectivity, she argued, is actually too weak. It scrutinizes the object of study and exempts the knower, the discipline, and the background assumptions from the same scrutiny, which leaves the most consequential distortions unexamined precisely because everyone shares them. Extending the scrutiny to the knower is not a concession to politics. It is an upgrade in rigor.

Think about it as metal, because the metallurgy is exact rather than ornamental.

Pure scientism is cast iron. Enormously strong along the single axis it was cast for, and brittle everywhere else. Load it from an angle nobody anticipated (a client the model was never built from, a rival mechanism explaining the same data) and it does not bend. It shatters. Its apparent invincibility, the refusal to admit any angle from which it might fail, is exactly what guarantees the failure is catastrophic when the angle arrives. This, in my perception, is what’s happening in the debate over the debunking of poly-vagal theory: its critics are “certain” that they’ve shattered it, and the adopters are insisting on its strong objectivity.

Pure deflationary critique is over-annealed metal, ductile to the point of uselessness. All give and no hold. It will never shatter because it never bears weight. You can bend it into a critique of any structure and build none, and you cannot hand it to a therapist on Monday morning and say, here is what to do.

What this essay has been describing is tempered steel. Its strength comes from combining what neither pure element has alone: the hardness to hold a load and the toughness to take a shock without fracturing. Under an unexpected load, tempered steel deforms locally instead of failing globally. It gives a little, right where the stress is, and by giving there it keeps its shape everywhere else.

So the situatedness is not the flaw in the metal. The situatedness is the carbon in the steel. Naming where a model came from, whom it was built with and for, which rival accounts it is not quietly displacing, and what it cannot see: that is what lets an explanatory claim take a hit from history or from a disconfirming case and bend at the point of stress rather than break across the whole structure. Reflexivity is not the solvent that dissolves the science. It is the alloying agent that tempers it.

Which inverts the thing I was braced for when I started writing this. I assumed that admitting the third strand would mean holding our mechanisms more loosely. It means the opposite. The braid is not overreaching when it names macro and micro. It is underbuilt: cast when it could have been tempered, poured into a single brittle shape when the same material, alloyed with its own situatedness, would carry far more weight.

What to do with this on Tuesday

Four suggestions, offered as practices rather than protocol.

Ask what field the prediction was built in. Not only when did you first learn this about yourself, but where, and who else was in that room, and what were they being taught at the same time. Race, gender, class, faith, money, papers, a body that did or did not move the way the room expected: these are not demographic boxes. They are the conditions under which your client learned what happens when a person is honest. History-taking already reaches for the family. Archer’s contribution to Phase 1 is a set of questions that reach wider than that, and the principle is portable: you can go further without turning an intake into a survey.

Watch yourself pricing. Once a session, catch the moment you decide something is on target, or a tangent, or meaningful, or defended. You do not have to change the call. Just notice that you made one, in a currency you did not mint. That sorting is an integral condition of the field, and it is doing more work than almost anything else you will do that hour.

Go looking for your own promotions. Not your opinions. Those you can find easily. The constructs that do not feel like positions at all: what you count as evidence, what strikes you as rigorous, which mechanism you reach for first and have never once asked to state its address. Those were promoted early enough to feel like perception.

Let the world in when it arrives. When something from outside enters the session, the trained reflex is to acknowledge it briefly and steer back to the target. Sometimes that is right. But if any of this holds, then the moment the world walks in is not a detour from the reprocessing. It may be the network coming online with its actual contents.

The braid, recounted

So the braid has a strand we did not count. Not because we thought it did not matter — because we were looking hard at what happens between two people, and this one was already inside both of them before either of them arrived.

The macro alliance has an inventory. The micro alliance has coding schemes and second-by-second video. This one has nothing going for it but two people willing to keep noticing, out loud, what neither of them can see alone. Which is, I would point out, roughly the standing the alliance itself held forty years ago, shortly before the evidence caught up.

Two nervous systems in a room are never only two. There is what you have built together, and what you build in the moment, and everything that built the two of you before you met.

The shift at the end of a session, or its refusal, has more than two authors.

The thread was never only ours to spin.

The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. Subscribing is free.

Sources mentioned: Haraway (1988), “Situated Knowledges”; Harding (1993), “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology”; Whitehead (1925), Science and the Modern World; Locke (1690), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Bourdieu (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice; Foucault (1966), The Order of Things; Herman (1992), Trauma and Recovery; Brown (2008), Cultural Competence in Trauma Therapy; Linklater (2014), Decolonizing Trauma Work; Kleinman (1988), The Illness Narratives; Archer (2021), Anti-Racist Psychotherapy.

David returns to the podcast (his first visit was 2022) as an anti-racist psychotherapist, EMDR trainer, and author of five books, to walk through rhythm and processing (RAP): his approach to the mental health consequences of complex racial trauma, grounded in predictive processing and memory reconsolidation. The mechanics are concrete. The client generates their own list of trauma targets, including the racial trauma questions most intakes never ask. The client — not the therapist — chooses the resource: a photo from a trip to Jamaica, a pet's nervous system alongside their own, a ten-hour video of a Sahara sand dune. Then a present-moment action lets the body discover that the old prediction no longer holds. Salience, not positivity, is the key — and it can't be chosen for the client, because the therapist can't feel what the sand dune means. What emerges is a way to help people heal with a lower risk of abreaction — a way to heal, in David's words, through joy.

Along the way: why race and gender are constructions with real consequences in the nervous system, what a genogram reveals for white and white-passing clients that a symptom checklist never will, where structural dissociation fits alongside parts work, and the seven Afrocentric dimensions that widen what we mean by resourcing — spirituality, collectivism, and an understanding of ancestorhood in which a person remains present as long as their name is spoken. David closes with an invitation to be a revolutionary therapist: carry the sword, and carry the shield.

In this episode

David Archer — social worker, marriage and family therapist, anti-racist psychotherapist, and EMDR trainer in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke, the unceded territory the city sits on) — returns four years after his first conversation with Bridger. Since then he has written five books, seen his work included in required readings for newly trained EMDR therapists, and developed rhythm and processing (RAP): strategies for the mental health consequences of complex racial trauma. This conversation moves from the sociopolitical moment into the session room — and stays there long enough to show you how the work actually looks.

Key themes

• Race is constructed; racial trauma is not. Race is not a biological or scientific category — it was built for colonization, extraction, and slavery. And its consequences live in the nervous system. David's African clients name it precisely: "The first time I ever had racial trauma is when I came to Canada. And then I found out I was black." The same lens applies to gender — these are not logical problems, so logic alone will miss the target. A trauma-focused understanding is required.

• The white therapist, too — heal thyself. Whiteness is not a monolith ("Canadian" is not a race). White and white-passing clients carry unasked-about histories — immigration, refugee status, witnessed trauma — and therapists carry their own. The work of anti-racist psychotherapy includes the therapist's own healing, not as a disclaimer but as a clinical necessity.

• Where words run out. Five years as an addictions counselor in Indigenous communities around Montreal taught David that words couldn't reach the depths of his clients' suffering — the survival responses underneath had no words at all. That's what drew him to EMDR: insight that arrives from the client's own associative work, not the therapist's interpretation.

• Loving an approach means staying critical of it. Some trainees finish basic training without confidence across the spectrum of dissociation; some communities have to ask whether EMDR was built for them. RAP puts race, social identity, complex racial trauma, dissociation, therapist self-care, and community care into the frame from phase one onward.

• The RAP technique: disconfirmation through client-chosen salience. Through a predictive-processing lens, healing is memory reconsolidation: reactivate the prediction, then let the body meet evidence that no longer fits. The client chooses the image or video — their trip, their pet, their culture, their spirituality — and a present-moment action (tapping, blinking, an epistemic search) anchors the body in the now. Salience, not positivity, is the criterion — the resource can look boring from the outside and still carry everything.

• Parts, under-resourcing, and structural dissociation. Different parts may need different resources — the oven mitts before what's coming out of the oven. RAP sits alongside IFS-informed EMDR work and adds explicit consideration of structural dissociation.

• An Afrocentric frame, for every client. Drawing on Belgrave & Allison's Afrocentric dimensions: spirituality (connection to something greater, religious or not), collectivism over the individualism David sees at the root of much Western suffering, and ancestorhood — the understanding that a person remains in community, and in the present, as long as their name is spoken.

• The revolutionary therapist. Do therapeutic things even where you aren't a therapist. Stay aware of climate as a mental-health context. Remember poverty is a policy outcome, not a personal one. Carry the sword (boundaries, advocacy) and the shield (protection from misinformation and vicarious trauma). And on AI: "You have actual intelligence."

Practical clinical takeaways (what you can bring into your next session)

• Add racial trauma questions to your history-taking for every client — and build a genogram that tracks positive and negative legacies on both sides of the family. For white and white-passing clients, that's often where the unspoken history lives.

