Notice That

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.
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Somewhere in our training, most of us learned to keep our faces still. It arrived in the raised eyebrow of a supervisor, in the word neutral on a competency checklist, in the quiet sense that a good clinician does not flinch. And that discipline had an honorable origin: analytic abstinence, therapeutic neutrality, EMDR's own emphasis on trusting the client's system were all built to protect the client from something real: the therapist's agenda, the therapist's unexamined wounds. This episode honors what that tradition was guarding against, and then asks the harder question it left unanswered: what does a blank slate cost a nervous system that came looking for another nervous system?
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.
Listen & subscribe
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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This is the launch of The Relational Thread, a free weekly essay series from Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage that tells the story of their forthcoming Routledge book, EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread, and applies it to the room. Each essay is read aloud by its author — in our voice, not an AI narrator — and lives on Substack for anyone who'd rather read. The regular biweekly episodes of Notice That continue as always; this series is added on top. This first thread, "The Unnamed Thing," is Bridger's, reflecting on chapters one and two.
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
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.
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.
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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A client comes in with a population you've never worked with, and you feel it... the quiet "I'm not equipped for this." In the finale of our Back to Basics series, Bridger and Jen sit with what that feeling is actually made of.
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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In this episode, Bridger welcomes Anastasia Soroka to Notice That for a one-on-one conversation about intersectionality, invisible identities, power, and complexity in the therapy room. Anastasia introduces herself as a trauma therapist specializing in complex trauma, relational dynamics, and interpersonal systems. She is also the host of the Insights with Us podcast and an author whose work explores stigma, sexuality, communication, and the human experience.
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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