Basic training gives you the model. It can't give you the first year. That's the year where a lot of trained therapists quietly set EMDR down, and it's the year this conversation is about.

Amanda Hearne got trained about five minutes after finishing her master's program and walked back into a domestic violence agency where nearly every client carried complex trauma. Eleven years later she's an EMDR Certified Therapist, an EMDRIA Approved Consultant-in-Training, and the voice behind @theemdrhealingpractice. Bridger and Jen sit down with her to talk about what held: a cohort that trained together, clients who could tolerate a therapist reading from a binder, and a decision about identity that changed everything downstream.

This episode is part of our series for clinicians in their first year after EMDR Basic Training.

IN THIS EPISODE

- Getting trained straight out of grad school: the case for it, and the one honest con

- Why empathy didn't feel like enough, and what a structured model gave a new therapist

- The two things that buffered Amanda against never using EMDR: community and client trust

- Walking in with the manual open, and letting clients know why

- The twelve-to-twenty-session caseload, and why the full three-prong plan didn't fit

- The recent event protocol, EMD, and why that is still EMDR

- Capacity as the work, not the warm-up

- The pressure to collect every advanced training right away, and why to hang tight

- Consultation twice a month, and why CITs are a route worth knowing about

- "Do you do EMDR?" "No, I'm an EMDR therapist."

- The fear underneath "I'm still integrating it," and why no modality can satisfy it

- Instagram, community after a move, and nurturing content for newly trained clinicians

- Go with that, or notice that: the neon sign poll

RESOURCES & LINKS

Amanda Hearne — Live and Align Therapy: https://www.liveandaligntherapy.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_HearneFirstYear_Therapists_Fall_2026

Instagram: @theemdrhealingpractice

Individual consultation and therapy (CA and TX): book through the Calendly on her site

Mentioned in the episode:

Recent Traumatic Episode Protocol (R-TEP), Elan Shapiro & Brurit Laub

When There Are No Words, Sandra Paulsen

Michelle Gottlieb, EMDR trainer and chronic pain specialist (Amanda's professor at Cal State Fullerton)

Trauma Recovery/HAP (where Amanda's agency cohort trained)

Lilly Risch — Burnout, Money, and Visibility with Lilly Risch | Notice That (the earlier episode on EMDR therapists and social media)

The Relational Thread — Bridger & Jen's book and essay series: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread

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.

#EMDR #EMDRtherapist #EMDRbasictraining #NewTherapist #TraumaTherapy #TherapistsOfInstagram #NoticeThatPodcast #EarlyLearner

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A couple of weeks ago, I cried in a therapy session.

Not the quiet, contained tear that gathers in the corner of your eye and can still plausibly be folded into a professional nod.

I mean cried.

My client was reading something to me, and whatever she had written struck me in a way I did not anticipate. I am not usually a heavy crier, particularly in session, but suddenly I was.

And somewhere underneath the emotion was another reaction entirely:

What is happening right now?

This is so unprofessional.

I’m not supposed to be doing this.

Pull it together.

What is she going to think of me?

What would a supervisor say if they saw this?

It was startling how quickly those old voices returned.

Most of the time, I no longer organize my work around those rules. I have spent years developing a much more expansive understanding of therapist self-expression, subjectivity, and the responsible use of our humanity in the room. I believe deeply that our reactions are not automatically intrusions simply because they are visible.

And still, in that moment, the ghosts of professors, supervisors, consultants, trainings, and old versions of professionalism surfaced almost intact.

They had been quiet for a long time.

They were not gone.

Even after years of sitting with people in some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, there was still a small internal alarm sounding the moment the therapist became too visible.

Too affected.

Too human.

The rules come first

Recently, in a consultation group, one of the therapists described completing an ethics training on self-disclosure.

Instead of leaving with greater clarity, she left feeling ashamed.

She began mentally cataloguing all the ways she had disclosed something about herself to clients over the years and wondering whether she had been doing therapy wrong.

As she kept listening, though, something shifted.

She realized she did not actually agree with much of what she was hearing.

Of course self-disclosure can become inappropriate. It can pull attention toward the therapist, ask a client to caretake us, blur roles, satisfy our needs rather than theirs, or expose something we later wish we had protected.

Those possibilities matter.

But there is an enormous difference between teaching clinicians how to discern those differences and giving them a list of things good therapists do not do.

That distinction feels increasingly important to me.

Because when ethics is taught primarily through prohibition, we may not actually be teaching therapists how to operate ethically.

We may be teaching them how to follow rules.

And then how to feel shame when they find themselves outside of them.

I remember versions of this from graduate school.

Sit this way because this posture communicates openness.

Do not reveal too much about yourself.

Be careful what is visible in your office.

Keep the focus on the client.

Maintain the frame.

There is wisdom inside many of those teachings.

Boundaries matter.

Power matters.

The therapist’s needs should not quietly become the work of the client.

Restraint can be an act of care.

But somewhere along the way, restraint can become confused with disappearance.

We can begin to believe the safest therapist is the least visible one.

The least affected.

The least knowable.

A person with no photographs, no reactions, no history, no preferences, no body that ever betrays what is happening inside it.

We may call this professionalism.

The client may experience something else entirely.

A person is already in the room

The problem is that the therapist does not stop being human because the session begins.

Our body does not disappear when we sit in the chair.

We still have a nervous system.

We still have histories.

We still get moved.

We become protective.

We feel anger.

We feel tenderness.

We sometimes become confused.

We sometimes feel inadequate.

There are moments when a client says something and our chest tightens before we know why.

Moments when we feel an unexpected urge to defend them.

Moments when their grief lands somewhere familiar in us.

Moments when our eyes fill with tears before the part of us responsible for professionalism has had time to approve the response.

The question, then, cannot really be whether our humanity enters the room.

It already has.

