The Two Channels

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

This article is also read by the author in the player above.

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.