Notice That

You prepped the target properly. You ran it clean. The SUD came down — and then stopped at a two, and stayed there. Most of us were taught to call that ecological and move on.
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.
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The eight-phase protocol was built to be learned, practiced, and trusted — and most of us were trained to hold it carefully. This conversation asks what happens when careful hardens into rigid. Bridger and Jen sit down with three voices from the new anthology Queering EMDR Therapy — editor Roshni Chabra, LMFT, alongside contributors Lisa Hayes, LISW-S, and Mish Kumar-Jonson — for a conversation that has been a year in the making, about what it means to queer EMDR: not a technique to add in phases four through seven, but a lens that runs from before phase one to after phase eight.
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.
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Most of us were trained with real care to attend to one half of the room. Symptom picture. Presenting circumstances. Developmental history. What happened to this person, what it did to them, and which of it belongs on a target list. That training is good, and this essay does not hand it back. But it asks about the other half — the encounter itself, the histories both people carried in without deciding to, and the ordinary minute-by-minute of what passes between two nervous systems. We have a rich vocabulary for the first half. We have almost none for the second.
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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EMDR was built to trust the client's system. David Archer asks the question that honors that premise and then extends it: whose system, from whose culture, holding whose history? Before some clinicians of color would even register for an EMDR training, they asked David whether it works for their communities. This episode is his answer — and it reshaped how he trains, consults, and sits with clients.
David returns to the podcast (his first visit was 2022) as an anti-racist psychotherapist, EMDR trainer, and author of five books, to walk through rhythm and processing (RAP): his approach to the mental health consequences of complex racial trauma, grounded in predictive processing and memory reconsolidation. The mechanics are concrete. The client generates their own list of trauma targets, including the racial trauma questions most intakes never ask. The client — not the therapist — chooses the resource: a photo from a trip to Jamaica, a pet's nervous system alongside their own, a ten-hour video of a Sahara sand dune. Then a present-moment action lets the body discover that the old prediction no longer holds. Salience, not positivity, is the key — and it can't be chosen for the client, because the therapist can't feel what the sand dune means. What emerges is a way to help people heal with a lower risk of abreaction — a way to heal, in David's words, through joy.
Along the way: why race and gender are constructions with real consequences in the nervous system, what a genogram reveals for white and white-passing clients that a symptom checklist never will, where structural dissociation fits alongside parts work, and the seven Afrocentric dimensions that widen what we mean by resourcing — spirituality, collectivism, and an understanding of ancestorhood in which a person remains present as long as their name is spoken. David closes with an invitation to be a revolutionary therapist: carry the sword, and carry the shield.
In this episode
David Archer — social worker, marriage and family therapist, anti-racist psychotherapist, and EMDR trainer in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke, the unceded territory the city sits on) — returns four years after his first conversation with Bridger. Since then he has written five books, seen his work included in required readings for newly trained EMDR therapists, and developed rhythm and processing (RAP): strategies for the mental health consequences of complex racial trauma. This conversation moves from the sociopolitical moment into the session room — and stays there long enough to show you how the work actually looks.
Key themes
Race is constructed; racial trauma is not. Race is not a biological or scientific category — it was built for colonization, extraction, and slavery. And its consequences live in the nervous system. David's African clients name it precisely: "The first time I ever had racial trauma is when I came to Canada. And then I found out I was black." The same lens applies to gender — these are not logical problems, so logic alone will miss the target. A trauma-focused understanding is required.
The white therapist, too — heal thyself. Whiteness is not a monolith ("Canadian" is not a race). White and white-passing clients carry unasked-about histories — immigration, refugee status, witnessed trauma — and therapists carry their own. The work of anti-racist psychotherapy includes the therapist's own healing, not as a disclaimer but as a clinical necessity.
Where words run out. Five years as an addictions counselor in Indigenous communities around Montreal taught David that words couldn't reach the depths of his clients' suffering — the survival responses underneath had no words at all. That's what drew him to EMDR: insight that arrives from the client's own associative work, not the therapist's interpretation.
Loving an approach means staying critical of it. Some trainees finish basic training without confidence across the spectrum of dissociation; some communities have to ask whether EMDR was built for them. RAP puts race, social identity, complex racial trauma, dissociation, therapist self-care, and community care into the frame from phase one onward.
The RAP technique: disconfirmation through client-chosen salience. Through a predictive-processing lens, healing is memory reconsolidation: reactivate the prediction, then let the body meet evidence that no longer fits. The client chooses the image or video — their trip, their pet, their culture, their spirituality — and a present-moment action (tapping, blinking, an epistemic search) anchors the body in the now. Salience, not positivity, is the criterion — the resource can look boring from the outside and still carry everything.
Parts, under-resourcing, and structural dissociation. Different parts may need different resources — the oven mitts before what's coming out of the oven. RAP sits alongside IFS-informed EMDR work and adds explicit consideration of structural dissociation.
An Afrocentric frame, for every client. Drawing on Belgrave & Allison's Afrocentric dimensions: spirituality (connection to something greater, religious or not), collectivism over the individualism David sees at the root of much Western suffering, and ancestorhood — the understanding that a person remains in community, and in the present, as long as their name is spoken.
The revolutionary therapist. Do therapeutic things even where you aren't a therapist. Stay aware of climate as a mental-health context. Remember poverty is a policy outcome, not a personal one. Carry the sword (boundaries, advocacy) and the shield (protection from misinformation and vicarious trauma). And on AI: "You have actual intelligence."