The more useful question is:

What do we do with it once it is here?

That is a much harder thing to teach.

It requires more than rules because context matters.

The same disclosure can be deeply useful with one client and intrusive with another.

A therapist’s tears might communicate recognition in one moment and emotional burden in another.

A personal story might help a client feel less alone, or it might quietly ask them to attend to the therapist.

Silence might communicate steadiness.

Or distance.

Structure might communicate safety.

Or control.

There is no single behavior that tells us which one is happening.

Which means ethical practice requires something more demanding than compliance.

It requires discernment.

From prohibition to discernment

I wish more clinicians were taught to ask questions like these:

What is happening in me right now?

What is my impulse asking me to do?

Whose need would it serve if I expressed this?

What might my client make of it?

What is happening between us?

Would naming my reaction deepen the client’s experience, or pull them away from it?

Am I choosing this, or am I reacting?

Can I remain responsible for myself while allowing myself to be affected?

These questions do not give us the comfort of certainty.

They do something better.

They keep us awake inside the relationship.

They make space for the possibility that our humanity can contain information without automatically becoming instruction.

That we can feel something strongly without immediately acting on it.

That sometimes the most ethical choice is restraint.

And sometimes the most ethical choice is to let the client see that another human being has actually been moved by them.

When my client read to me

That was what I eventually understood about my own tears.

What she was reading had landed deeply.

But the significance was not simply that I was emotional.

My crying did not become clinically meaningful because tears are inherently therapeutic.

It became meaningful because of what those tears encountered in her history.

This was someone who had repeatedly experienced important parts of herself being dismissed.

She had known what it was like to speak from a vulnerable place and have the other person remain untouched.

And now she was sitting across from someone whose body had responded before language did.

I was moved.

Really moved.

There was something almost startling about that recognition.

Not because my reaction was the point.

She was still the point.

But my reaction offered information.

What she had written mattered.

What she was saying could reach another person.

She was not too much.

She was not ridiculous for being affected by her own story.

Her experience could land somewhere and be held there.

There was an opportunity in that moment.

I could have hurried to pull myself together and silently communicated that my reaction was an error.

I could have become embarrassed and made her reassure me.

Neither would have served her.

Instead, the work became figuring out how to let my humanity exist without requiring her to manage it.

That distinction matters.

The fear of getting it wrong

I think therapists carry more shame about these moments than we admit.

A colleague in that consultation described having an unexpectedly intense emotional response with a client and immediately thinking something close to:

If anyone knew this happened, they would think I was a terrible therapist.

Maybe even:

Could I lose my license over this?

That level of fear does not emerge from nowhere.

Many clinicians were trained inside systems where ethical competence was associated with avoiding mistakes rather than learning what to do when complexity inevitably appeared.

This is part of what makes professional conditioning so powerful. We can outgrow a rule intellectually long before our bodies stop bracing around it. We can believe in a more relational, expressive, human way of practicing and still feel the old alarm when we step outside the posture we were first taught was safe.

The rule may no longer live in our philosophy.

It may still live in our nervous system.

And complexity always appears.

A client will remind you of someone.

You will become irritated.

Something they say will hurt.

You will misunderstand them.

You will feel deeply protective.

You will occasionally disclose something and later wonder whether you should have.

You may cry.

You may fail to cry when you wish you could.

You may feel absolutely nothing in a moment when you think a good therapist should feel something.

Human beings do not become predictable simply because one of them has a license.

The fantasy that ethical therapy depends on eliminating these experiences leaves therapists with two bad options.

Either deny what is happening.

Or experience it and believe we have failed.

Neither makes us safer clinicians.

Awareness does.

Reflection does.

Accountability does.

The capacity to notice our impact and repair does.

The difference between being human and making it about us

I want to be careful here, because “therapists are human too” can become its own excuse.

It is true.

But it is not sufficient.

Our humanity does not automatically justify every expression of it.

Clients are not there to receive whatever spills out of us in the name of authenticity.

Being genuine and being uncontained are not the same thing.

Being relational does not mean abandoning boundaries.

If anything, allowing more of ourselves into the room requires more responsibility, not less.

If I choose to tell a client something personal, I need to know why.

If I cry, I need to remain capable of staying with their experience rather than requiring them to shift into caring for mine.

If I feel anger, I need enough awareness to distinguish between useful information and an impulse that belongs somewhere else.

If a client’s story lands somewhere familiar in me, I have to be curious about both truths: what I may be recognizing in them, and what the moment may be awakening in me.

This is not a loosening of ethics.

It is a deepening of them.

The question moves from:

Am I allowed to do this?

to:

What does this moment require of me?

And:

Can I remain fully human without asking the client to carry the cost of my humanity?

Those are harder questions.

They are also much closer to the actual work.

What we were taught to hide

I think many therapists were taught to subtract themselves before they were taught to know themselves.

We learned how not to intrude before we learned how to recognize the difference between intrusion and presence.

We learned the dangers of self-disclosure before we developed a language for responsible subjectivity.

We learned that our reactions could contaminate the work.

Far fewer of us were taught that our reactions could also inform it.

So perhaps part of becoming a seasoned therapist is not becoming better at hiding.

Perhaps it is becoming more trustworthy with what can no longer be hidden.

Our faces.

Our bodies.

Our uncertainty.

Our intuition.

Our histories.

Our tears.

The parts of ourselves that inevitably register the person sitting across from us.

And perhaps professionalism was never supposed to mean becoming less human.

Maybe it means becoming responsible enough with our humanity that another person can safely encounter it.

Not every feeling needs to be spoken.

Not every story needs to be shared.

Not every impulse deserves action.

But neither does every human response need to be erased.

Sometimes a client needs steadiness.

Sometimes they need quiet.

Sometimes they need a boundary.