• Let the client generate the target list. David's RAP intake questions produce a client-authored spreadsheet of specific trauma targets — the client as active participant in their healing, from the first session.

• Follow salience, not positivity. Ask what holds vitality for the client — a trip, a pet, a place, a practice from their culture or spirituality — and resist supplying your own favorite. The therapist cannot feel what the sand dune means.

• Pair the chosen image with a present-moment action — tapping, blinking, an epistemic search (looking for numbers in the room) — so the body registers now while the old prediction is active. That mismatch is the disconfirmation.

• Resource the part, not just the person. Ask which part needs the oven mitts, and consider where your client sits on the spectrum of dissociation before reprocessing.

• Widen your resourcing frame: spirituality, collective belonging, ancestors whose names are still spoken. These are resources in the truest neurobiological sense.

Why this episode matters

Much of trauma training quietly assumes healing must pass through pain on the way to relief. This conversation offers a different account: when the client chooses what is salient — their culture, their joy, their sand dune — the disconfirmation can arrive through what is loved rather than only through what is feared, with a lower risk of abreaction. And it restores something the old narrative of trauma took away: the client as the active participant in their own healing. That's not a softer version of the work. It may be a more precise one.

David Archer

• Archer Therapy (website, blog & weekly consults): https://archertherapy.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

• What is the RAP Agenda? (rhythm and processing): https://archertherapy.com/what-is-the-rap-agenda/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

• EMDR consultation & monthly two-hour rhythm and processing workshops (low-cost and no-cost options): https://archertherapy.com/training/consultation/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

David's five books

• Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: Confronting Systemic Racism and Healing Racial Trauma (also on audiobook): https://archertherapy.com/books/anti-racist-psychotherapy/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

• Black Meditation: Ten Practices for Self-Care, Mindfulness, and Self-Determination (also on audiobook): https://archertherapy.com/books/black-meditation/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

• Racial Trauma Recovery: Healing Our Past Using Rhythm and Processing: https://archertherapy.com/books/racial-trauma-recovery/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

• Black Mountain: Fight for the Future (Afrofuturist novel): https://archertherapy.com/books/black-mountain/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

• Transforming Complex Trauma: Reflections on Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: https://archertherapy.com/books/transforming-complex-trauma/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

Mentioned in the conversation

• David's first Notice That conversation (2022): https://emdr-podcast.com/david-archer-anti-racist-74/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

• Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564299/how-to-be-an-antiracist-by-ibram-x-kendi/

• Belgrave & Allison, African American Psychology: From Africa to America (the Afrocentric dimensions): https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/african-american-psychology/book248474

• IFS-Informed EMDR: Creative and Collaborative Approaches (David Polidi, Routledge, 2025): https://www.routledge.com/IFS-Informed-EMDR-Creative-and-Collaborative-Approaches/Polidi/p/book/9781032891675

• Thomas Zimmerman, EMDR Cleveland (David's training collaborator): https://emdrcleveland.com/

• Bridger & Jen's book, EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread, and the essay series: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Two sessions. Same protocol, run with the same fidelity.

In the first, every phase lands where the manual says it should. The target is activated, the sets are clean, the SUD drops on schedule, the positive cognition installs to a seven. On paper it is a model session. And three weeks later the client returns essentially unchanged — the belief we watched go quiet has crept back to where it started, intact.

In the second, something interrupts the plan. Mid-set the client says a small true thing they have never said aloud, and looks up to see whether we flinch. We don’t. We stay. These moments are among the most uncanny, where a reality emerges between us that shows us something genuine, unpolished, and honest — two human beings stumbling on to raw connection. Neither of us could tell you what “technique” that was. But that is the session the client is still referring to a year later — the one where something reorganized and did not creep back.

We have all had both. And most of us were trained to explain the difference by reaching for a word: rapport, or safety, or the great catch-all, the relationship was strong. Useful words. But notice what they quietly do. They file the second session’s decisive moment outside the mechanism — as the warm conditions around the real work, something to appreciate but not count on — rather than the work itself. This essay is about taking that moment and moving it to the center, where the evidence increasingly suggests it belongs.

The word that demotes it

For decades the field had a category for what happened in that second session: nonspecific. The alliance, empathy, presence — the “common factors” — were understood as the supportive backdrop against which the specific, active ingredients (the protocol, the technique) did the actual causal work. Even clinicians who love the relationship often speak of it this way. It is the container. It holds the work. It is not, in this telling, the work.

The container metaphor got something real: you cannot process what cannot be held, and a nervous system in genuine threat does not integrate anything. Honor that. But “container” and “support” and “nonspecific” all perform the same quiet demotion — they place presence adjacent to the change rather than inside it. And when we look at how change actually happens in the brain, that adjacency gets harder to defend. The thing we called the backdrop keeps showing up in the causal path.

How memory actually changes

Here is the part worth slowing down for, because the mechanism is more specific than “relationships help.”

For most of a century we assumed that a consolidated memory was fixed — that therapy worked by building new, competing learning alongside the old, and hoping the new outcompeted the old. Extinction, essentially. It explained why so much hard-won therapeutic gain relapsed under stress: the original learning was never rewritten, only overlaid.

The reconsolidation research complicated that picture, in a way that matters enormously for what we do. When an emotional memory is reactivated under the right conditions, it appears to become briefly labile — literally destabilized at the synaptic level, open to being rewritten before it re-stores. Bruce Ecker and his colleagues distilled the clinical requirements into a sequence: reactivate the old emotional learning, and then, while it is open, deliver a mismatch — a lived experience that contradicts what the old learning predicts. Not information against the belief. An experience against it. Lane and their colleagues, synthesizing the same literature for psychotherapy broadly, arrived at a compatible account: emotional arousal plus a new, contradictory emotional experience, integrated in the moment, is what durably updates the network. In our own field, Chamberlin has argued that this is a plausible part of why EMDR does what it does — the protocol is unusually good at reactivating a target network and taxing it into a malleable state.

But let’s sit with the shape of that requirement. The old learning has to be on — activated, felt, not merely discussed. And then it has to meet something that genuinely violates its prediction, vividly enough that the nervous system registers the violation. That is the moment the memory can rewrite. Miss either half — no activation, or no mismatch — and the network re-stores unchanged. A textbook-clean session that never surfaced a real contradiction is exactly the first of my two sessions: everything reactivated, nothing disconfirmed, the belief quietly restored to a seven and then home to itself.

The mismatch has to be felt — and most of the deep ones are relational

So what supplies the mismatch?

For a great many of our clients — especially those whose wounds are developmental and relational — the prediction that needs violating is not really about a discrete event. It is about what happens between people. If I show you this, you will withdraw. If I need something, you will resent me. If you see the whole of me, you will leave. These are not thoughts they can be argued out of. They are priors, built early, held in the body, confirmed thousands of times. Karlen Lyons-Ruth names the core of it as the internalized certainty of being too much, or not enough, to be held.

Now here’s a hot take: You cannot disconfirm a relational prediction with a technique. You can only disconfirm it with a relationship — with a lived experience, in real time, of showing the unspeakable thing and not being met with the predicted criticism, rejection, and withdrawal. And this is where the demoted “backdrop” turns out to be the causal agent, because the contradiction is the therapist. The steadiness that stays when the client braced for absence is not the warm condition around the reprocessing. In that moment it is the reprocessing — the very mismatch the memory needed in order to rewrite. Essay two ended on this line and I want to unpack the mechanism claims within it now, not as sentiment: we are the contradiction.

Which means a blank slate has a specific, technical problem. A therapist who holds perfect neutrality while a client reactivates an abandonment network supplies no mismatch at all. Even worse — the neutral, unreadable face is often a match: it confirms the prediction that other people go absent under the weight of one’s need. The old learning reactivates and finds exactly what it expected, and re-stores, strengthened. This is not a soft observation about warmth. It is a claim about why some technically faithful trauma work quietly fails, and it points at the therapist’s presence as the variable.

Why the presence has to be genuine, not performed

You might reasonably ask whether this could be manualized — whether the “disconfirming response” could be scripted and delivered on cue. Say the warm line at the right phase. The trouble is that the nervous system we are trying to update is exquisitely tuned to detect exactly that. Performance, manipulation, and misrepresentation.

Stephen Porges’s work (again, not gonna relitigate the evolutionary validity of differentiated parasympathetic innervation in fruit flies here) on neuroception describes a fast, sub-cortical appraisal running constantly beneath awareness, reading the other person’s prosody, face, and autonomic state for cues of genuine safety and availability versus threat and agenda. Geller and Porges have argued that a therapist’s actual physiological presence — really settled, really engaged — is itself a safety cue the client’s system detects and settles toward. And a nervous system doing that appraisal is, by design, reading for the genuine article: performed or absent presence is information too, and it gets read. Allan Schore describes the same traffic as right-brain to right-brain: affect regulation transmitted through implicit channels faster than either person’s cortex can compose a sentence — it’s felt and inhabited before it’s named or understood. A scripted warmth delivered by a therapist who has, in that moment, left the room to monitor their own performance is not a mismatch. The client’s body reads the absence and flags it under confirmed.

