Notice That

When the Session Stops Being About the Target: Working with Enactments in EMDR | The Relational Thread

Somebody taught you what to do when a client gets activated, when they dissociate, when the SUD won't move. Nobody taught you what to do when the thing happening is between the two of you.This is the practical one. After two essays arguing that the relational field is where the work lives, "The Two Channels" is what Bridger actually does when a pattern surfaces in the room: offering the client a choice out loud between working it in the world or working it between us — and why saying that menu out loud changed his practice more than picking correctly ever did.Also in here: reciprocal dual attention — the second pair of timelines the therapist is holding while the client holds theirs; a whiteboard, a bell curve, and why making an enactment slightly ridiculous makes it survivable; saying a thing in its sharpest form on purpose, with a warning label; the past-present-past rhythm; and the one question to lean on once the conceptualization is finally shared.Read the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week): https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_Essay06_Therapists_Summer_2026The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage.Reciprocal dual attention developed with Jen Savage and Caleb Boston as part of Enactment-Focused EMDR.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Inside EMDRIA: Standards, Community, and the Plane We're Building Together with Viviana Urdaneta | Notice That

Most of us meet EMDRIA as a set of requirements. Consultation hours, credentialing pathways, standards documents that arrive in the inbox already decided. That impression is fair, and it is incomplete. This week Viviana Urdaneta Melo, Deputy Executive Director of the EMDR International Association, joins us to put faces and reasoning behind the acronym.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 episodeViviana 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 themesFrom 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 mattersStandards 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 MeloPrivate practice, consultations & workshops: https://vivianaurdaneta.com/EMDR consultations: https://vivianaurdaneta.com/emdr-consultations/EMDRIA — what we talked aboutEMDRIA 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 FoundationUPSIDE 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/EventsEMDRIA 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 mentionedPaul Miller, EMDR Therapy for Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses (Springer, 2015): https://www.springerpub.com/emdr-therapy-for-schizophrenia-and-other-psychoses-9780826123176.htmlOur 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_threadSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Why the SUD Stalls at a Two: Plato's Cave, Target Selection, and Relational Trauma | The Relational Thread

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_2026The 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.

Queering EMDR Therapy with Roshni Chabra, Lisa Hayes, and Mish Kumar-Jonson | Notice That

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 episodeRoshni 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 themesQueering 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 mattersA 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 & LINKSQueering EMDR Therapy — official site: https://queeringemdr.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026Contributor consultants directory: https://queeringemdr.com/about-the-book/contributors/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026The book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Queering-EMDR-Therapy-Roshni-Chabra/dp/B0FMK76GP3Roshni Chabra, LMFT — Lavender Healing Collective: https://www.lavenderhealingcollective.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026Lisa 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_2026Mish 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_2026Our 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_2026EMDR basic training & case conceptualization (SIP) with Beyond Healing: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_QueeringEMDR_Therapists_Summer_2026Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/thinkbeyondhealingABOUT NOTICE THATNotice 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.

On Target, or a Tangent?: How We Decide what Counts in EMDR | The Relational Thread

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.comThe Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen SavageMentioned in this essay: Donna Haraway; Sandra Harding; Alfred North Whitehead; John Locke; Judith Herman; Laura Brown; Renee Linklater; Arthur Kleinman; David Archer.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.