Practical clinical takeaways (what you can bring into your next session)
Add racial trauma questions to your history-taking for every client — and build a genogram that tracks positive and negative legacies on both sides of the family. For white and white-passing clients, that's often where the unspoken history lives.
Let the client generate the target list. David's RAP intake questions produce a client-authored spreadsheet of specific trauma targets — the client as active participant in their healing, from the first session.
Follow salience, not positivity. Ask what holds vitality for the client — a trip, a pet, a place, a practice from their culture or spirituality — and resist supplying your own favorite. The therapist cannot feel what the sand dune means.
Pair the chosen image with a present-moment action — tapping, blinking, an epistemic search (looking for numbers in the room) — so the body registers now while the old prediction is active. That mismatch is the disconfirmation.
Resource the part, not just the person. Ask which part needs the oven mitts, and consider where your client sits on the spectrum of dissociation before reprocessing.
Widen your resourcing frame: spirituality, collective belonging, ancestors whose names are still spoken. These are resources in the truest neurobiological sense.

Why this episode matters
Much of trauma training quietly assumes healing must pass through pain on the way to relief. This conversation offers a different account: when the client chooses what is salient — their culture, their joy, their sand dune — the disconfirmation can arrive through what is loved rather than only through what is feared, with a lower risk of abreaction. And it restores something the old narrative of trauma took away: the client as the active participant in their own healing. That's not a softer version of the work. It may be a more precise one.
David Archer
Archer Therapy (website, blog & weekly consults): https://archertherapy.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026
What is the RAP Agenda? (rhythm and processing): https://archertherapy.com/what-is-the-rap-agenda/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026
EMDR consultation & monthly two-hour rhythm and processing workshops (low-cost and no-cost options): https://archertherapy.com/training/consultation/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

David's five books
Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: Confronting Systemic Racism and Healing Racial Trauma (also on audiobook): https://archertherapy.com/books/anti-racist-psychotherapy/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026
Black Meditation: Ten Practices for Self-Care, Mindfulness, and Self-Determination (also on audiobook): https://archertherapy.com/books/black-meditation/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026
Racial Trauma Recovery: Healing Our Past Using Rhythm and Processing: https://archertherapy.com/books/racial-trauma-recovery/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026
Black Mountain: Fight for the Future (Afrofuturist novel): https://archertherapy.com/books/black-mountain/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026
Transforming Complex Trauma: Reflections on Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: https://archertherapy.com/books/transforming-complex-trauma/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026

Mentioned in the conversation
David's first Notice That conversation (2022): https://emdr-podcast.com/david-archer-anti-racist-74/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ArcherRAP_Therapists_Summer_2026
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564299/how-to-be-an-antiracist-by-ibram-x-kendi/
Belgrave & Allison, African American Psychology: From Africa to America (the Afrocentric dimensions): https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/african-american-psychology/book248474
IFS-Informed EMDR: Creative and Collaborative Approaches (David Polidi, Routledge, 2025): https://www.routledge.com/IFS-Informed-EMDR-Creative-and-Collaborative-Approaches/Polidi/p/book/9781032891675
Thomas Zimmerman, EMDR Cleveland (David's training collaborator): https://emdrcleveland.com/
Bridger & Jen's book, EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread, and the essay series: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Two sessions. Same protocol, same fidelity, same clinician. One changes the client's life. The other changes nothing. This essay is about that difference — and why it isn't the part we were trained to think it was.
Drawing on the memory-reconsolidation research, Bridger reads the third essay in The Relational Thread and makes the claim underneath the first two: your presence isn't the warm support around the real work. It may be the mechanism of the real work — the felt, unfakeable experience that contradicts an old relational prediction while the memory is briefly open to being rewritten. Why a blank slate supplies no mismatch. Why the disconfirming moment can't be scripted. The sub-lexical channels it actually travels on. And three things to try on Tuesday.
In this episode
Bridger reads Essay 3 and completes a thought the series has been building toward. The first essay said the relationship is the work. The second said the person of the therapist is the instrument. This one makes the claim underneath both: presence isn't the backdrop the intervention happens against — it may be part of the causal path by which an old memory changes. The whole thing turns on two sessions run with identical fidelity, where one reorganizes something for good and the other quietly restores the client to exactly where they started.
Key themes
The demotion hidden in our favorite words. Rapport, safety, the relationship was strong, container, nonspecific — all useful, and all doing the same quiet thing: filing presence next to the change rather than inside it. The episode honors what "container" got right (a nervous system in genuine threat integrates nothing) and then moves the moment we file under rapport to the center.
How a memory actually changes. For most of a century we assumed therapy worked by extinction — building new learning alongside the old and hoping it outcompetes. Reconsolidation complicates that: a reactivated emotional memory becomes briefly labile, open to being rewritten before it re-stores. Ecker's clinical sequence — reactivate the old learning, then, while it's open, deliver a mismatch — is the spine of the episode.
The contradiction is the therapist. For clients whose wounds are developmental and relational, the prediction that needs violating is about what happens between people (if you see the whole of me, you will leave). You can't disconfirm a relational prediction with a technique — only with a relationship. The steadiness that stays when the client braced for absence isn't the warm condition around the reprocessing. In that moment, it is the reprocessing.
Why a blank slate has a technical problem. A therapist holding perfect neutrality while a client reactivates an abandonment network supplies no mismatch — and the unreadable face is often a match, confirming that people go absent under the weight of one's need. This is an account of why some technically faithful trauma work quietly fails.
It can't be scripted, because the nervous system is built to catch scripts. Neuroception (Porges) runs a fast, subcortical read of prosody, face, and autonomic state for genuine safety versus performance. Presence delivered on cue, by a therapist who has left the room to monitor their own performance, gets read as absence and filed under confirmed.
The mismatch lives in the carrier wave. The disconfirming experience travels on the sub-lexical channels — tempo, prosody, the pause before a response, the willingness to let a silence stretch. "You're safe here," said rushed and flat, is not a contradiction; it's a match the body hears underneath the words. When we choose our word for a client's grief, we're also choosing the tempo we say it at.
You can't operate the channels — but you can notice them. Presence isn't a set of dials (lower the pitch, lean four degrees forward); the system that spots inauthenticity catches that too. It's cultivated by attending inward, outward, and to the field between — and by tracking your own tempo and bracing as a live readout of the relational field.