And sometimes they may need to look across the room and discover that what they have shared has actually reached another person.

That someone heard them.

That someone was affected.

That someone remained.

Maybe the work is not learning how to keep ourselves out of the room.

Maybe the work is learning how to bring ourselves in
carefully,
reflectively,
ethically,
and fully enough
to actually be there.

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.

Most of the time I no longer organize my work around those rules. And still, in that moment, the ghosts of professors, supervisors, consultants, and old versions of professionalism surfaced almost intact. They had been quiet for a long time. They were not gone.

This week's essay is about what we were taught to hide. When ethics is taught primarily through prohibition, we may not be teaching therapists how to practice ethically. We may be teaching them how to follow rules, and then how to feel shame when they find themselves outside them. Restraint can be an act of care. But somewhere along the way, restraint became confused with disappearance. The therapist doesn't stop being human because the session begins, so the question was never whether our humanity enters the room. It already has. The question is what we do with it once it's here.

Along the way: the questions I wish more clinicians were taught to ask in the moment; why the same disclosure can be deeply useful with one client and intrusive with another; why we can outgrow a rule intellectually long before our bodies stop bracing around it; and why "therapists are human too" can become its own excuse. Being genuine and being uncontained are not the same thing.

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

https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_EssayNN_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:

https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread

Notice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage.

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

Seven years and more than a thousand trained therapists in, we look at where SIP started, what has changed, and why it matters most at the stuck points in EMDR. We cover its three spheres (relationship, body, and memory) and the intersubjective space where they meet between therapist and client. Then we zoom in on one of the hardest stuck points: the SUD drops from a 9 to a 2, the client keeps answering your questions, and the activation is gone. We talk about why that moment usually doesn't call for another protocol or tool, and why the relationship itself can become the disconfirming experience.

Stick around after we close for the full audio of the "What Is SIP?" case walkthrough, a composite case involving complex trauma, religious rigidity, and neurodivergence.

In this episode

• The three spheres of SIP and why intersubjectivity matters so much

• How SIP has evolved as a living model over seven years

• Why a falling SUD with vanishing activation may not be progress

• Before, during, and after: seeing trauma, and in-session enactments, as patterns and not single moments

• Early attachment trauma and why the therapist can feel like the threat

• The "what do I do?" question, and why it works best after you zoom out

• Shared language for clients, colleagues, and ourselves

Resources

• Watch the "What Is SIP?" video and download the free companion worksheet: connectbeyondhealing.com/sip

• SIP alumni can retake the training for free

Upcoming trainings and workshops (calendar.connectbeyondhealing.com)

• SIP: When the Target Won't Move, our first training for Australia and New Zealand (8:30 PM to 1:30 AM Central)

• Enactment Focused EMDR: Nov 11, 12:30 to 4:30 PM Central

• AI in the Therapy Room: Dec 2, 9 AM to 1 PM Central

• EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Dec 9, 12:30 to 4:30 PM Central

• EMDR and Grief: Jan 6, 12:30 to 4:30 PM Central

Free workshops and longer CE workshops ($95) can be filtered on the course calendar.

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

Dr. Sarah Schubert delivered a keynote at the EMDRIA Conference 2026, her first EMDRIA conference as both attendee and speaker. She works across the lifespan, including children and adolescents in out-of-home care, has done theoretical and PhD research on EMDR, and founded EMDR Therapy Training Australia. Find her at drsarahschubert.com. [OPTIONAL: one-line bio expansion, confirm wording with Sarah]

We talk about why she was asked to keynote (honor Shapiro's vision, and name where AIP has limits); what Indigenous voices in Australia are asking of EMDR ("we don't want EMDR adapted to our culture, we want you to listen to our culture"); what changes when time is not past, present, and future and the trauma is not in the past; memory as something distributed across place, objects, and people rather than held in one mind; why phase two is about connecting to strength that is already there rather than building a resource from scratch; the check-in she calls "finding the you that's you" (when have you been able to be yourself this week, doing what, where, and with whom); the pebbles she keeps in her pocket for clients; the biopsychosocial model of AIP and the idea that the AIP system is an attachment system; why "self-regulated" might be a contradiction in terms; the difference between looking inward as a clinician and turning a training practicum into therapy; the teacher who taught her that a therapist's own nervous system is clinical data; what adolescents in out-of-home care teach you about phase two; and the dual-therapist, group-based way her team works with children in care, drawing on Nacho Jarero's protocols. Her closing question: why are we doing therapy on our own?

Notes from the Hall is a 26-episode series from the Notice That podcast, recorded on the floor of the EMDRIA Conference 2026 in Anaheim — a window into the largest gathering of EMDR therapists in the United States, for everyone who was there and everyone who couldn't be. Hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage. Produced by Beyond Healing Media. Explore the full series at connectbeyondhealing.com.

Listen/watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/csR0hluKfM0

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

There’s a session most of us have had, and it confused me at first, then I began to dread them.

The session is a good one. The one where something finally lands. The client who has spent six sessions on their partner’s drinking goes quiet and says I’m just so tired of people never showing up for me…it’s always been this way. Or the client whose presenting problem was work stress and they hear their own voice say I don’t think anyone has ever actually liked me, and doesn’t take it back. The thing underneath the thing gets said, and they stay with it, and you stay with them, and the hour ends in that particular quiet that neither of you wants to close. You write your note half-thinking “this is why I do this”.

And then they cancel the next appointment.

The reading our training supplies is too much, too fast. Sometimes that’s exactly right, and the answer is pacing. Sometimes what looked like a breakthrough was a performance the two of you built together without noticing. But there’s a third possibility, and it’s the one our field almost never names.

Sometimes the session went well, and that’s the problem.

