EMDR, Predictive Processing and the Flash Technique with Thomas Zimmerman

Today I’m joined by trauma therapist and EMDR trainer Thomas Zimmerman to talk about Flash technique, a fast-evolving approach that aims to process traumatic memories with dramatically less distress, especially for people with complex PTSD and dissociation who may struggle with the “admission cost” of standard EMDR.

We unpack what Flash is, why it can work even when someone cannot tolerate long activation, and how it differs from simply “distracting” yourself. Thomas explains his predictive processing version of Flash through a clear image: instead of dumping the whole memory into awareness, we bring in one tiny “bean” of it, then shift into a strong pleasant scene to create the kind of sensory mismatch that helps the nervous system update. We also explore why dissociation can be a brilliant adaptation, how culture shapes what we think healing should look like, and why resourcing can be practical, tolerable, and even fun.

We get concrete about clinical application too: the core resources Thomas teaches, why sensory grounding matters, how parts-informed consent changes the pace, and when to slow down for DID or severe amnesia. We close with where the research is headed, what Thomas is building next through trainings and a nonprofit, and why accessible trauma therapy could matter at a societal scale.

If this conversation sparks something for you, subscribe, share it with someone who’d benefit, and leave a review. What’s one idea from this talk you want to try or think about more?

Learn more: 
https://thomaszimmerman.us/
https://emdrcleveland.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Lisa Danylchuk 0:04

Welcome back to the How We Can Heal podcast. Today our guest is Thomas Zimmerman. Thomas is a licensed professional clinical counselor, MDS certified therapist, and one of the leading voices in the world of EMDR therapy. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, he runs EMDR Cleveland, manages one of the largest global communities of EMDR therapists, and in 2024 published his landmark book, EMDR with Complex Trauma. Whether he's training clinicians, consulting with therapists worldwide, or pioneering new approaches like the predictive processing version of Flash we talk about today, Thomas has dedicated his career to helping trauma therapists work more effectively so their clients can heal. Our conversation today focuses on how his approach has evolved to address the needs of folks with complex trauma histories and experiences of dissociation, to emphasize resourcing and find tolerable, even fun ways to cultivate healing. David Archer, who's been a guest here on the show twice now, recommended I reach out to Thomas, and I'm so glad I did. Please join me in welcoming Thomas Zimmerman to the show. I'm excited to have you here today.

Thomas Zimmerman 1:24

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Lisa Danylchuk 1:27

So you specialize in complex trauma and doing work at EMDR. I'm curious just how you came to the field of complex trauma.

Speaker 1:35

Well, I I probably should cover how I came to the field. Of mental health in general. Of mental health. So yeah, I mean, I've done a lot of things before. So I'm one of those therapists that came to the field in their very early 40s. I'm in my mid-50s now. So I'm still somewhat new. I mean, if I feel like the older therapist, if you don't have 20 years in, you're like, you're still a newbie. But I came after doing a lot of things. And I came, I think in a lot of ways, like looking for an adventure, right? There's an American Express commercial in the 80s where there's all these young archaeologists that are like, oh, I can't wait to retire. And there's this old guy there that's like, I am retired. You know what I mean? So so I kind of came with, you know, while this wasn't my retirement profession, I came with a level of like interest in this and enthusiasm in this and wanting to see what it could teach me and what it would teach me about life. And of course, I didn't, I wasn't obsessed. I didn't realize, even though I was the one who carried an enormous amount of trauma personally. First, I didn't realize that until later. And then I didn't realize that I was gonna become a trauma therapist.

Lisa Danylchuk 2:59

Yeah.

Speaker 3:00

It's one of those things that I think in in a in a community mental health internship, and I'm like, I want to see it all. And I did. In my community mental health internship, I like saw the whole DSM, like everything from you know, yeah. Now it nearly killed me.

Speaker 2 3:15

Yeah.

Speaker 3:16

You know what I mean? That year. But but again, I wanted an adventure, but I didn't know what shape that adventure would take. But it came pretty clear to me very early on that these are some pretty pervasively wounded people. And then it was later, it was after I started getting EMDR training that I was like, oh, and I'm one of them. You know, and it really took it really took me for the first time in my life, you know, from what was coming up with my clients. It took me having PTSD symptoms in response to the work with my clients that made me like get into EMDR therapy on my own. I was already a practicing EMDR therapist before I did my own like direct trauma work.