This is why presencing — the genuine, cultivated, moment-to-moment quality of contact — is not decoration substituted for the mechanism. It is load-bearing as the mechanism. The reactivation can be protocol-driven, but the contradiction cannot be faked, because the thing doing the appraising was built specifically to spot this.

There is a frontier version of this worth naming, if only lightly. As our field begins to pair processing with pharmacologically heightened neuroplastic states — the ketamine-assisted work, for instance — the same question sharpens rather than dissolves: when the window of malleability is pried open wider, what determines what gets written into it? The honest hypothesis Jen and I hold is that presence there is not merely supportive but constitutive — that it shapes the content of what integrates during the open window. The drug can open the window. It cannot be the contradiction. Someone has to be.

The channels the contradiction travels on

If the contradiction has to be felt, it is worth asking through what, exactly, it reaches the client — because it is almost never the sentence. A reassuring line delivered in a thin, quick voice reassures no one; the same words, carried on a voice that has slowed and dropped and settled to where the client, you, and the space between actually is, land as something the body can believe. The disconfirming experience travels on the sub-lexical channels: prosody, tempo, the pause before a response, the pitch and warmth of the voice, the softening or bracing of the face, the rhythm of breath, the small lean forward, the willingness to let a silence stretch rather than fill it. Beatrice Beebe’s microanalytic research and Daniel Stern’s writing on the present moment locate relational change precisely here — in tiny, reciprocal, second-by-second exchanges beneath the words. The point for our purposes is that these are not manners. They are, as the developmental researchers keep insisting, regulatory operations — the actual instruments through which one nervous system tells another it is safe to feel and express, and perhaps even revise a prediction. When we choose our word for a client’s grief, we are also, and more consequentially, choosing the tempo we say it at.

Which changes what “word choice” even means in this work. The lexical content matters, but it rides on a carrier wave the client’s system is weighting more heavily — and a contradiction delivered in propositional form (“you’re safe here”) while the carrier wave says otherwise (rushed, flat, subtly withdrawn) is not a contradiction at all. It is, again, a match: the body hears the old prediction confirmed underneath the words. The mismatch lives in the prosody, or it does not live.

Observing our own participation

None of this is a set of dials to turn. That is the part I most want to protect. You cannot manufacture an animated, attuned presence by deciding to lower your pitch and lean four degrees forward — the system built to spot inauthenticity catches that, too. Presence, as Shari Geller and Leslie Greenberg describe it, is not applied to the room; it is cultivated by attending inward to your own embodied experience, outward to the client’s cues, and — the part that matters most here — by letting the field between you guide the response. Co-regulation, in the book’s framing, is not something we perform on a client. It emerges between two nervous systems in contact.

So the practice is not to operate the channels but to observe our participation in them. To notice, in real time, that our tempo has just quickened — and to grow curious about what in the field quickened it. To catch our voice thinning as the client nears the unspeakable thing, and to read that thinning as information about what is rising between us, not only within us. To feel the urge to fix arrive, and let it breathe a moment before it becomes a sentence. This is the difference between a steadiness we impose on the room and a presence that is animated by the room — responsive, alive, co-constituted, emergent. Optimal attunement is not a flat calm we hold against the client’s storm. It is a presence the field draws out of us and keeps reshaping, moment to moment: grounded enough to stay, spacious enough not to rush, relational enough to feel a rupture the instant it opens.

And this is the hopeful part, because it is workable. We cannot will ourselves genuine. But we can get better at noticing — at tracking our own prosody, tempo, and bracing as a live readout of the relational field, and letting that noticing soften and reanimate our presence from the inside, rather than from a rule. The channels cannot be faked. But they can be felt, and freed, and returned to contact.

What this changes on Tuesday

If presence is in the causal path and not beside it, three things follow. Offered as practices, not protocol.

Reactivate with the relationship on, not just the target. The protocol is very good at bringing the old network online. But if the goal is a genuine disconfirmation, then the relationship has to be live at the moment of activation — you have to actually be there, not narrating the phases from a careful, procedural distance. The activation and the contradiction have to happen in the same room, at the same time, or the window opens onto no one.

Treat the disconfirming moment as the reprocessing — not a detour from it. When the client says the true thing and checks your face, the pull is often to note it and steer back to the “real” set. But by this account, that glance is the set — the memory is open and a prediction is being tested in real time. Slowing down and letting the contradiction land is not going off-protocol. It may be the most on-target thing happening.

Hold the window; the steadiness is doing the encoding.​ The vulnerable minutes after something true has been said are not downtime before the next procedural step. They are when a reactivated network is deciding what to re-store, revise, and rewrite. Staying regulated, present, and unwithdrawn across those minutes is not bedside manner. It is, quite literally, part of what gets encoded — the new prediction, laid down in the presence of the person who stayed. This is why our dynamics matter so much — when we’re alive with the room, moving in choreography with the affect and presence of our client, that’s what shapes the encoded experience.

The soft part was the mechanism all along

So the moment we were trained to file under rapport turns out to have a place in the causal story of how memory changes — not adjacent to it, but inside it. What our field called nonspecific may be among the most specific things in the room: the particular, felt, unfakeable experience that violates an old relational prediction while the network is open to being rewritten. Presence is not the warmth around the intervention. On this reading, presence is what makes the intervention land as something new, and it is what carries the effects of the work to the places it needs to go most.

None of this retires the protocol. The eight phases still reactivate the network, tax working memory, and give the work its shape and its safety; that scaffolding is real and I would not run trauma processing without it. But the scaffolding was never the thing that rewrote the memory. The contradiction did. And the contradiction has to be genuine, has to be felt, and has to be supplied by a person who is actually there — which returns us, by a longer and more neurobiological road, to where this series keeps arriving.

The relationship, we said in the first essay, is the work. The person of the therapist, we said in the second, is the instrument. Now the third claim: the presence is the mechanism — the live, contradicting experience through which an old memory, reactivated and briefly open, learns something it was certain could never be true. That certainty, quietly disconfirmed, is where people change. We, together, are the disconfirmation. It was never the soft part of the work. It was the part doing the work all along.

The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. If you’d rather listen, each essay is read aloud on the Notice That podcast. Subscribing is free.

Sources mentioned: Ecker, Ticic & Hulley (2012), Unlocking the Emotional Brain; Lane, Ryan, Nadel & Greenberg (2015), Behavioral and Brain Sciences; Chamberlin (2019), Journal of EMDR Practice and Research / Frontiers in Psychology; Lyons-Ruth (1999); Porges (2022), polyvagal theory; Geller & Porges (2014), Journal of Psychotherapy Integration; Geller & Greenberg (2002), Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies; Lepak & Carson (2022); Beebe et al. (2010); Stern (2004), The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life; Schore (2012), The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. “Presencing,” the reconsolidation reading of EMDR, and the constitutive-presence hypothesis are drawn from EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (Falkenstien & Savage, 2027).

Drawing on the memory-reconsolidation research, Bridger reads the third essay in The Relational Thread and makes the claim underneath the first two: your presence isn't the warm support around the real work. It may be the mechanism of the real work — the felt, unfakeable experience that contradicts an old relational prediction while the memory is briefly open to being rewritten. Why a blank slate supplies no mismatch. Why the disconfirming moment can't be scripted. The sub-lexical channels it actually travels on. And three things to try on Tuesday.

In this episode

Bridger reads Essay 3 and completes a thought the series has been building toward. The first essay said the relationship is the work. The second said the person of the therapist is the instrument. This one makes the claim underneath both: presence isn't the backdrop the intervention happens against — it may be part of the causal path by which an old memory changes. The whole thing turns on two sessions run with identical fidelity, where one reorganizes something for good and the other quietly restores the client to exactly where they started.

Key themes

• The demotion hidden in our favorite words. Rapport, safety, the relationship was strong, container, nonspecific — all useful, and all doing the same quiet thing: filing presence next to the change rather than inside it. The episode honors what "container" got right (a nervous system in genuine threat integrates nothing) and then moves the moment we file under rapport to the center.

• How a memory actually changes. For most of a century we assumed therapy worked by extinction — building new learning alongside the old and hoping it outcompetes. Reconsolidation complicates that: a reactivated emotional memory becomes briefly labile, open to being rewritten before it re-stores. Ecker's clinical sequence — reactivate the old learning, then, while it's open, deliver a mismatch — is the spine of the episode.

• The contradiction is the therapist. For clients whose wounds are developmental and relational, the prediction that needs violating is about what happens between people (if you see the whole of me, you will leave). You can't disconfirm a relational prediction with a technique — only with a relationship. The steadiness that stays when the client braced for absence isn't the warm condition around the reprocessing. In that moment, it is the reprocessing.