The second mirror

Every client walks in already holding a mirror. Not one they chose. It was issued; by the family, the marriage, the congregation, the workplace, the whole field we’ve been tracing through this series. It has a small vocabulary it repeats: you’re too sensitive. That’s not what happened. After everything we’ve done for you. It reflects back who they’re allowed to be, what their wanting means, whether their account of themselves is credible. They’ve been looking into it so long it doesn’t feel like a mirror at all. It feels like their face.

Then therapy starts working, and something strange happens. The room becomes a second mirror.

In this one, their needs are not too much. Their perceptions count as real. The thing they’ve never said out loud gets said: I don’t love him. I was relieved when she died. I don’t believe any of it anymore. And the ceiling doesn’t come down. Week after week, the second mirror shows them someone the first mirror has never once reflected.

I have come to think of the stretch that follows as the hardest part of the work, and it’s often the part we prepare people for least. Because the mirrors don’t agree. And a person who can see both reflections at once is holding a contradiction with their whole life; not as an idea, but at dinner, in bed, on the drive home from your office. The suffering of that middle period is real, and it has a property we’d rather not look at directly.

We caused it; not we as in just the therapist in the room, but we as in the us of the relationship. The contrast exists because the work is working.

Why the middle is the hardest part

Here’s the mechanism as I understand it, offered with the challenges it honestly requires.

The third essay in this series made the case that change happens when an old relational prediction is reactivated and meets a lived experience that violates it. The room is good at supplying that violation. But a prediction isn’t a stone you remove once; it’s a lesson the relational dynamics keep teaching. The fifth essay put it this way: the odds shift depending on whether the therapist knows which field they’re contradicting, and how active that field is in perpetuating the woundings it carries.

Active is the operative word. Your client spends one hour a week in front of the second mirror. They spend the other hundred and sixty-seven in front of the first (not to mention every day before they met you), and the first mirror doesn’t argue. It repeats. Every flat response to a newly named need, every subject changed, every flicker of judgment where recognition was hoped for; each is another rep for the old learning, run at home, with the people who matter most.

So the new learning isn’t fragile because the work was shallow. It’s outnumbered.

This is not an argument that the room is powerless. I’ve watched an hour a week revise what decades had installed, and I’d bet you have too. It’s an argument about what the middle of that revision feels like from inside a life: like being caught between two accounts of who you are, both rendered by people you need, one much more infrequent than the others.

I’d rather end on the turn

A window, before I tell you what this actually looks like.

Why does every case story I’ve ever heard end at the moment it worked? The turn, the tears, the sentence that reorganized everything… then the lights come up, applause break, next slide. It’s done in trainings, in consultation, in professional journals, and many books. While this might be my hot take of the day, I believe that the genre ends there because the genre is secretly about us; that turn is where we look best.

But I’ve heard remarkably fewer accounts of the month after the turn. Which means a working clinician who watches a client wobble after a genuine breakthrough has been quietly taught to read it as regression, or as their own failure, or as proof the breakthrough wasn’t real. The story stopped where the stories stop, and everything past that point feels off the map.

This essay is the part after the slide deck ends. It’s less flattering to the work. In my experience, it’s also where the work is decided.

What after actually looks like

A few shapes I’ve come to recognize. Each is a composite; none is a person.

There’s the client who does everything we could have hoped. The sarcasm turns out to have been a bid for reassurance. The relentless competence turns out to be a decades-old agreement never to need anyone. They find the actual need under the strategy, practice naming it here until the words hold, and then carry it home; plainly, bravely, without accusation, to the person it was always for. Some version of: I need to feel wanted, not just useful. And the person across from them says some version of: what are you talking about? Isn’t what we have enough?

I want to be careful with that moment, because it’s the one where this essay could turn someone into a villain, and I don’t think that’s true or useful. The partner who can’t receive the newly spoken need is usually standing at the far edge of what their own first mirror permits. They’re inside a field too. Often the request lands on them less like an invitation and more like an accusation aimed at everything they were taught closeness is; and what looks like refusal is, close up, a swirl of fear and bewilderment wearing refusal’s face. The fourth essay in this series argued that the world both people were raised inside walks into every room with them. That doesn’t stop being true because one of them went to therapy.

There’s the client who gets worse because it’s going well. Not worse on any measure; worse in the specific way of someone whose eyes have adjusted. One said to me, more or less: the contrast makes me sad for my regular life. That sentence isn’t a setback. It’s grief arriving exactly on schedule, and it deserves to be greeted as evidence of sight rather than loss of progress.

And there’s the client who leaves. The hardest one for me, still. Something like: it’s too much to come here and know how you see me, and then go home and feel how they see me. I can’t change them. I can stop coming here. It took me years to stop hearing that as failure; mine or theirs. It’s neither. It’s a person doing honest arithmetic about how much contradiction their one life can hold this year, and choosing to survive the field they can’t yet leave. The door we offered stays offered. Some people need it to stay offered longer than we get to watch.

“Isn’t this just secondary gains?”

A hand goes up around here whenever I teach this material, and I want to take it seriously, because it’s a good question asked in a vocabulary that worries me. Usually some version of: is that what you mean by strategy? That some people don’t want to change because they’re resistant?

Let’s honor the concept first. There are people whose in-laws are only tender with them while they’re the fragile one. There are families that only call when someone’s in crisis. There are marriages where symptoms are the one form of need that’s permitted to speak. Secondary gains, as a concept, invites us to look squarely at perpetuating factors like these; at why a person might be upside down in a power dynamic where getting better costs them the only leverage, or the only belonging, they have. That’s a real clinical question, and I’m glad we have language for it.

But listen to the word riding along in the question. Resistant. It takes everything we’ve been describing and relocates it inside one person, as a property; the field’s oldest move. What it hides is that the strategies we’ve been naming were never solo acts. The self-sacrifice we met earlier wasn’t a symptom someone keeps for private benefit. It was half of an agreement: I’ll never ask for anything, and you’ll never fall apart. I’ll keep the peace, and you’ll stay. Even the running-away-and-blaming carries a clause: no one will ever understand me, which quietly guarantees no one has to be let close enough to try. These are silent contracts; long-standing arrangements people make with one another without ever holding the meeting.