Mentors And Learning Through Embodiment

Lisa Danylchuk 4:05

Yeah. So that's how you came to the field and to trauma and EMDR. Were there any pivotal moments along the way, aha's or mentors in your life that directed you, or do you feel like you were just kind of feeling it forward and sniffing it out the whole way?

Speaker 4:21

I've had many mentors. And and I mean, I really I mean, I've had people who have been patient with me when I wasn't getting it. Do you know what I mean? But many of my stories go back to a friend of mine, Ramona. We went through grad school together, and one of those really kind but also brilliant friends who originally said, Hear me out, hear me out here. There's this thing that I'm getting trained in that's actually pretty cool. You may want to do it. And again, it was only because of the equity, my recognition of her as somebody who's just a really remarkable person, that are like, okay, maybe I'll give this weird thing a try. So I've had people early on who were really helpful in getting me to an EMDR training. I trained with Institute for Creative Mindfulness, which was a just a fantastic program for somebody who was themselves pretty somatically disconnected and whatever, to encounter a different way of thinking about therapy and a different way of doing trauma work. I've had other mentors, I mean, the same or Ramona also said, you know, because you go to do EMDR therapy and it's not long before you realize, oh, I gotta like be in my body. This thing is like relevant. And Ramona was like, hey, why don't you come to a dancing mindfulness class?

Lisa Danylchuk 5:51

Nice.

Speaker 5:52

And I was like, I literally hear your words, but I'd rather jump out of an airplane naked. And she's like, and she just said, that just means you really need to come to a dancing mindfulness class, which I eventually did and was helpful in. So I guess a lot of what I've learned about trauma, I can't minimize the amount that what I've learned about trauma has come from being someone carrying it.

Speaker 3 6:21

Yeah.

Speaker 6:22

And having to do the very hard work to find myself more and more and more into my own body, more and more into my own life, more and more in my own practice, more and more into my own experience as being human.

Speaker 3 6:33

Yeah.

Speaker 6:33

So yeah, but I wouldn't be here without mentors.

Speaker 3 6:37

Yeah.

EMDR Meets Dissociation Challenges

Speaker 6:37

But I wouldn't be able to have done this work without people who believed that I could.

Lisa Danylchuk 6:44

Yeah. And how did the EMDR and complex trauma piece come together? Because for many of us, we do EMDR training and then try to apply it to one of our more complex cases. And then start to go, okay, well, what do I do now? And you know, we can get consultation. But I remember in one of my early, early trainings, someone was people were asking for recommendations for, well, how do I work with dissociation? And someone in the training actually recommended my mother, Lynette Danelchuk, who specializes in dissociative identity disorder, to do consultation with. And I was like, okay, that's that's where we are. We're in the refer out stage of this. And this was maybe 2010, right? So we're at that point in the training I was in, folks were just like, well, yeah, probably screen for it and talk to someone who knows about it.

Speaker 7:39

Yeah.

Lisa Danylchuk 7:39

But I think we've come a long way since then.

Speaker 7:42

I mean we have, but we but if if all we were doing in the whole world was watching Facebook groups, yeah. We're in a group of 33,000 EMDR therapists, we have 29,000 experts and everything, right? So in that group, the most consistent advice you would still get is assess for dissociation.

Speaker 3 8:08

Yeah.

Speaker 8:09

And that's the most common guidance that you just endlessly assess. Well, then what?

Lisa Danylchuk 8:13

Yeah.

Speaker 8:14

It's like then what? So guess what? You assess for it.

Lisa Danylchuk 8:17

And here it is.

Speaker 8:18

And you might find it. And even if you don't find it, I know because I was a really, really dissociative human. And I would not have had significant scores on either the DES or the mid-60. Do you know what? I just it's these instruments are not perfect, but okay. So how did I like become someone who's really interested in the intersection of how we train you and how we actually meet the nervous systems of our severely complex or dissociatively complex clients? I had the advantage of having relatively recently gone on this journey on my own.

Speaker 3 9:08

Yeah.

Speaker 9:08

And I realized our standard approaches are not for that nervous system.