• Why a blank slate has a technical problem. A therapist holding perfect neutrality while a client reactivates an abandonment network supplies no mismatch — and the unreadable face is often a match, confirming that people go absent under the weight of one's need. This is an account of why some technically faithful trauma work quietly fails.

• It can't be scripted, because the nervous system is built to catch scripts. Neuroception (Porges) runs a fast, subcortical read of prosody, face, and autonomic state for genuine safety versus performance. Presence delivered on cue, by a therapist who has left the room to monitor their own performance, gets read as absence and filed under confirmed.

• The mismatch lives in the carrier wave. The disconfirming experience travels on the sub-lexical channels — tempo, prosody, the pause before a response, the willingness to let a silence stretch. "You're safe here," said rushed and flat, is not a contradiction; it's a match the body hears underneath the words. When we choose our word for a client's grief, we're also choosing the tempo we say it at.

• You can't operate the channels — but you can notice them. Presence isn't a set of dials (lower the pitch, lean four degrees forward); the system that spots inauthenticity catches that too. It's cultivated by attending inward, outward, and to the field between — and by tracking your own tempo and bracing as a live readout of the relational field.

Practical clinical takeaways (three things to try on Tuesday — offered as practices, not protocol)

• Reactivate with the relationship on — not just the target. The protocol is very good at bringing the old network online. But a genuine disconfirmation needs the relationship live at the moment of activation — you actually there, not narrating the phases from a careful, procedural distance. The activation and the contradiction have to happen in the same room, at the same time.

• Treat the disconfirming moment as the reprocessing — not a detour from it. When the client says the true thing and checks your face, the pull is to note it and steer back to the "real" set. By this account, that glance is the set — the memory is open and a prediction is being tested in real time. Letting the contradiction land is not going off-protocol. It may be the most on-target thing happening.

• Hold the window — the steadiness is doing the encoding. The vulnerable minutes after something true has been said are not downtime before the next step. They're when a reactivated network decides what to re-store. Staying regulated, present, and unwithdrawn across those minutes is, quite literally, part of what gets encoded — the new prediction, laid down in the presence of the person who stayed.

Concepts, frameworks & names mentioned

• Memory reconsolidation (clinical sequence) — Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic & Laurel Hulley (Unlocking the Emotional Brain, 2012): reactivate the old learning, then deliver a lived mismatch while it's labile.

• Reconsolidation synthesis for psychotherapy — Lane, Ryan, Nadel & Greenberg (2015): emotional arousal plus a new, contradictory emotional experience, integrated in the moment, is what durably updates the network.

• Reconsolidation and EMDR — Chamberlin: EMDR is unusually good at reactivating a target network and taxing it into a malleable state.

• "Too much, or not enough, to be held" — Karlen Lyons-Ruth, on the internalized relational prior at the core of developmental wounding.

• Neuroception / polyvagal theory — Stephen Porges: a fast, subcortical read of safety versus threat and agenda, beneath awareness.

• Therapeutic presence as a physiological safety cue — Geller & Porges: a therapist's genuinely settled, engaged presence is itself a cue the client's system detects and settles toward.

• Therapeutic presence (cultivated, not applied) — Shari Geller & Leslie Greenberg: presence attended inward, outward, and to the field between.

• Right-brain-to-right-brain affective communication — Allan Schore: affect regulation transmitted on implicit channels, faster than either cortex can compose a sentence.

• Microanalysis & the present moment — Beatrice Beebe (second-by-second reciprocal exchange) and Daniel Stern (the present moment): relational change located beneath the words, as regulatory operations rather than manners.

• Presencing, the reframe of "nonspecific" common factors, and the relational reading of reprocessing — from EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (Falkenstien & Savage).

Why this episode matters

Most continuing education hands you another way to work on the memory. This episode points at the variable in the room that decides whether the work lands at all — the person who has to actually be there when an old certainty is briefly open to learning it was wrong. It completes the series' through-line: if the relationship is the work and the person is the instrument, then presence is the mechanism — the live, contradicting experience an old prediction meets while the network is open. That's the claim that turns "be warm" from bedside manner into part of the clinical account.

Listen & subscribe

The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the space between therapist and client and what actually changes people in it. Each essay is read aloud here on Notice That. Read it and subscribe — free, one essay a week available here.

The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage.

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Somewhere in our training, we were taught to keep our faces still.

Maybe no one said it outright. But the lesson arrived anyway, in the raised eyebrow of a supervisor, in the word neutral on a competency checklist, in the quiet sense that a good clinician does not flinch. So we learned. A client says the unspeakable thing, and something moves in us — a sting behind the eyes, a flush of anger on their behalf, an ache we can’t quite place — and we hold our expression level, perhaps with an encoded range of “acceptable and appropriate affect.” We were taught to file the reaction under countertransference, make a note to take it to consultation, and return our attention to where we were trained to believe the real work is happening: in the client, through the technique.

Last week’s essay made a claim about the space between therapist and client: that the felt shift, or its refusal, at the end of a session is data, not sentiment. The writing here follows that claim to the place it leads, which can be uncomfortable. If the relationship is doing the work, then we are doing the work. Not the protocol. Not the technique. Us, the clinician, sitting there with a still face and moving insides.

I want to suggest that the reaction smoothed away was not an interruption of the work. It may have been the work reaching for us. To remind and show us that, despite how difficult it may be, the instrument was never the protocol. The instrument is the person.

What the tradition got right, and what it cost

This discipline of holding ourselves back has an honorable origin. Analytic abstinence, therapeutic neutrality, the blank slate… these were not arbitrary cruelties of intentional self-erasure. They were built to protect the client from something real: the therapist’s agenda, the therapist’s wounds, the imposition of one person’s unexamined material onto another person’s moment of vulnerability and need. EMDR inherited a version of this too, in its own cultural emphasis on staying out of the way and trusting the client’s system. A clinician who cannot be present with their own reactions without impulsively reacting to them will flood the room. The tradition was right to worry about that.

But a blank slate, by definition, cannot co-regulate. And regulation, as far as we can tell, is not a solo achievement the client performs while we observe. Louis Cozolino puts it plainly: the embodied brain is a social organ; its flexibility and integration are forged in relationship, not in isolation. When we make ourselves as absent as possible in the name of objectivity and impartiality, we may be withholding the very thing a dysregulated nervous system came looking for: another nervous system, present and steady, willing to be affected and engaged without being overwhelmed or prone to critique and shame.

And for some clients, the cost is not neutral at all. Karlen Lyons-Ruth locates the core wound of disorganized attachment not in abuse alone but in misattunement, in missed repair, in the internalized belief that I am too much, or not enough, to be held. A client who learned that early does not experience carefully maintained neutrality as safety. They experience it as absence — an eerily familiar one. Following the protocol precisely, without presence, can quietly confirm the very thing they came to disconfirm: that they are alone in their pain, observed rather than accompanied, handled rather than held.

So the corrective is not to abandon discipline. It is to move inside it. The skill was never the absence of the self. It is the use of the self, on purpose, in the client’s service.

The research quietly agrees: who we are matters more than what we do

Here is the finding our trainings rarely put in the foreground. When researchers account for everything about a course of therapy — the model, the manual, the diagnosis, the technique — and then ask how much of the outcome traces back to which therapist the client happened to see, the answer is: a meaningful, stubborn amount. Baldwin and Imel (2013), reviewing the therapist-effects literature, found that therapists differ from one another in outcomes to a degree that specific techniques struggle to explain. Wampold and Imel (2015) reached the same place from another angle: the person of the therapist is one of the most robust predictors we have, and it does not reduce to what school they trained in.

This is a strange and slightly uncomfortable finding. It means the variable we are often least formally trained to develop — ourselves — may be the one doing the most work. While we spend our continuing-education hours accumulating protocols and evidence-based techniques, the outcome evidence keeps pointing at the practitioner holding them.

Countertransference is not noise. It is a second channel.

Return to the sting behind the eyes. Psychoanalysis spent its first decades treating the therapist’s emotional response as contamination — a lapse to be analyzed away. Then Paula Heimann, in 1950, made the turn that still hasn’t fully reached our fidelity checklists: she proposed that the therapist’s felt response might be an instrument of research into the client’s unconscious — information, not interference. Karen Maroda and the relational analysts who followed built this into a practice: the therapist’s inner weather, held with discipline, is one of the most sensitive assessment tools in the room.

The discipline is everything, though, and it cuts in two directions simultaneously. What we feel might be a perception of the client’s field — the grief they can’t yet reach, the anger they were never allowed to hold, the panic forever neglected. Or it might be our own history, activated by something in the room that belongs to our life and not theirs. Usually it is some braid of both. Philip Bromberg described the therapist as someone who must learn to stand in the spaces between their own self-states, present to more than one truth at a time. That is the actual skill. Not a decontaminated signal. A capacity to feel something strongly and hold it as a curiosity rather than a certainty.