So when the work starts working, our client doesn’t just change. They show up at home having unilaterally amended a contract the other party never knew was open for negotiation. Some of what our field calls resistance is the sound of the other signatories objecting. And some of it is our client counting, accurately, what breach will cost them. That’s not a person refusing to change. That’s a person embedded in the terms of their own belonging.

Secondary gains asks what the symptom does for a person. This essay is asking what the change does to the agreements that person lives inside.

When the question changes shape

A quiet note before this next part: it touches on suicidality, so take it at your own pace.

Some of the people who come to us have been carrying a despair-shaped question. Privately, sometimes for years, some version of: if no one will ever really see me, what is the point of going on? I take that question with complete seriousness; it belongs in the open, between two people, and part of our work is making this a room where it can be brought and held rather than carried alone.

Here’s what I’ve watched the work do, in the cases where the room takes hold and the world still doesn’t cooperate. The circumstances may not move for a long time. The person at home may go on not-seeing. And yet the question changes shape. It stops being what’s the point and becomes something like: what does it mean that I’ve finally shown them, and they won’t look?

On paper that can read like no progress at all; the pain is still there, and the scale has no row for it. But those two questions are different in kind, and the difference matters clinically. The first question is addressed to the void. The second has an addressee; it’s grief, and grief is relational. A despair-shaped question isolates by its nature. A grief-shaped one can be brought to another person, wept through, worked, and answered slowly with a life. When the question acquires an addressee, the person has moved from alone-with-it to accompanied; and everything this series has argued says that’s not a consolation prize. It’s the hinge.

The rescue has begun. It just doesn’t show up anywhere except the shape of the question, and in who gets to hear it now.

Being the second mirror

Which brings me to us, because this essay is finally about our side of the glass.

Being the second mirror is a stranger role than our job descriptions admit. For a stretch of the work, your steadiness is what makes your client’s Tuesday harder. Your seeing them clearly is the thing their ordinary life now gets compared against and found wanting. There are weeks when the kindest-looking thing would be to dim; to see them a little less vividly so the contrast hurts less. That impulse is worth noticing in your body when it comes. It has a logic. I don’t think we should obey it, but I’ve stopped pretending I’ve never felt it.

There’s a discipline on the other side, too. Standing in this role, it gets tempting to quietly recruit the client against their own life; to let our clarity about what they deserve turn into a verdict about what they should do. The sixth essay said it and it holds double here: plenty of people are inside arrangements where authenticity carries genuine cost, and it isn’t our job to tell someone their life has to change before they can feel better. The second mirror reflects. It doesn’t sentence.

And there’s a grief that belongs to us, and I’d rather name it than have you meet it alone in week forty of a case like these. You will sometimes be the only person who ever sees what you see in someone. You will watch them carry something true toward people who can’t receive it, or won’t, and you will not be able to follow them through the door; you said you’d go through it with them, and you meant it, but some doors are in houses you don’t live in. What we can do is what the whole series keeps arriving at. Stay. Keep the reflection steady. Be there on the far side of the attempt, whichever way it went.

What to do with this on Tuesday

Three practices, in the usual spirit.

Tell them about the contrast before it arrives. In preparation, alongside resourcing, I now say some version of: as this starts to work, there may be a stretch where your regular life feels worse by comparison; if that comes, it isn’t a sign we’ve broken something. Named in advance, the contrast lands as weather we predicted together instead of proof that healing was a mistake. I’d rather it be a landmark than an ambush.

Read “worse after a good session” as information. Before reaching for pacing or resourcing, ask what the good session made visible. What did the second mirror show that the first mirror spent all week contradicting? The answer often hands you the next piece of work more precisely than any float-back would have.

Track the question, not just the number. Somewhere in your conceptualization, keep the client’s deepest question in their own words, and check it the way you check a SUD. The ones I’ve written down sound like: what’s wrong with me that I’m this hard to love? Why can’t I just be happy like everyone else? If people really knew me, would anyone stay? Then listen, over the months, for the question to change shape. What’s wrong with me becomes why couldn’t my mother look at me? Why can’t I just be happy becomes look what it cost me to keep that house calm. Would anyone stay becomes I finally showed them, and they turned away. When the question changes shape like that (when it acquires an addressee, when despair starts sounding like grief), say so, out loud, and let it count. People deserve to know when the thing that changed is the thing that matters.

Where this leaves us

The prisoners in the cave got one essay. The ones who turned around and then had to go on living in the cave, among people still facing the wall, get this one.

Because that’s most of our clients, most of the time. The world does not reorganize itself on the schedule of their healing, and the middle of the work is longer than any of our stories about it. What we have to offer there isn’t resolution. It’s a reflection that holds still; a place where the question can change shape and someone is there to hear the new one.

Two mirrors, and a person learning to stand between them. The rescue has begun, even when this room is the only place it shows.

But we keep working.

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.

Bridger joins her in it. He talks about the counseling program that told him the field didn't need more boutique private practices, about the first two years of his own practice at fifty clients a week, and about the stonemason father whose voice he still hears every time he raises his rate. Lilly names the conflict she has not resolved and does not pretend to have resolved: she runs a private pay practice, she believes that prices some people out of care, and she has done enough of her own work to hold that truth without collapsing under it. They stay in that tension for a long time without reaching for a tidy answer, because there isn't one, and because the not-talking-about-it is doing more damage than the conflict itself.