Practical clinical takeaways (three things to try on Tuesday — offered as practices, not protocol)
Reactivate with the relationship on — not just the target. The protocol is very good at bringing the old network online. But a genuine disconfirmation needs the relationship live at the moment of activation — you actually there, not narrating the phases from a careful, procedural distance. The activation and the contradiction have to happen in the same room, at the same time.
Treat the disconfirming moment as the reprocessing — not a detour from it. When the client says the true thing and checks your face, the pull is to note it and steer back to the "real" set. By this account, that glance is the set — the memory is open and a prediction is being tested in real time. Letting the contradiction land is not going off-protocol. It may be the most on-target thing happening.
Hold the window — the steadiness is doing the encoding. The vulnerable minutes after something true has been said are not downtime before the next step. They're when a reactivated network decides what to re-store. Staying regulated, present, and unwithdrawn across those minutes is, quite literally, part of what gets encoded — the new prediction, laid down in the presence of the person who stayed.

Concepts, frameworks & names mentioned
Memory reconsolidation (clinical sequence) — Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic & Laurel Hulley (Unlocking the Emotional Brain, 2012): reactivate the old learning, then deliver a lived mismatch while it's labile.
Reconsolidation synthesis for psychotherapy — Lane, Ryan, Nadel & Greenberg (2015): emotional arousal plus a new, contradictory emotional experience, integrated in the moment, is what durably updates the network.
Reconsolidation and EMDR — Chamberlin: EMDR is unusually good at reactivating a target network and taxing it into a malleable state.
"Too much, or not enough, to be held" — Karlen Lyons-Ruth, on the internalized relational prior at the core of developmental wounding.
Neuroception / polyvagal theory — Stephen Porges: a fast, subcortical read of safety versus threat and agenda, beneath awareness.
Therapeutic presence as a physiological safety cue — Geller & Porges: a therapist's genuinely settled, engaged presence is itself a cue the client's system detects and settles toward.
Therapeutic presence (cultivated, not applied) — Shari Geller & Leslie Greenberg: presence attended inward, outward, and to the field between.
Right-brain-to-right-brain affective communication — Allan Schore: affect regulation transmitted on implicit channels, faster than either cortex can compose a sentence.
Microanalysis & the present moment — Beatrice Beebe (second-by-second reciprocal exchange) and Daniel Stern (the present moment): relational change located beneath the words, as regulatory operations rather than manners.
Presencing, the reframe of "nonspecific" common factors, and the relational reading of reprocessing — from EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (Falkenstien & Savage).

Why this episode matters
Most continuing education hands you another way to work on the memory. This episode points at the variable in the room that decides whether the work lands at all — the person who has to actually be there when an old certainty is briefly open to learning it was wrong. It completes the series' through-line: if the relationship is the work and the person is the instrument, then presence is the mechanism — the live, contradicting experience an old prediction meets while the network is open. That's the claim that turns "be warm" from bedside manner into part of the clinical account.
Listen & subscribe
The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the space between therapist and client and what actually changes people in it. Each essay is read aloud here on Notice That. Read it and subscribe — free, one essay a week available here.
The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.