This is why the instrument requires tuning. Not to eliminate our reactions, but to know them well enough to tell our weather from theirs.

Our body is not neutral

We tend to imagine the therapist’s contribution as what happens above the neck: the formulation, the reflection, the well-timed interweave… the “right” thing said at just the “right” time. But most of what the client’s nervous system is actually reading happens below it. Allan Schore has spent a career describing the affective communication that runs right brain to right brain — beneath language, through tone, posture, facial micro-shifts, the rhythm of a breath. On that channel, there is no such thing as a neutral therapist. Our groundedness is a signal. So is our bracing. The client’s body takes both in as data about whether this room is safe, whether we’re connected, whether the relationship can be trusted.

Jen and I wrote a whole chapter in The Relational Thread arguing that even the body scan — Phase 6, ostensibly the most procedural moment in EMDR — is a relational event, because the therapist’s body is part of the regulatory environment whether or not we intend it to be. Sometimes the most honest intervention available is to let that show. As you notice your body right now, I’m aware of a heaviness in my own chest. I wonder if that resonates, or if your body is telling a different story. The client’s experience stays centered. But our nervous system has stopped pretending to be furniture, and become what it always was: the other half of the field.

A name for the disciplined self: Presencing

There is a word Jen and I keep reaching for, and that I lean on constantly in training, when we try to point at this. It isn’t just presence. Presence sounds like a trait — something you either have or you don’t, a quality of temperament. What we mean is a verb. Presencing.

The clumsy “-ing” is doing deliberate work. Presencing is not a settled state achieved in graduate school and then possessed. It is cultivated, disrupted, and established, moment by moment, across a single session — the ongoing, embodied act of being genuinely here, genuinely with, genuinely willing to be affected by what is happening between us. We can feel it come and go in our own bodies. There is a felt difference between being with someone and being adjacent to them, and the client’s nervous system registers that difference long before either person could name it.

And here is the part that makes presencing a discipline rather than a personality: the thing that most reliably disrupts it is not the client. It is the therapist’s own not enough. The internal monitor that runs during a hard session — am I doing this right, is this the correct interweave, would my consultant approve — is not a neutral background process. It is noise on the exact channel the client is trying to reach us on. When we leave contact to check whether we are doing it correctly, we have, for that moment, left. The self-consciousness the tradition installed in so many of us, in the name of competence, turns out to be one of the surer ways to vacate the room.

This reframes what “developing as a therapist” even means. It is not only the accumulation of more techniques and their competent use. It is the slow work of becoming a person present enough to stay — so that when the client’s old pattern activates and braces for the familiar absence, someone is actually there to disconfirm it. Memory updates on contradiction, so often, and perhaps most powerfully, we are the contradiction. The steadiness that stays when the client expected withdrawal is the new data. That someone stayed. That someone saw. That the worst moment did not end in abandonment.

A discipline, not a license

None of this is a license to run away with every feeling that arises in us. The same instrument that perceives the client’s grief can just as easily broadcast our own. When our relational history goes unexamined, it distorts what we sense: some of us will read a client’s anger as danger because anger once preceded harm in our own lives, or mistake their autonomy for withdrawal, their stillness for regulation, their humor for stability, their intensity for crisis — because that is what those signals meant in the rooms where we first learned to read them. A felt sense is information, not verdict. Meaning is not the same as certainty (Hayes, Gelso, & Hummel, 2011).

And this instrument is culturally tuned. What registers in our bodies as warmth, as safety, as appropriate closeness or “too much,” was calibrated in particular families and particular cultures — which means our sense of what is attuned carries blind spots as surely as it carries wisdom (Hook et al., 2017). What lands as presence for one client can feel like intrusion to another. Radical trust in the person of the therapist, offered without this humility, can quietly recenter the therapist’s world as the measure of the room.

This is why the embrace of the self is a discipline and not a permission slip. Jen and I call this the move from reverence to precision: our field does not lack reverence for the relationship — it lacks specification. “Presence” can become a word we hide our dysregulated whiplash behind, an unfalsifiable virtue that excuses us from accountability. The corrective is not less rigor but more: to hold what we feel as a curiosity, to offer it tentatively — I wonder if…, I’m sensing…, I’m feeling… — and to let the client resonate, revise, or refuse it, so that two people can meet without either becoming the object of the other’s certainty. The instrument earns trust only when it stays in tune, and it stays in tune through the same unglamorous means it always has: reflection, consultation, our own therapy. Tuning the inner instrument is not indulgence. It is part of ethical practice.

What to do with this on Tuesday

If our own nervous system is part of the clinical apparatus, three practices follow. Offered as practices, not protocol.

Assess yourself before you assess the client. Before the session, take the reading you would take of anyone you were about to engage with: Where am I right now? Braced, tired, tender, rushed? You are the first condition of the field the client is about to enter. You don’t have to fix your state. Naming it is what keeps it from leaking in unnamed — and noticing when your presencing has wavered is the first move toward restoring it.

Treat your history as a known variable, not a contaminant. The reactions that recur with a certain kind of client, the sessions that leave you unaccountably heavy — these are not failures of objectivity. They are the instrument telling you where it bends, and where it might mislead. Consultation and your own therapy are not remediation for having a self. They are how a good instrument stays in tune. The goal is not to be without reactions. It is to become someone who knows their own reactions well enough to use them, and to explore them, in the same moment.

Let yourself be seen, on purpose. Not the flood the tradition rightly feared. A deliberate authenticity: a softening in the face when the client reaches something true, a quiet that lands in me too, the honest naming of the heaviness in your own chest. For a client whose earliest relationships taught them that other people’s faces stay blank no matter what they show, a therapist who is visibly, safely affected is not a lapse in technique. It may be the disconfirming experience the whole treatment is organized around.

The self we were trained to subtract

So the person of the therapist turns out to be the part of the work so many of us were most carefully taught to remove. And the teaching did not begin in graduate school. Long before any of us met a supervisor, many of us had already learned which of our feelings were welcome in a room and which ones made us “too much.” So many of us arrived at our training already fluent in self-subtraction — already practiced at keeping our faces still so that other people could stay comfortable. The profession didn’t invent that reflex. It handed us a vocabulary that made it sound like competence.

But disciplined and absent are different words. The first is a way of bringing ourselves along. The second is a way of disappearing. What so many of our clients most lacked was not a neutral observer of their pain. It was a present other who could bear to feel it with them and not leave. As Jessica Benjamin puts it, the client is not managed or interpreted — they are met.

That is the harder discipline, and the more human one: not to empty ourselves out of the room, but to bring a self so well-known that it becomes safe to authentically express from. We are not a blank slate the healing happens by bouncing off of. We are — each of us — an integral condition of the field it happens within.

Which raises the question this series will spend the coming weeks inside. If the person of the therapist is the instrument, presencing is the practice that makes the instrument usable — and a practice can be learned, lost, and learned again. So the next essays turn toward that craft: how presencing is cultivated, how it collapses under our own not enough, and how it gets restored in the middle of a hard session, when it matters most. The relationship, we said, is the work. The person is the instrument. What remains is learning to play it — carefully, humbly, and on purpose.

The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. If you’d rather listen, each essay is read aloud on the Notice That podcast. Subscribing is free.

Sources mentioned: Heimann (1950), International Journal of Psycho-Analysis; Baldwin & Imel (2013), in Bergin & Garfield’s Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change; Wampold & Imel (2015), The Great Psychotherapy Debate; Maroda (2004), The Power of Countertransference; Bromberg (2001), Standing in the Spaces; Cozolino (2017), The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy; Schore (2012), The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy; Lyons-Ruth (1999); Benjamin (1995); Hayes, Gelso & Hummel (2011), Psychotherapy; Hook et al. (2017), Cultural Humility. “Presencing,” the move from “reverence to precision,” and the relational reading of Phase 6 are drawn from EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (Falkenstien & Savage, 2027).

Drawing on Essay 2 of The Relational Thread, Bridger and Jen follow the felt reaction we were trained to smooth away and suggest it was never an interruption of the work — it may have been the work reaching for us. They walk through the therapist-effects research (the person of the therapist predicts outcome more robustly than the school they trained in), the turn Paula Heimann made in 1950 that still hasn't reached our fidelity checklists, and the right-brain-to-right-brain channel where there is no such thing as a neutral therapist. Even the Phase 6 body scan, ostensibly the most procedural moment in EMDR, turns out to be a relational event.

At the center is a word they keep reaching for: presencing. Not presence as a trait you either have or don't, but a verb: the moment-by-moment, embodied act of staying genuinely with someone, cultivated and lost and restored across a single session. This is the first turn in a series about the craft that makes the instrument usable. Come for the reframe of countertransference; stay for the quieter invitation to bring a self so well-known it becomes safe to work from.