Speaker 3 9:14

Yeah.

Speaker 9:14

Right? Dissociation's its whole thing. We could have, we could talk, I believe we could probably talk for weeks about dissociation. And I would hope at the end of that conversation, people would be more hopeful than scared.

Speaker 3 9:29

Yes.

Speaker 9:30

But but there are many, many, there are many, many challenges, the biggest which is phobia of it. And I would argue dissociation is one of the more brilliant adaptations of the human nervous system and the human mind. It is a in all its forms. And that's one of the problems with dissociation is even linguistically, we group this word to account for 25 different things.

Speaker 2 9:58

Yeah.

Speaker 9:59

You know, loosely associated with the freeze response. But we're not even we're not even precise in the language of what we mean when we talk about it. So Yeah, complex traumas everywhere, apparently.

Speaker 3 10:12

Yeah.

Speaker 10:13

And dissociations. Very, very, very common. Is it a problem? It depends on the agenda that you bring to things. It's in the room. Is anger a problem? Is are any of the other survival stri well, kind of, but also, you know.

Flash Technique Basics And Promise

Lisa Danylchuk 10:34

Yeah, also understandable. And often the context is such an important piece because when we see the context of anger, when we see the context of dissociation, when we see the basics of our nervous system, we go, oh, well, of course you are, of course you're angry. Of course there's rage. Of course there's disconnection or amnesia or dissociation or numbness or whatever of those, you know, 26, 80, 89 different things that we kind of put under the umbrella of dissociation. So you came to specialize in complex trauma and EMDR. It's something you've written about, it's something you do trainings on. And you also now focus a lot on the flash technique with EMDR. And just for folks listening, I think most people listening to this episode are familiar with EMDR, eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. Can you tell us a little bit about FLASH and how it relates?

Speaker 11:27

So the Flash technique was something discovered by an EMDR therapist named Phil Manfield nine years ago now, and was originally understood as a way to take some heat out of a difficult memory. And if you're an EMDR therapist, if you know anything about EMDR, you can probably know that going into a memory at two, three, four out of ten distress is probably more pleasant than going into it at 10 out of 10 distress. So the flash technique emerged to solve a particular set of problems in EMDR therapy and to kind of take some heat out of memories. But Flash has grown up, it's changed, it's evolved, it's got many, many different forms. And I've developed and teach one of those forms. And I'm convinced that what Flash can teach us, this is a big claim, and I'm not prone to hyperbole, but I'm convinced that what Flash can teach us about how we heal is going to change how we deliver mental health services in my lifetime globally. It's that big of a deal. And what I think is different in the version of Flash that I teach is it it struck me that there's a very clear model that conceptualizes why it works so well. And the dilemma is I think we've been treating the wrong brain, right? So really Flash, I think, is one of the clearest examples of the predictive mind at work. So I've also been really getting into understandings of the brain and the nervous system that are a profound update to triune brain. Because triune brain was developed by a guy born in 1913.

Speaker 3 13:18

Yes.

Speaker 13:19

Okay. We have learned an enormous amount about the brain in the last 20 years, 30 years, the last 10 years. And what we're learning is that our brain is profoundly different than what we have always consumed, you know, always like assumed that it was. And when I say brain, I don't even think like your brain. I think your brain, I mean synonymous with your whole nervous system from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. So for me, flesh was a really excellent example of working effectively with that mind, with a predictive mind rather than a, because the way we've always taught is you just have this part of your brain that's 150 million years old, it's running 150 million-year-old programming. And, you know, that was very non-pathologizing at the time. But now we know we have a, and again, if that's the version of the brain that we have, we're in trouble. Like, you know what I mean? If you just think about it, we're really in trouble because how in the world can a hundred fifty million-year-old part of the brain make sense of the enormously complex nest of cultures in which we and metacultures and virtual cultures and metavirtual cultures. So it's what we now know is that we have a mind that's always on.

unknown 14:43

Right?

Speaker 14:44

Your mind is always on until you're died. Your mind is always changing. What a mind is in these new models is not only something that can change, but it is something that exists because of trillions of changes.

Speaker 2 14:59

Right.

