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

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

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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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

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

In this episode

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

Key themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concepts, frameworks & names mentioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this episode matters

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

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

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

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

In this episode

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

Key themes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concepts, frameworks & names mentioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this episode matters

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

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The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the space between, the person of the therapist, and what happens when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. Each essay is read aloud here on Notice That. Subscribing is free.

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Key themes

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

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

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

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

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

Practical clinical takeaways — what to bring into your next session

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

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

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

Concepts, frameworks & names mentioned (with light context)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the essay: The Relational Thread on Substack here!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Themes

Intersectionality in therapy

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

Invisible identities

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

Power in the therapy room

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

EMDR and complex trauma

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

Resourcing and adaptive networks

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

Parts work and EMDR

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

Chronic pain and identity

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

Clinical curiosity and humility

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

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

We discuss:

• Why attachment trauma often lives beneath symptoms

• How EMDR can help heal early relational wounds

• Working with children using EMDR

• Family therapy + EMDR integration

• Resourcing trust, safety, and connection

• Parents as part of the healing process

• Parts work / ego states in EMDR

• How therapists become corrective emotional experiences

• Why the therapeutic relationship still matters deeply in trauma work

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

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

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

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

DETAILED SHOW NOTES

Introduction

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

Meet Deb Wesselmann

Deb shares her background as:

• Former school teacher

• Therapist for 35+ years

• EMDR clinician since the mid-1990s

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

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

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

Early EMDR with Francine Shapiro

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

She discusses:

• Why she was initially skeptical

• Her powerful practicum experience

• How EMDR differed from hypnosis

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

Why Attachment and EMDR Fit So Well

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

• mistrust

• abandonment wounds

• relational fear

• unresolved grief

• abuse memories

• developmental trauma

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

What Didn’t Happen Matters Too

One of the most powerful moments of the episode:

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

It is also about grieving and repairing what never happened:

• protection

• soothing

• attunement

• nurture

• safety

• emotional co-regulation

Parts Work / Ego States in EMDR

Deb and the hosts discuss:

• ego states

• parts language

• multiplicity of self

• internalized child parts

• wounded protector parts

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

Deb’s Integrative Family EMDR Model

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

Phase 1:

Parent psychoeducation and case conceptualization

Helping parents understand:

• “This is not a bad child.”

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

Phase 2:

Family preparation and regulation work

Including:

• body regulation exercises

• window of tolerance education

• playful nervous system work

• emotional literacy

Phase 3:

Attachment-focused EMDR resourcing

Examples:

• parent-child connection exercises

• messages of love

• soothing touch

• bilateral stimulation paired with relational safety

• healing the “little one inside”

When Parents Are the Barrier

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

The hosts discuss how therapists may need to pivot toward:

• supporting the child directly

• grief work

• coping strategies

• becoming a safe relational template

The Therapist as Attachment Resource

A major theme of the conversation:

The therapeutic relationship itself becomes healing data.

Bridger discusses inviting clients to:

“Take my voice with you.”

Meaning:

• internalize compassion

• remember safety

• borrow regulation

• carry supportive relational memory into distress

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

Why This Episode Matters

This conversation reminds us that EMDR is not merely protocol.

It is also:

• relational

• developmental

• embodied

• attachment-informed

• deeply human

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

In this episode, we explore:

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

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

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

• The difference between interrupting processing vs. supporting movement

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

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

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

• Somatic interweaves

• Affective interweaves

• Relational and resource-based interweaves

You’ll also hear real clinical reflections on:

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

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

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

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

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking:

“What do I say right now?”

This episode will help you shift toward:

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

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

Together, we unpack:

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

• Why “just resourcing” may unintentionally limit healing

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

• The difference between trauma and the deeper layers of loss

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

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

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

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

Connect with Bethany Warren:

• Website: https://bethanywarrenlcsw.com/

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

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

Together, we explore:

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

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

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

• How modern parenting culture conflicts with evolutionary caregiving needs

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

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

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

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

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

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In this deeply reflective episode of Notice That, Bridger and Jen are joined by therapist and trainer Jessica Downs for an intimate conversation exploring the inner life of therapists, professional identity, and the personal work that inevitably emerges beneath clinical practice.

Together, they explore the hidden motivations that draw people into helping professions, the illusion of the “next training” as a solution to therapeutic stuckness, and the moment many therapists encounter when professional development turns into personal reckoning.