In this episode

Bridger and Jen open Essay 2 of The Relational Thread and take up the person of the therapist, the part of the work so many of us were most carefully taught to remove. Starting from last week's claim that the relationship is doing the work, they follow it to the uncomfortable place it leads: if the relationship is the work, then we are the instrument, sitting there with a still face and moving insides.

Key themes

• What neutrality was built to protect, and what it can cost. Abstinence and the blank slate were designed to keep the therapist's material off the client. But a blank slate cannot co-regulate. And for a client shaped by misattunement, carefully maintained neutrality can register not as safety but as an eerily familiar absence.

• The research nobody foregrounds. When you account for model, manual, and technique and then ask how much of the outcome traces to which therapist the client saw, the answer is a meaningful, stubborn amount. The variable we're least trained to develop may be the one doing the most work.

• Countertransference as a second channel. Following Heimann (1950), the therapist's felt response is reframed from contamination to information, an instrument of research into the client's field, held with enough discipline to tell our weather from theirs.

• The body is not neutral. Beneath language, on the right-brain-to-right-brain channel, our groundedness is a signal and so is our bracing. There is no neutral therapist below the neck.

• Presencing. A verb, not a trait. The ongoing, embodied act of being genuinely with. And the thing that most reliably disrupts it is not the client but the therapist's own not enough.

Practical clinical takeaways (what you can bring into your next session)

• When something moves in you mid-session, treat it as data on a second channel. Hold it as a curiosity rather than a certainty, and ask whether it's yours, theirs, or (usually) a braid of both.

• Notice the internal monitor (am I doing this right, would my consultant approve) and recognize it as noise on the channel the client is reaching you on. When you leave contact to check your work, you have, for that moment, left.

• Consider the honest, disciplined disclosure as an intervention: As you notice your body, I'm aware of a heaviness in my own chest. I wonder if that resonates, or if your body is telling a different story. The client's experience stays centered; your nervous system stops pretending to be furniture.

• Treat Phase 6 as relational, not merely procedural: your body is part of the regulatory environment whether or not you intend it to be.

• Remember the felt sense is information, not verdict. And it's culturally tuned, carrying blind spots as surely as it carries wisdom.

Concepts, frameworks & names mentioned

• Therapist effects — Baldwin & Imel (2013); Wampold & Imel (2015), The Great Psychotherapy Debate. The person of the therapist as a robust predictor of outcome.

• Countertransference as instrument — Paula Heimann (1950); Karen Maroda, The Power of Countertransference (2004).

• Standing in the spaces — Philip Bromberg (2001): the therapist present to more than one self-state at a time.

• The social brain / co-regulation — Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy (2017).

• Right-brain affective communication — Allan Schore (2012).

• Disorganized attachment & misattunement — Karlen Lyons-Ruth (1999).

• Being met, not managed — Jessica Benjamin (1995).

• Felt sense as information, not verdict — Hayes, Gelso & Hummel (2011).

• Cultural humility — Hook et al. (2017).

• Presencing, the move "from reverence to precision," and the relational reading of Phase 6 — from EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (Falkenstien & Savage).

Why this episode matters

Most continuing education adds another protocol to the shelf. This episode points at the practitioner holding them. If the person of the therapist is the instrument, then developing as a clinician isn't only accumulating technique — it's the slow work of becoming present enough to stay, so that when a client's old pattern braces for the familiar withdrawal, someone is actually there to disconfirm it. That's the through-line of the series this episode opens.

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Key themes

• The moment at the door. The felt sense that something shifted — or refused to — after a session, and why we've been trained to file it under "rapport" and write the protocol note instead.

• The thing isn't unnamed — in us it is. The literature has named it for decades (intersubjectivity, mutual recognition, the therapeutic alliance, the relational field). What it lacks is standing in the therapist's own internal ledger of what counts as real clinical material.

• The relationship as the most reliable predictor of outcome. What the research has been saying quietly for half a century, and why "non-specific factors" may be the signal rather than the noise.

• The space between is not a metaphor. Interpersonal neurobiology and attachment work suggest regulation, safety, and meaning are co-constructed between bodies, beneath language, in real time — held with appropriate humility, since the mechanisms are still contested.

• The stuck case, reframed. Immovability is rarely a malfunction. Compliance, perfect answers, and warmth that never quite lets you in are adaptations built in relationships where being fully seen wasn't safe. The refusal to shift is relational information, not the absence of it.

Practical clinical takeaways — what to bring into your next session

1. Track the field like you track the target. Add one channel to the SUD/affect/body you already monitor: what is happening between us right now — closer or further, softer or more braced? You don't have to do anything with it yet. Tracking it is the skill.

2. Let your own body count as assessment. Treat the heaviness, the impulse to lean in, the sudden distance as hypotheses about the field rather than contaminants of your objectivity — while holding that your body may also be reporting on your own history. Hold both at once.

3. Try naming it out loud. "Feel like something just changed — what's coming up for you?" or "I sense there's something beneath this, but we can't quite see under it right now." Used with care, language like this turns the implicit field into shared, workable material — and it's often the exact experience a client has never had.

Concepts, frameworks & names mentioned (with light context)

• Flückiger et al. (2018) — meta-analysis synthesizing ~295 studies and 30,000+ clients; found the alliance–outcome correlation strong, stable, and consistent across modalities.

• Norcross & Lambert (2019) — reached a convergent conclusion on the relationship's role in outcomes from another direction.

• Wampold (2015) — "common factors" (alliance chief among them) account for more outcome variance than any specific technique.

• Allan Schore — right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere communication in the therapeutic dyad.

• Stephen Porges — co-regulation as a biological imperative (Polyvagal theory).

• Jessica Benjamin — mutual recognition: the moment two people become subjects to each other rather than objects.

• Interpersonal neurobiology / attachment literature — the broader case that co-regulation and meaning are built between nervous systems in real time (held provisionally).

Read the essay: The Relational Thread on Substack here!

Most of us were handed fidelity checklists and taught to call the rest "non-specific." This thread makes the opposite wager: the felt shift at the door is not the soft part of your work — it may be the most important part, and it can be developed with the same rigor as any protocol. If you've ever trusted that sense and then discounted it in the same breath, this is an invitation to stop.

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We close Francine Shapiro's foundational EMDR text on its last two chapters, selected populations and research, and land on the thesis humming under the whole show: EMDR is an approach to the entire therapeutic relationship, not a tool you apply to a diagnosis. In this episode:

- A conceptualization frame you can bring to any population: four questions for your next session

- Why the person is the expert on their own condition, and what themes and patterns are (and aren't) good for

- Safety and shame as the through-line across every population

- The reframe that most "population protocols" (chronic pain, perinatal, OCD, grief) are conceptualization frameworks in disguise

- Competency culture, imposter syndrome, and when a referral is wisdom rather than failure

- Populations up close: veterans, OCD, TBI, the perinatal period, chronic pain and illness, and grief

Plus a season of milestones at Beyond Healing: the EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship manuscript submitted to the publisher (forthcoming, early 2027, with a foreword by Deb Wesselman), the launch of Beyond Healing Psychiatry, and upcoming EMDR and SIP trainings ahead of EMDRIA this August.

If you've ever hesitated at a referral, or felt behind on certifications, this one is for you.

Learn more about our trainings at beyondhealingcenter.com (Trainings tab), or reach us at trainings@beyondhealingcenter.com. Support the show at patreon.com/thinkbeyondhealing. Follow us: Notice That Podcast.

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There is a moment most therapists know and almost none of us were trained to name.

The session is technically over. Your client has gathered their things and said the thing people say at doors. You’re sitting with your notes, and you are aware, with a certainty you would struggle to defend in a treatment team meeting, that something happened. Not the target. Not the SUD score, which may not have moved at all. Something between you shifted. Or, just as unmistakably: something between you refused to.

You know this moment. You have probably learned to file it somewhere safe: rapport, maybe, or countertransference, or that great clinical junk drawer, the relationship was really good today. And then you write your note about the protocol, because the protocol is what you have language for.

But perhaps the thing you felt is not the atmosphere of the work; it may be the work itself. I want to suggest, carefully, with all the hedging the science honestly requires, that your sense of it is not sentimentality. It is data.

To be precise: the thing itself is not unnamed. The literature has been naming it for decades. Intersubjectivity, mutual recognition, the therapeutic alliance, the relational field. Where it goes unnamed is somewhere more consequential: inside the therapist. In the internal ledger where we decide what counts as real clinical material and what gets filed under “soft,” this thing has no entry. The names exist in the journals. They have not been granted standing in our own minds or in our therapy rooms.

What the research has been saying, quietly, for decades

Psychotherapy outcome research has a strange open secret. We have spent more than a half century refining techniques, manualizing treatments, and defending modalities…and across all of it, the single most reliable predictor of outcome keeps being the same thing: the quality of the therapeutic relationship.