Speaker 14:59

And every minute, every moment that you've been alive. We just appreciate that the trauma bits of it aren't meant to be changed without the right type of sensory update, without the right type of sensory disconfirmation, without the right type of experiential disconfirmation. So Flash, I think, is a big deal because top line, it lets you heal trauma without distress.

Speaker 2 15:28

That's a big deal.

Speaker 15:29

Second line, it helps you heal trauma with remarkably little risk of decompensation. Third line, it lets you heal trauma that get you to the same places you would have gotten if your clients were healthy enough to have done the more intensive trauma methodology. So EMDR has an admission cost, meaning in order to do it, you have to be able to slow down, be present, notice. You have to be in your body enough to notice, you have to be able to tolerably activate. And the bad joke, which is just true, is that some part of you has to already have the answer that unlocks the learning and the trauma. Meaning, you you're you have to have had a good enough life to have had the experiences that allow the difficult stuff to have something to connect with.

Speaker 3 16:26

Yeah.

Speaker 16:26

Flash doesn't require any of those things. We can literally help people start the process of healing by watching YouTube videos of puppies.

Speaker 3 16:36

Yeah.

Speaker 16:37

Right? And not just healing. And again, I refuse to believe that if Flash fully adaptively resolves memories, when you do it well, well, shoot. I can name 30 psychotherapies built around less. So I don't want to hear that Flash is a substandard. No, when we have hundreds of ways that humans can heal, then then let's do comparisons. When we have dozens of ways that humans can reliably predictably heal in as little as a session, then let's do comparisons. So, you know, lots of people look at Flash and they're well, there's just not enough distress in it for me to believe that it's real. And I'll just say, can you check to make sure that assumption, your belief that people have to suffer that that assumption doesn't float back to very big little men with tiny egos that never for a moment saw the type of healing that we see all the time in transformational trauma? So maybe Flash isn't for some people, maybe it's not for some therapists, but I refuse to believe that it's not good. Does that make sense? So Flash lets us meet our clients here to help resource them to get there, to where they can actually do some of the deeper transformational work. They can actually be, they can slow down enough, be present enough to be able to do trauma-informed yoga, to do, you know, other things that might really be helpful in the service of their recovery.

Lisa Danylchuk 18:25

Yeah. So and so flashes is a less distressing intervention. It's uh it's uh would you call it like an like abbreviated, or would you call it uh maybe a little more distanced from the pain? I mean, it sounds like when you're talking about a two or a three instead of a 10, and you're talking about bringing in puppy videos, like really amping up the resource in real time, not just maybe going into your own mind trying to find the resource that may or may not be there from earlier in life. Um, how would you describe it to someone who's just learning about it for the first time? Is it is it adapted, abbreviated?

Speaker 19:03

Well, abbreviated applies, implies that it's a cliff notes version of something else. And it's not, it's not EMDR's little redheaded cousin. It's it's what I'm trying to do is help shape Flash into an approach to psychotherapy.

Speaker 3 19:22

Yeah.

Speaker 19:22

Because when you do it well, people fully adaptively heal, permanently heal.

Speaker 3 19:29

Yeah.

Speaker 19:30

Right? So, meaning memories fully resolve, you have more adaptive belief about yourself. I mean, Flash, it's no longer controversial to say that Flash completely gets you there.

Speaker 3 19:41

Yeah.

Speaker 19:41

But it doesn't get you there the same way the other things get you there. So, you know, the metaphorical approach is some people show up and they have a 2025 Toyota. Right? You can like walk around it, you can open the door, you can check your wallet, make sure you have some money, and you can get in that car and go. Some people show up with a dirty alpine air freshener. You know what I mean? And they don't have a, they don't have a windshield wiper, they don't, they don't have a rearview mirror, they don't have a car, they don't have a dashboard, they don't have tire, they don't have any of those things. Well, Flash lets you get those clients and put them on an airplane.

Speaker 3 20:21

Yeah.

Speaker 20:22

While you're building the car, right? While you're helping them become more embodied, while you're helping make the present safe enough. Flash is done in a dissociative state most of the time. It's done with us dissociating into a pleasant, engaging YouTube video.

Lisa Danylchuk 20:40

Yeah.

unknown 20:41

Yeah.

Lisa Danylchuk 20:41

So technology is a big part of it.