This episode moves beyond theory into experience, as Jessica guides a live experiential exercise inviting listeners to connect with younger parts of themselves — demonstrating how EMDR principles, ego state work, and imagination can foster integration and self-compassion.

Themes explored include:

• Why therapists often chase new modalities or trainings

• The relationship between burnout and unresolved inner dynamics

• Countertransference and the therapist’s personal history

• Ego states and parts work through an EMDR lens

• The role of suffering in human experience

• Individuation, identity, and professional evolution

• Healing as wholeness rather than symptom elimination

This conversation is slower, more inward, and intentionally reflective — an invitation to pause, notice, and reconnect with the parts of yourself that brought you into this work in the first place.

In This Episode, We Discuss

• The unconscious reasons therapists become therapists

• When “helping people” isn’t the whole story

• Capitalism, continuing education culture, and therapist insecurity

• Internal imagery and symbolic work in healing

• Parenting, therapy, and mirrors of the self

• Jessica’s “spotlighting” ego state exercise (follow along included)

• The La Loba myth and reclaiming lost parts of self

About Our Guest — Jessica Downs

Jessica Downs is a trauma therapist, EMDR clinician, and co-founder of Iris Training Collective. Her work integrates EMDR, ego state approaches, symbolism, and depth psychology to help therapists reconnect with authenticity and wholeness in both personal and professional development.

Resources & Links

• Iris Training Collective

• Live Well Counseling Center (Grand Junction, CO)

• Notice That Podcast

• Beyond Healing trainings and consultation opportunities

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In this episode of Notice That, Bridger and Jen are joined by Laurel O’Neal Thornton, EMDR clinician, consultant, and educator, for a rich conversation on the neuroscience of resilience and what it actually looks like in EMDR therapy.

Drawing from neuroscience, EMDR, and years of clinical experience, Laurel reframes resilience as an innate human capacity—one that exists even in the presence of trauma, depression, neurodivergence, and chronic stress. Together, we explore how shame disrupts resilience, why meaning-making matters, and how EMDR can foster regulation, integration, and adaptability without chasing perfection or symptom elimination.

This episode is especially resonant for clinicians working with complex trauma, neurodivergent clients, chronic depression, or anyone feeling stuck in rigid models of “healing.”

✨ In This Episode, We Explore:

• Why resilience is adaptation, not toughness or “bouncing back”

• How EMDR naturally supports resilience through plasticity, regulation, and integration

• The role of shame as a major disruptor of innate resilience

• Why healing doesn’t mean never being triggered again

• How meaning, purpose, and relational connection show up in resilience research

• Working creatively within the EMDR protocol—especially Phase 2 and Phase 8

• Supporting neurodivergent and highly intelligent clients in EMDR

• Why spontaneity, play, and pattern-breaking matter in therapy

• What it really means to “trust the brain” in EMDR

🧩 Key Takeaways for Clinicians

• Resilience exists before healing—and therapy helps clients reconnect to it

• EMDR doesn’t fix broken brains; it helps glitching systems reintegrate

• Decreasing shame may be one of the most powerful therapeutic interventions

• Creativity and flexibility are not deviations from EMDR—they’re part of its design

• Healing is about faster recognition, quicker recovery, and greater self-understanding

👩‍🏫 About Our Guest

Laurel O’Neal Thornton is an EMDR clinician, consultant, educator, and practice owner who specializes in the neuroscience of trauma, resilience, and neurodivergence. She trains and consults clinicians internationally and is passionate about helping therapists integrate neuroscience in ways that are practical, humane, and deeply respectful of the client’s nervous system.

Learn more about Laurel’s work at Whole Brain Solutions

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We’re joined by Cassie Krajewski, LCSW, AASECT-certified sex therapist, EMDRIA Approved Consultant, and co-founder of Iris Training Collective. Cassie brings a deeply integrative lens to sexuality—one that moves far beyond technique and into conceptualization, embodiment, and healing.