Flückiger and colleagues (2018), synthesizing 295 studies and more than 30,000 clients, found the alliance–outcome correlation to be strong, stable, and consistent across modalities. Norcross and Lambert (2019) reached the same conclusion from another direction; Wampold (2015) showed that so-called common factors, the alliance chief among them, account for far more of the variance in outcomes than specific technique. None of this means technique is irrelevant; it means technique appears to do its best work inside something, and that something is relational.

Here is what strikes me about this literature: almost every clinician I train already knows it. Not from the journals, but from Tuesday afternoons. The research doesn’t teach us something new. It confirms something we’ve been quietly sensing and systematically discounting, because our trainings handed us fidelity checklists and called the rest of it “nonspecific factors.” Nonspecific. As if the moment two nervous systems find each other were noise in the signal, rather than, plausibly… (*insert dramatic pause*) the signal itself.

The space between is not a metaphor

When I say something shifted between you, I mean that more literally than the phrase usually allows.

Interpersonal neurobiology has been building a case that two people in sustained interaction are not simply exchanging words. The case is still provisional, still contested at the mechanistic level, and worth holding with humility. Schore’s work on right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere communication, Porges’s work (and no, I don’t want to hear another refutation of Porges, thank you) on co-regulation as a biological imperative, the broader attachment literature: together they suggest that regulation, safety, and meaning are co-constructed between bodies, beneath language, in real time. Jessica Benjamin gave the relational tradition a name for the fullest version of this: mutual recognition. The moment two people become subjects to each other rather than objects, each real, each felt.

If some version of this is true — and the convergence of evidence, while incomplete, is difficult to dismiss — then the space between you and your client is not the backdrop of the session. It is a field with weather in it. It has conditions. It changes when one of you braces, and it changes again when one of you softens. And it registers in you somatically before you have words for it: the breath that drops lower, the sudden urge to lean in, the peculiar heaviness that arrives two minutes before a client touches something they’ve never said aloud.

Which means the felt shift at the end of the session (the one you can’t defend in a treatment meeting) may be a perception of something real. You are, after all, half of the field. You would be the first to know.

Why “or refused to” matters just as much

I said that something between you might shift, or refuse to. The refusal deserves its own paragraph, because it is where most of us feel most incompetent, and where we may actually be receiving the most information.

The stuck case (*sigh*). The client who completes every phase, cooperates with every procedure, and remains politely, immovably unchanged. Our training gives us mostly self-blaming or client-blaming vocabularies for this: poor case conceptualization, insufficient resourcing, “not ready,” “resistant.” But viewed relationally, immovability is rarely a malfunction. The strategies our clients bring — the compliance, the perfect answers, the warmth that never quite lets you in — are not obstacles to the work. They are adaptations, built in relationships where being fully seen wasn’t safe, doing exactly what they were built to do. The refusal to shift is not the absence of relational information. It may be the most honest relational communication in the room.

When the relational field refuses to move, the invitation is usually not push harder on the protocol. It’s come closer… the quiet instruction so many of us have felt rise up in a faltering session and been trained to override.

What to do with this on Tuesday

If any of this is true, it should change something concrete. Three suggestions, offered as practices, not protocol:

Track the field like you track the target. You already monitor SUDs, affect, body. Add one more channel: what is happening between you, right now? Closer or further? Softer or more braced? You don’t need to do anything with it yet. Tracking it is the skill.

Let your own body count as assessment. The heaviness, the impulse to lean in, the sudden distance. Treat these as hypotheses about the field rather than contaminants of your objectivity. Hypotheses, not verdicts: your body is also capable of reporting on your own history. The discipline is in holding both possibilities at once.

Name it, sparingly, out loud. “I feel like the something just changed… what’s coming up for you?”, or, “I sense there’s something beneath this… but we can’t see under it right now” are among the most powerful interventions I know, and they appear in no protocol. Used with care, they convert the implicit field into shared, explicit, workable material. It is also, not incidentally, the exact experience many of our clients have never had: someone noticing the space between, and saying so.

The thing under the thing

So the unnamed thing turns out to be strangely well-documented. It has citations. What it doesn’t have — what our field’s history, for understandable and even honorable reasons, never granted it — is a place in the therapist’s internal sense of what is valuable, valid, and objectively integral to the work. We were taught that what counts is what can be counted, and the space between two people is genuinely hard to count. So we learned to perceive it and discount it in the same motion, most of the time not even noticing that it happened.

And that teaching did not begin in graduate school. Long before any of us met a fidelity checklist, we had already learned which of our perceptions were permitted to “count” as real. We learned it in families, in classrooms, in every room where belonging had conditions. Training didn’t install the ledger. It inherited it, sharpened it, and put professional credibility on the other side of questioning it.

But hard to measure and not real are different claims. The first is a limitation of our instruments, and bias in our thinking. The second is a conclusion the evidence does not support, and that your own Tuesday afternoons have been quietly arguing against for years.

So this is the wager of this publication, essay by essay: that the moment at the door (the shift, or the refusal) is not the soft part of your work. It may be the load-bearing part. And that learning to perceive it, trust it, and work with it deliberately is a clinical skill that can be developed with the same rigor we bring to any protocol.

You have sensed the thing. The field has named it. That was never the question.

The question is what becomes possible when the name finally moves from the journals into the room. When we stop treating that sense as private, and start treating it as shared professional ground. It turns out, everything really is “talk-about-able”, if we can cultivate and maintain the safety to trust each other.

The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. Subscribing is free. If you’d rather listen, each essay is read aloud on the Notice That podcast.

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The conversation begins with Anastasia’s metaphor for intersectionality: each identity as a street or intersection that adds complexity to the road of a person’s life. Rather than viewing identity as a single category, Anastasia describes intersectionality as the layered interaction of race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, culture, disability, chronic pain, geography, and lived experience. Bridger and Anastasia explore how this matters clinically because simplified assumptions about identity can prevent therapists from truly meeting the client in front of them.

Anastasia shares about growing up across multiple countries, including Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates, and how her early life shaped her understanding of culture, belonging, and difference. Having spent much of her childhood outside the United States, she reflects on the question “Where are you from?” and how difficult it can be to answer when identity is shaped by movement, cultural immersion, and many overlapping homes.

The conversation then turns toward invisible identities and the difference between what is chosen, what is given, and what is allowed to be. Anastasia reflects on queerness, sexuality, chronic pain, perfectionism, and the ways some identities become difficult to name when the surrounding environment does not make enough room for them. Bridger and Anastasia discuss how therapy can become a space where clients begin to recognize, name, and reclaim parts of themselves that may have been minimized, hidden, or disallowed.

Anastasia also shares the story of becoming a therapist, beginning with her original desire to pursue research and academia, her work in crisis services, and her eventual movement into trauma therapy and EMDR. She describes her crisis work as a place where she learned the power of slowing down, sitting with another human being, and offering safety without rushing toward solutions.

A major portion of the episode explores EMDR therapy with complex trauma. Anastasia reflects on her experience of EMDR basic training, the usefulness of the Adaptive Information Processing model, and the realization that standard protocol alone is often insufficient for clients with developmental trauma, dissociation, chronic shame, and complex relational histories. Bridger and Anastasia discuss the importance of extended resourcing, building adaptive networks, and honoring the pace required for complex trauma work.

Anastasia describes how she integrates parts work into EMDR, especially by attending to protectors and allowing those parts to help shape the pace and sequence of trauma processing. Rather than forcing the client into a rigid treatment structure, she emphasizes the need to “go with” the client’s system — honoring imagery, sensation, color, thought, dissociation, and the unique ways trauma communicates through the body and imagination.

The episode also includes a powerful reflection on chronic pain as an invisible identity. Anastasia shares her experience of living for over a decade with debilitating headaches and migraines before finally being believed by a provider who recognized the source of her pain. She and Bridger discuss how chronic pain shapes identity, self-understanding, relational life, and the ability to show up authentically. This leads into a broader reflection on the clinical importance of believing clients when they describe their own experience.

Toward the end of the conversation, Bridger and Anastasia explore how therapists can begin practicing intersectional humility. Anastasia suggests that trauma-informed care means entering the room with awareness that something important may be present even when it has not yet been named. This includes trauma, but it also includes invisible identities, minority identities, shame, pain, and meanings the client may not yet feel safe enough to disclose.

The conversation closes with a discussion of meaning-making, assumptions, monogamy, polyamory, relational expectations, diversity education, and the need for therapists to deconstruct their own definitions. Anastasia invites clinicians to ask clients what their words, values, identities, and relationships mean to them rather than assuming shared definitions. Bridger connects this with the therapeutic need to create an authentic meeting place where client and therapist can build meaning together.

Key Themes

Intersectionality in therapy

Identity is not singular. Each client and therapist enters the room with overlapping experiences of culture, privilege, marginalization, history, body, pain, sexuality, belonging, and relational meaning.