Speaker 20:44

Technology can be a big part of it because hint, hint, that's how we're dissociating a lot of time already. Right. And people say, well, I don't want to support these. I'm just like, we're gonna let governments worry about what we do with whole generations of children being raised on, you know, mediated, commercially sanctioned learning and information. I'm in the business of trying to help people heal. And if you can help them heal using things that every client has access to, that's not a problem. That's how we start to rescue ourselves from ourselves as a species. That's can be a part of the answer.

Lisa Danylchuk 21:30

Yeah. And you mentioned in your own history and within the work the somatic element, right? That somatic sense of disconnection and the what kind of assumption or need with EMDR to start to track, you know, what's that sensation? Where do you feel it in your body? How does that show up in Flash? Do you do you use much somatic resourcing or or any elements there?

Speaker 21:56

Yeah, there are many ways of doing Flash. And the way that I teach is built around the predictive mind.

Speaker 3 22:03

Okay.

Speaker 22:04

So the distress, first of all, in the version of Flash that I teach, we're not activating the memory.

Speaker 2 22:11

Okay.

Speaker 22:11

We're activating a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of the memory. And there's a difference. So in regular trauma work, it's almost like we're getting the memory and we're like dumping it into working memory. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get a single bean of it and bring a single bean of this bean bag into working memory, leaving all the other 957 beans there.

Speaker 3 22:37

Yeah.

Speaker 22:37

Right. And if people are like, well, my clients can't do that, I don't know what to tell you. People with complex trauma all over the world are doing just fine in Flash with the right type of preparation and rehearsal. So the point is what happens to the distress when we activate a tiny piece of the memory, the distress is moving away from you. It doesn't move through your body. And again, that's very strange because it's almost like it sounds like you're trying to separate wet from water. You know, we're so used to. But what I say is that, well, how did we get used to things? Does that make sense? So we're used to we're used to interacting in trauma with trauma in culturally approved ways, right? So the ways that people interact with trauma in the present moment aren't the way that, quote, hysterical women of the 1880s interacted with trauma. Does it make sense? So the same cultures that wound us highly, highly shape what kinds of things we're allowed to even see as trauma, and then how we should get that treated, and what should we should do about it, and how we should, you know, how we should carry it, and and which therapies are weird and which ones make sense. So Flash is a very non-intuitive way of healing. So is EMDR. But the ways of healing or carrying trauma that make perfect sense have never ever worked. Right? So my the long take-home, the long story of this from a predictive mind and from everything, kind of Bruce Ecker has said, is that we heal when we have experiences that are different than the expectation. Right. And even exposure therapies, you don't begin to heal until your experience of that exposure is different than your expectations.

Speaker 3 24:40

Yeah.

Speaker 24:41

So what we're trying to do in bringing each little piece of the bean of that memory into working memory is to give you an experience that demonstrates repeatedly that it's over.

Speaker 3 24:56

Yeah.

Speaker 24:56

It's not happening right here, right now in your nervous system. And you can do that in Flash, you can do that in EMDR, you can do that in EMDR 2.0, you can do that in parts work, you can do that with you know psychedelic assisted therapy, you can do that in a series of ways, but we heal across prediction error, right? We're wounded across prediction confirmation, we're subsequently rewounded. So my point is that Flash lets us do therapy in ways that are compatible with the mind that we have, not the mind we thought we had in the 60s, 70s. And if we by the way, you know, the kind of things we're learning about a predictive mind, it's not just related to learning. It's not just related to perception. Almost everything a mind does seems to be modeled, seems to be guided by a model of a model, predictions, prediction error, and then where in all of that your brain is attaching attention. So pretty fundamentally, what a mind is, and almost everything it does, including all of our homeostatic mechanisms of our mind, are governed by model, prediction, prediction error, and waiting. Like where's your brain attaching attention? And what I'm arguing is that every single psychotherapy that is transformational differs primarily based on what part of the model of yourself and the world are you activating and how are you activating it? And then the second part is where are you asking the client to put their purposeful attention. Because when you shift attention, when you shift purposeful attention, that shifts where your brain largely focuses and what it does in constructing your reality largely unconsciously. So I think in the end, we heal one way, we update our minds one way, even though it's got a lot of varieties. Right. So it's that just like there are many, many forms of music.