Then the conversation turns toward visibility, which turns out to be the same conversation wearing different clothes. Why the word marketing makes clinicians flinch. Why the laminated card from a small-town mechanic outperforms an A/B tested content calendar. Why the therapist who says my friend would be better for you is not being humble. And what it costs a community when the people who actually know how to work with trauma are the hardest ones to find.

What this episode is about

Lilly Risch works at an intersection most EMDR consultants leave alone: the place where a therapist's business decisions and their clinical capacity meet. She came to it honestly. Seven years in child welfare intake left her, in her words, burnt crispy, and the staff psychologist who ran her screeners told her she had to quit. There was no other option on the table.

What she built afterward is a group practice outside Milwaukee, an approved consultant practice, and a coaching business for EMDR therapists. What she teaches is not a road map. It's a question.

Key themes

Burnout is structural before it is personal. Lilly loved child welfare and loved the people she worked with. The work was still set up to produce exactly what it produced in her. Naming the structure is not an excuse, it's an accurate case conceptualization.

Every practice transition is an identity transition. Moving from agency to private practice meant deconstructing the helper identity she'd been trained into on a child welfare stipend track, where private practice was never presented as an option at all. Bridger's program went further, framing private practice as a kind of defection. Neither of them was ever taught that they were about to run a business.

The conflict does not resolve, and naming it beats pretending. Lilly runs a private pay practice and believes that prices some people out of care. She holds both without choosing one. She keeps a sliding scale slot, works with victim compensation, runs workshops. It is not a solution and she does not present it as one.

Rate-setting is contextual, not moral. Whether a therapist's spouse works, what benefits they carry, what a market will hold, what the clinician needs in order to be fully present in the chair. A dollar amount doesn't carry a verdict on your character. Bridger's position: charge what will actually support you, then look honestly at the implications for your context.

We all have a money story. Bridger's came from a blue collar family where a dentist was a luxury, moved through raising a painting rate from fifteen dollars an hour to twenty-five and feeling the nervous system register it, and still shows up as his father's voice every time he raises a fee.

Visibility avoidance is clinical material. When a therapist won't build the website or do the outreach, Lilly asks what's getting in the way. The answer is usually some version of it's not supposed to be about me. Bridger names the cost of that belief inside the therapy hour: it omits half the room.

Visibility does not mean Instagram. A newsletter. LinkedIn. Weekly coffee with a new therapist. Twice-yearly networking events. A free workshop at a PT office or a hair salon. A stack of note cards handed around a small town, which is what actually generated referrals for one of Bridger's consultees after she watched a mechanic's laminated flyer do the same thing.

The platform and the work run on different nervous systems. Lilly names the whiplash of doing deep relational work and opening Instagram an hour later. Comparison reinforces I'm not good enough, which is a belief most therapists in this field are already carrying. Her answer has been boundaries: three posts a week, specific days off, an intention behind each post.

What you can bring into your next session

• Run your own avoidance through a case conceptualization. What isn't getting done, and what's underneath it?

• Ask Lilly's sustainability question directly: what would sustainable look like, and what would have to change?

• Notice whose voice shows up when you consider a rate change. That voice has a history.

• If raising your rate feels like a betrayal, consider that it may also be a disconfirming experience, for you and sometimes for the client who sees you do it.

• Pick one visibility practice that matches what you actually like doing. The one you'll sustain beats the one that's optimized.

Concepts, names, and resources mentioned

• Money story. Lilly's frame for the inherited beliefs about worth, labor, and asking that every clinician brings to their fee.

• "Shaped like you, not shaped like me." A line from Bridger's Relational Thread essays that Lilly uses in her coaching. No plan fits every therapist, and no plan fits every client.

• Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller. Lilly's recommendation for clinicians moving into this work. Its argument, roughly: smart people overcomplicate, and that's the problem.

• Jess Bruno. Lilly's UK-based content creator, who limits her to three posts a week and is on record about the algorithm.

• Peacefully Booked Out EMDR. Lilly's free monthly workshops.

• Overflow. Her group coaching membership for EMDR therapists, with two live calls a month.

• Iris Collective. Partner on a course launching in spring covering the business side, ethical marketing, burnout, compassion fatigue, and therapist identity.

Why this episode matters

The field trains clinicians to hold other people's worst hours and then leaves them alone with the question of how to survive doing it. That silence has a cost, and the cost is not only financial. It shows up as the therapist who quietly stops, and as the clients who lose them without warning. Lilly's last word on it is the one worth keeping: an abrupt end has an impact on our clients too.

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

Our training supplies a reading for that: too much, too fast. Sometimes that's exactly right. Sometimes the breakthrough was a performance you built together without noticing. But there's a third possibility our field rarely names. Sometimes the session went well, and that's the problem.

This week's essay is about the two mirrors. Every client walks in holding one they didn't choose, issued by the family, the marriage, the congregation, the workplace. It has a small vocabulary and it repeats: you're too sensitive; that's not what happened; after everything we've done for you. Then therapy starts working and the room becomes a second mirror, one where their needs are not too much and their perceptions count as real. The mirrors don't agree. And your client spends one hour a week in front of the second one, and the other 167 in front of the first. The new learning isn't fragile because the work has been shallow. It's outnumbered.

This is the part after the slide deck ends: the client who carries a newly named need home and hears "isn't what we have enough?"; the client who gets worse because it's going well; the client who leaves, and why that isn't a failure. Along the way: what secondary gains gets right and what the word "resistant" hides; the silent contracts our clients unilaterally amend when the work works; and how a despair-shaped question, addressed to no one, can become a grief-shaped one, addressed to someone. Plus three practices for the middle of the work, starting with telling your client about the contrast before it arrives.

A note: a short passage in the middle of this essay touches on suicidality. Take it at your own pace.

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

https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_EssayNN_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:

https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread

Notice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage.