Invisible identities

Anastasia highlights how identities such as chronic pain, queerness, cultural displacement, and internalized shame may deeply shape a person’s life even when they are not immediately visible.

Power in the therapy room

Power is not something therapists can opt out of. It is present in the room through language, assumptions, clinical models, cultural norms, and the therapist’s posture toward the client.

EMDR and complex trauma

The episode explores why complex trauma often requires more flexibility, resourcing, pacing, and clinical humility than a rigid application of the standard protocol can provide.

Resourcing and adaptive networks

For clients with developmental or complex trauma, resourcing is not a quick preliminary step. It may be the core work of building new regulatory capacity over time.

Parts work and EMDR

Anastasia discusses using parts work to honor protectors, barriers, and internal systems before moving into trauma processing.

Chronic pain and identity

The conversation frames chronic pain not only as a physical experience, but as an identity-shaping reality that can affect selfhood, relationships, work, and embodiment.

Clinical curiosity and humility

Therapists are invited to ask, “What does that mean to you?” rather than assuming that words like family, healing, power, safety, or love mean the same thing for every client.

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Deb shares her decades of experience integrating attachment theory with EMDR therapy, including practical ways therapists can work with children, parents, families, and adults carrying unresolved developmental trauma.

We discuss:

• Why attachment trauma often lives beneath symptoms

• How EMDR can help heal early relational wounds

• Working with children using EMDR

• Family therapy + EMDR integration

• Resourcing trust, safety, and connection

• Parents as part of the healing process

• Parts work / ego states in EMDR

• How therapists become corrective emotional experiences

• Why the therapeutic relationship still matters deeply in trauma work

Deb also shares stories from training with Francine Shapiro in the early days of EMDR and how the field has evolved over time.

If you're an EMDR therapist, trauma therapist, counselor, psychologist, or simply fascinated by healing relationships, this conversation is packed with wisdom.

Learn more about Deb Wesselmann through her website: https://debrawesselmann.com/

Learn more about training and professional development opportunities with Beyond Healing through our website: connectbeyondhealing.com

DETAILED SHOW NOTES

Introduction

Bridger and Jen open the episode by discussing their upcoming EMDR Basic Trainings, hybrid learning model, consultation opportunities, and their emphasis on relationship-centered EMDR training.

Meet Deb Wesselmann

Deb shares her background as:

• Former school teacher

• Therapist for 35+ years

• EMDR clinician since the mid-1990s

• Co-founder of the Attachment and Trauma Center in Nebraska

• Longtime specialist in attachment, trauma, adoption, children, and family healing

Her journey into therapy began through witnessing the unmet emotional needs of children in school settings.

Early EMDR with Francine Shapiro

Deb reflects on training directly with Francine Shapiro when EMDR was still considered “experimental.”

She discusses:

• Why she was initially skeptical

• Her powerful practicum experience

• How EMDR differed from hypnosis

• Why EMDR felt safer, gentler, and more effective for trauma treatment

Why Attachment and EMDR Fit So Well

Deb explains how EMDR naturally supports attachment healing because it helps process:

• mistrust

• abandonment wounds

• relational fear

• unresolved grief

• abuse memories

• developmental trauma

She emphasizes that attachment styles are shaped through experience—not fixed identity.

What Didn’t Happen Matters Too

One of the most powerful moments of the episode:

Healing is not only about processing what happened to clients...

It is also about grieving and repairing what never happened:

• protection

• soothing

• attunement

• nurture

• safety

• emotional co-regulation

Parts Work / Ego States in EMDR

Deb and the hosts discuss:

• ego states

• parts language

• multiplicity of self

• internalized child parts

• wounded protector parts

They explore how parts work deepens EMDR treatment, especially with complex trauma.

Deb’s Integrative Family EMDR Model

Deb outlines her step-by-step model for working with children and families:

Phase 1:

Parent psychoeducation and case conceptualization

Helping parents understand:

• “This is not a bad child.”

• “This is a wounded child in survival mode.”

Phase 2:

Family preparation and regulation work

Including:

• body regulation exercises

• window of tolerance education

• playful nervous system work

• emotional literacy

Phase 3:

Attachment-focused EMDR resourcing

Examples:

• parent-child connection exercises

• messages of love

• soothing touch

• bilateral stimulation paired with relational safety

• healing the “little one inside”

When Parents Are the Barrier

Deb speaks honestly about difficult cases where caregivers are emotionally unsafe, resistant, or abusive.

The hosts discuss how therapists may need to pivot toward:

• supporting the child directly

• grief work

• coping strategies

• becoming a safe relational template

The Therapist as Attachment Resource

A major theme of the conversation:

The therapeutic relationship itself becomes healing data.

Bridger discusses inviting clients to:

“Take my voice with you.”

Meaning:

• internalize compassion

• remember safety

• borrow regulation

• carry supportive relational memory into distress

This is a beautiful section for therapists working with complex trauma.

Why This Episode Matters

This conversation reminds us that EMDR is not merely protocol.

It is also:

• relational

• developmental

• embodied

• attachment-informed

• deeply human

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If you were trained to think of interweaves as something you “pull out of a list” when a client gets stuck, you’re not alone. But what if interweaves aren’t about saying the right thing… and instead about understanding what the system needs next?

In this episode, we explore:

• What interweaves are actually doing in the brain and nervous system

• Why “cognitive interweaves” are only part of the story

• How stuckness in EMDR often reflects deeper relational and developmental patterns

• The difference between interrupting processing vs. supporting movement

• How to move from rigid scripts to relational, somatic, and intuitive interweaves

• Why some interweaves increase distress—and why that’s not a failure

We walk through core categories from Francine Shapiro's EMDR: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (responsibility, safety, and choice), while also expanding into a more integrative framework that includes:

• Somatic interweaves

• Affective interweaves

• Relational and resource-based interweaves

You’ll also hear real clinical reflections on:

• Why “I’m confused…” doesn’t always land

• How metaphor, imagery, and even humor can unlock stuck processing

• When to stay out of the way… and when your presence matters most

Ultimately, this conversation reframes interweaves not as a technique—but as a relational intervention grounded in attunement, timing, and case conceptualization.

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking:

“What do I say right now?”

This episode will help you shift toward:

“What does my client’s system need right now?”

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In this episode of Notice That, we sit down with perinatal mental health specialist Bethany Warren to explore how EMDR therapy can be used safely and effectively with pregnant and postpartum clients—and why so many clinicians have been taught otherwise.

Together, we unpack:

• The most common myths about EMDR in pregnancy (and what the research actually says)

• Why “just resourcing” may unintentionally limit healing

• How attachment wounds, identity shifts, and grief show up in the perinatal period

• The difference between trauma and the deeper layers of loss

• How EMDR helps untangle both present-day distress and long-standing relational patterns

We also explore the emotional reality of becoming a parent—the unexpected grief, the vulnerability of attachment, and the ways our own histories come alive in this stage of life.

This conversation is both clinically rich and deeply human—an invitation to rethink how we approach trauma, healing, and development in one of the most transformative seasons of life.

Whether you’re an EMDR clinician or simply someone navigating parenthood, this episode offers a powerful lens into what it means to heal while becoming.

Connect with Bethany Warren:

• Website: https://bethanywarrenlcsw.com/

• Perinatal EMDR Training (HAP): https://www.traumarecoveryhap.org/course/warren-perinatal-clients

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In this episode of Notice That: An EMDR Podcast, Bridger and Jen sit down with psychologist and EMDR consultant Dr. Nirit Gordon to explore the profound developmental, attachment-based, and trauma-related shifts that occur during the perinatal period. Drawing from feminist theory, attachment research, evolutionary anthropology, and clinical EMDR practice, this conversation reframes the transition to parenthood as a sensitive developmental stage comparable to adolescence — a time marked by identity reorganization, heightened emotional activation, relational stress, and the resurfacing of unresolved attachment wounds.

Together, we explore:

• Why perinatal mental health is one of the most under-recognized areas in trauma treatment

• How attachment memories and developmental trauma networks reactivate during pregnancy and early parenting

• The concept of matrescence and its implications for case conceptualization Why fathers and partners undergo neurobiological and hormonal shifts during early parenting

• How modern parenting culture conflicts with evolutionary caregiving needs

• The myth of constant parental attunement and what attachment research actually shows

• Birth trauma and systemic gaps in trauma-informed obstetric care Using babies as resources in EMDR therapy

• The clinical importance of including perinatal experiences in Phase 1 history taking How therapists can support identity transformation during early parenthood

This episode invites clinicians to expand their understanding of trauma, development, and relational memory — and to consider the perinatal period not simply as a life event, but as a critical neurobiological and psychological window for therapeutic intervention. Whether you work directly with parents or not, this conversation offers a powerful lens for understanding how attachment, trauma, and identity evolve across the lifespan.

To follow Nirit's work, check out her website at niritgordonphd.com and her training offerings at touchstoneinstitute.org

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