Together, we explore how sexual health is not a “specialty concern,” but a core dimension of human wellness—and how EMDR therapy offers a powerful, attuned framework for addressing sexual shame, desire, pleasure, and trauma.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why sexual health is a birthright, not a performance metric

• How culture, religion, and shame disrupt embodiment and desire

• The role of pleasure as a healing mechanism, not a reward

• Why many therapists avoid sex—and how that avoidance shows up clinically

• Integrating sex therapy principles into EMDR case conceptualization

• Creative and embodied resourcing for sexual trauma and low desire

• Consent, curiosity, and reclaiming agency in sexuality

• How therapists can reflect on their own relationship to sex and pleasure

This episode is an invitation—to therapists and humans alike—to pause, notice, and gently question the stories we’ve inherited about sexuality… and to consider what healing might look like if pleasure were allowed back into the room.

Free Resources on Cassie's website at inneratlastherapy.com

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A Conversation with Arilda Surridge, LMFT

What happens when EMDR moves beyond the individual—and into the relationship itself?

In this episode of Notice That, Bridger and Jen sit down with Arilda Surridge, LMFT, author and EMDR clinician, to explore how EMDR can be ethically, safely, and powerfully integrated into couples therapy. Arilda shares a clear, grounded framework for working with two nervous systems in the room—without deviating from EMDR fidelity—and offers concrete clinical examples that bring this work to life.

This conversation goes far beyond theory. Together, we walk through:

• When couples EMDR is and is not appropriate

• How to assess whether a trauma is individual, shared, or relational

• What simultaneous EMDR reprocessing actually looks like in practice

• How compassion, accountability, and repair emerge through bilateral stimulation

• Why tools alone often aren’t enough for deeply dysregulated couples

Arilda also shares clinical wisdom from her work with couples navigating car accidents, attachment injuries, guilt and shame, trust ruptures, and relational enactments—highlighting how EMDR can help partners move from reactivity to empathy.

This episode is especially valuable for:

• EMDR therapists working with couples

• Clinicians navigating attachment trauma and relational enactments

• Therapists curious about maintaining EMDR fidelity in non-traditional applications

• Anyone interested in how trauma lives between people—not just within them

About the Guest

Arilda Surridge, LMFT is a licensed marriage and family therapist, EMDR clinician, and the owner of Wellness Counseling Inc. She specializes in integrating EMDR into couples therapy while maintaining fidelity to the eight-phase protocol. Arilda is the author of a practical, clinician-focused book on EMDR for couples and offers professional trainings on this emerging area of practice.

Find out more about her practice here: https://wellnesscounselinginc.com/about/

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This episode isn’t about teaching a specific technique. It’s about humor, authenticity, and why laughter belongs alongside depth in trauma work. We talk about how Jennifer’s platform grew, what it’s like navigating social media as a therapist, handling negative comments, and why being real often connects more than being polished.

We also explore EMDR in everyday practice—ritual, intention, parts work, and the familiar client experience of “I don’t know why this works… but it does.”

Connect with Jennifer Ann Counseling

Instagram / TikTok: @JenniferAnnCounseling

Free resources available via her bio

If this episode resonates, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a colleague who needs a reminder that therapy can be human, playful, and deeply meaningful.

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Together, they dive into:

• How Arielle’s early training in somatic psychology shaped the way she learned and practices EMDR

• Why the body scan and somatic check-ins are not just “boxes to tick,” but core guides for pacing, target selection, and resolution

• Polyvagal theory’s view of how trauma gets “tagged” in the nervous system—both in external cues and internal sensations

• What to do when clients say, “I don’t feel anything in my body” and how even that response is meaningful data

• The myth that SUDs “should always go down,” especially with dissociative and complex trauma presentations

• Arielle and Barb Maiberger’s “golden nugget practice” and why we shouldn’t wait for a SUD = 0 to install and future-template meaningful shifts

• Therapist embodiment: using our own nervous system as an instrument for attunement, pacing, and repair

Arielle also shares about her Somatic EMDR trainings through BodyLab, her therapist retreats in Sedona and Costa Rica, and her Beyond Trauma nervous system care retreats, including an immersive experience in South Africa that combines yoga, nervous system education, and observing animals in the wild.

You’ll hear practical language, case examples, and flexible ways to honor EMDR’s structure while staying deeply relational, embodied, and responsive to the nervous system in front of you.

Learn more about Dr. Arielle Schwartz:

• Website (events, retreats, trainings): resilienceinformedtherapy.com

• Website (blog, yoga, additional resources): drarielleschwartz.com

Check out her card deck that integrates nature photography with quotes from The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook—a powerful tool for helping clients locate themselves in their healing process and set intentions for EMDR and somatic work.

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