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

Prof. Derek Farrell MBE delivered one of the keynotes at the EMDRIA Conference 2026 and was part of the EMDRIA–MQ Mental Health Research funding process from start to finish; his research unit focuses on military and veteran populations.

We talk about why this year's keynote deliberately continued last year's debate on adaptive information processing; whether EMDR is "a terrible name for a therapy" and what it would cost to change it; why randomized controlled trials move the dial and why that means investing in early-career researchers on a ten-to-fifteen-year horizon; the strange rules that get treated as law (a four-year-old, eye movements, and a rejected accreditation video); where qualitative and mixed-methods research fit in a field that runs on RCTs; the many narratives a client's partner can add to the one the client brings; what the EMDRIA–MQ funding actually is and isn't; why the answer to a research communication problem turned out to be podcasts; and the oak tree in a Cornwall biodome that fell because nothing had ever pushed back on it.

Derek has been on Notice That before, this one picks up like a conversation between colleagues who've done this before.

Notes from the Hall is a 26-episode series from the Notice That podcast, recorded on the floor of the EMDRIA Conference 2026 in Anaheim — a window into the largest gathering of EMDR therapists in the United States, for everyone who was there and everyone who couldn't be. Hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage. Produced by Beyond Healing Media. Explore the full series at connectbeyondhealing.com.

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

There is a particular kind of grief in understanding someone you can no longer be close to in the same way.

Sometimes, not understanding would be easier.

It would be easier if the behavior made no sense. If we could call someone cruel or selfish or manipulative and allow the certainty of that story to carry us away. There can be a strange relief in a villain.

Villains simplify grief.

But many of us who find ourselves estranged from someone we love are left with something far more complicated.

We understand.

We understand the loneliness underneath the reaching.

We understand why the phone call comes.

Why the promise gets made again.

Why anger follows the boundary.

Why distance can be experienced as abandonment.

Sometimes we understand the other person so well that understanding itself becomes dangerous.

Because for a long time, understanding was followed by participation.

I see why you are hurting.

So I will come closer.

I know why you are afraid.

So I will make myself smaller.

I understand why you need reassurance.

So I will give you more than I actually have.

I know what happens when you feel abandoned.

So I will not leave, even when staying requires me to abandon myself.

There is a difference between understanding someone’s pain and organizing your life around it.

For some of us, it takes years to learn the difference.

The dance is older than the argument

In close relationships, we don’t simply learn things about one another.

We learn choreography.

A change in tone means something.

A pause means something.

The way someone closes a door, takes a breath, begins a sentence, or says your name can tell your body what is coming long before your conscious mind catches up.

We learn when to move closer.

When to become quiet.

When to explain.

When to fix.

When to rescue.

When to disappear.

Over time, these exchanges become less like decisions and more like rhythm.

The term relational memory describes some of this.

Relational memory is different from simply remembering what happened. It is the implicit knowing carried forward from repeated experiences with other people: what closeness requires, what conflict predicts, what happens when someone is disappointed, and what shape we need to take in order to preserve connection.

The past does not remain neatly stored behind us.

Sometimes it comes forward as expectation.

As anticipation.

As an impulse in the body.

As knowing exactly what comes next.

This is one reason estrangement can be so disorienting.

You may have spent years understanding a relationship intellectually before your body stopped participating in it automatically.

You knew the pattern.

You talked about the pattern.

Maybe you even joked about the pattern.

And still, when the familiar distress arrived, you found yourself moving into place.

Because knowing the choreography and no longer dancing it are very different achievements.

Who I had to be

In this context, strategy is not meant in the calculated sense.

It is not manipulation or something we consciously invent to get what we want.

Strategy is the way a human system learns to organize itself in response to experience.

We learn what helps us preserve connection.

What keeps the room calm.

What prevents rejection.

What makes us useful.

What keeps someone we love from falling apart.

What helps us belong.

These adaptations are intelligent.

They make sense inside the relationships that shaped them.

And with enough repetition, they can become so automatic that we no longer experience them as strategies at all.

They simply feel like who we are.

One child learns to disappear.

Another learns to perform.

Another becomes funny.

Another becomes endlessly competent.

Another becomes easy.

Another becomes responsible for the emotional temperature of the entire room.

And some of us learn to rescue.

We become exquisitely sensitive to another person’s distress. We anticipate what is needed before it is spoken. We notice changes in mood before anyone else. We move quickly toward reassurance, explanation, smoothing, fixing.

These qualities can become beautiful parts of us.

They can make us deeply attentive partners, parents, friends, therapists, leaders.

And still, something adaptive can carry a cost.

The problem is not that we learned the strategy.

The problem comes when we no longer know that we have one.

When care becomes obligation.

When empathy becomes self-erasure.

When understanding someone means losing the right to understand ourselves.

When another person’s pain automatically becomes an instruction.

The invitation

One way to describe an enactment is old relational choreography becoming active again.

It is not simply two people behaving badly.

It is a familiar relational pattern becoming alive enough in the present that the people inside it begin to feel its pull.

One person moves.

The other knows the next step.

A look.

A withdrawal.

A criticism.

A crisis.

A promise.

An apology.

A silence.

And before either person has consciously decided what is happening, the dance has begun.

I think this is part of what makes changing a close relationship so difficult.

You are not only changing what you do.

You are changing something that has been organized between people.

When one person stops taking the familiar step, the other person feels it.

Of course they do.

The system has changed.

The person who once rescued does not.

The person who explained stops explaining.

The person who absorbed the anger allows the anger to remain where it originated.

The person who always moved toward the rupture stays still long enough to see whether anyone else will cross the distance.

That change can feel enormous to everyone involved.

And sometimes the relationship begins reaching for the old version of you.

Not necessarily maliciously.

Sometimes desperately.

Because that is the version of you the relationship knows.

The reaching may come as promises.

Anger.

Guilt.

Tenderness.

Crisis.

Accusation.

Reminders of who you used to be.

And suddenly the central question of estrangement is not simply:

Do I want this person in my life?

It becomes something subtler:

Who do I have to become in order for this relationship to continue in its familiar form?

That question can change everything.

Understanding without participating

One of the painful misconceptions about boundaries and estrangement is that distance must require a loss of empathy.

As if remaining compassionate means remaining available.

As if recognizing another person’s pain means agreeing to organize around it.

As if the only proof that we understand someone’s suffering is our willingness to relieve it.

But perhaps there is another kind of understanding.

One that can hold both people at the same time.

Your pain is real.

And so is mine.

Your longing matters.

And so does my limit.

Your history helps me understand what you are doing.

And my understanding does not require me to participate in it.

Your loneliness may explain the reaching without making the reaching safe for me.

This is not indifference.

In some ways, indifference would be easier.

Indifference asks very little.

It is much harder to see the humanity of someone you love and remain unwilling to disappear on their behalf.

There is grief in that.

Because sometimes we are not only grieving the relationship we lost.

We are grieving the hope that if we could just understand enough, love enough, explain clearly enough, rescue carefully enough, or stay long enough, the relationship might finally become what we kept believing it could be.

And relinquishing that hope can feel almost like relinquishing the person.

It isn’t.

But the body may not know the difference immediately.

When recognition becomes choice

The hopeful part is not that our old strategies eventually disappear.

I don’t think most of us heal that way.

The body can remain extraordinarily fluent in an old language long after we stop speaking it every day.

A familiar relationship can still awaken an old impulse.

You can feel yourself wanting to explain.

To fix.

To defend.

To reassure.

To make the ache stop.

The change may simply be that now you can feel the impulse arrive.

There is a moment between invitation and participation.

A breath.

A recognition.

There I am.

There is that old move.

I know what happens next.

And sometimes that moment is enough.

Not to make the history disappear.

Not to make the relationship uncomplicated.

But to restore choice.

The old response becomes something we could do instead of something we automatically become.

That may sound small.

It isn’t.

A life can change inside that pause.

So can a relationship.

And sometimes, painfully, the relationship cannot survive it.

Because some relationships have only ever known us through our participation in the old choreography.

That does not necessarily mean anyone is evil.

It may simply mean the dance was doing more of the connecting than anyone realized.

About a month ago, I woke from a dream with a few lines of a poem still moving through my mind.

I hadn’t gone to sleep intending to write anything. But something about the experience of estrangement—the ache of understanding someone’s reaching and still being unable to return to an old way of being—had apparently followed me into sleep.

I wrote the lines down before they disappeared.

What emerged was this.

I Cannot Re-member

I know the loneliness beneath her reaching.

I know the desperation of someone whose pain has become the only language she knows for connection.

I watch her struggle.

I feel her reaching for me, inviting me to step back into the dance we once knew so well—the dance of pain and rescue, disappointment and abandonment.

I hear her calling for me to react.

To participate.

To give in.

To rescue.

To become who I used to be.

Because that is where she still knows how to find me.

I deeply know the shallowness of her promises.

Not because I question whether she means them in the moment…

But because I have lived long enough to know that the promises are never what endure.

The dance does.

I recall who I once had to be.

I remember how quickly I learned the steps.

How instinctively I anticipated her needs before I ever noticed my own.

How naturally I abandoned myself in hopes that this time love might stay.

I know all of it.

I recall it with remarkable clarity.

But I cannot re-member.

I cannot gather those fractured pieces of myself and place them back into the shape that once made our relationship possible.

Love has changed me.

Loyalty.

Curiosity.

Truly being known.

The kind of love that remains instead of disappearing.

The kind of love that asks nothing of me except that I remain fully myself.

Now I know another way to belong.

And because I know it…

I refuse to re-member.

I cannot return to surviving now that I’ve learned to live.

So I watch her.

I grieve her.

I ache with her.

But I cannot join her.

Not because I no longer love her.

But because I no longer know how to leave myself.

That is the quiet grief of healing.

I still recall the person I once was.

But I can no longer re-member him.

What remains

I keep noticing how often the poem says I know.

Not I hate.

Not I don’t care.

Not even I don’t understand.

I know.

Maybe that is part of what makes estrangement so painful.

Sometimes we leave with enormous understanding.

We can see the loneliness beneath the reaching and still not reach back in the same way.

We can have compassion for the strategy without accepting the role it assigns us.

We can grieve someone without returning to the version of ourselves the relationship once required.

And perhaps that is one of the quieter signs of healing.

Not forgetting.

Not hardening.

Not finally becoming untouched.

But learning that love does not have to require self-abandonment.

That belonging can hold the whole of us.

That another person’s pain can move us without becoming an instruction.

The invitation may still come.

The body may still recognize the music.

We may still remember every step.

But now there is something else we know too.

We know another way to belong.

And sometimes that knowing changes what we are able to return to.

Not because love disappeared.

But because we no longer know how to disappear with it.

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.

Jennifer is a trauma therapist and content creator behind Jennifer Ann Counseling, and the creator of Permission to Post, a course helping therapists show up authentically on camera. Find her at @jenniferanncounseling.

We talk about her first podcast ever (on Notice That), staying yourself when everyone wants a moment with you, "embracing the cringe," what it takes to make personality-driven therapist content ethically, and the intention she set walking into the conference, one worth borrowing at any training: be kind to yourself first.

This episode opens with a short introduction to the series.

Notes from the Hall is a 26-episode series from the Notice That podcast, recorded on the floor of the EMDRIA Conference 2026 in Anaheim; a window into the largest gathering of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapists in the United States, for everyone who was there and everyone who couldn't be. Hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage. Produced by Beyond Healing Media. Explore the full series at connectbeyondhealing.com.

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

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.

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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).