Speaker 3 27:20

Yeah.

Speaker 27:22

But it's all music.

Lisa Danylchuk 27:24

Yeah.

Speaker 27:25

Yeah.

Lisa Danylchuk 27:26

So it's a very titrated way to approach rather than going for the earliest, strongest memory, it's going for one bean of the of the bean bag.

Speaker 4 27:38

Yeah.

Lisa Danylchuk 27:38

And it's working with predictive processing in that, in that, okay, let's take this little bean and have a different experience. Yeah. And see, oh, actually, the thing that my brain learned would happen, that it learned to predict, actually didn't happen. And so in that way, it sounds like there can be this um upstream effect of that. So that rather than going into the painful memory and diving into it and pulling it up by its roots, you're kind of putting some nutrients in the soil around it and they're getting in, right? Or you're just addressing the sunlight on the flower and then it goes through the whole plant.

Speaker 28:16

Right. Because what happens, like one of the things we know about trauma is that it, and again, I've just been thinking about this idea for a few months. What if what if trauma is just learning that's deeply salient? Yeah. Because we've been we've said forever, trauma's stored in your limbic brain. And, you know, it's almost like an EMDR. We're helping a memory put on its little hobo backpack and walk from your limbic brain to your neocortex. The implication has been that trauma is this whole other terrible, awful thing. When in fact, I think its salience explains 90% of it. It doesn't have to be, quote, stored in its own part of the brain. I think trauma, if we think about what a memory is, what is a memory? A memory is a population of neurons that are electrochemically related, the population of neurons that fire together, right, that are related together. And again, each neuron may have a relationship with many tens of thousands of other neurons, right? So it's a level of networking that I don't think we'll ever fully deeply understand. But but the point is, is that how even trauma therapists, how we think we heal is highly, highly shaped by the cultures that have given us language, by the cultures that have given us all of these things. But what the predictive minds suggest is that we have a model of ourselves in the world, and if you want to update it, you need to activate a piece of it and then have the right type of prediction error. Because when your brain issues a whole cascade, well, first of all, with flash, we look at a memory very quickly. Okay. Do you know what happens when you get a little bitty tiny piece of a memory and push it out of your awareness? You've brought a little bitty tiny piece of something into awareness.

Speaker 2 30:18

Yeah.

Speaker 30:19

What that means is your brain has to make predictions about it. And the predictions that it's making aren't matching your right now experience because what you're experiencing is puppies and kittens. And I have you look at the memory so quickly, and then we're puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, puppies, right? Back to back to back. And then that experiential mismatch is generating prediction error. And you know what prediction error? That's one of two things it can do. It can either issue a new revised cascade of predictions, or it can update that little bitty, tiny piece of the memory.

Speaker 3 31:02

Yeah.

Speaker 31:02

Right? So again, what we're doing in Flash isn't resolving the memory all at once. We're resolving each micro slice at a time.

Speaker 3 31:09

Yeah.

Speaker 31:10

And you know what a little bitty tiny, tiny piece of a single experience is? It's not that evolutionarily expensive. It's really easy to change if your nervous system has the right type of sensory-based disconfirmation.

Speaker 3 31:28

Yeah.

Speaker 31:29

So it's really easy in these strategies to update, largely without your awareness, without having to elicit what the beliefs are on the front end or the back end. It's easy to update a little bitty tiny piece of something, and then the next piece, and then the next piece, and then the next piece.

Speaker 3 31:48

Yeah.

Speaker 31:49

So Flash makes, I'm gonna die on this hill, and I've told people I've trained, I will meet with you endlessly and for free until you get this point. And this point is that while Flash doesn't make the resolution of complex trauma easy, Flash does make the resolution of individual memories easy. And non it is a non difficult clinical task. It is simply flash makes the resolution of individual memories non-eventful. And in fact, pleasant. And that is mind-blowing. And what makes it mind-blowing is going to help rescue us as a species if we have any chance of that.

Lisa Danylchuk 32:41

It's a way to have a new experience, again, without asking someone to go to the most challenging moments or experiences or again.

Speaker 32:51

Many of our instincts from the cultures that most wounded us. And by the way, who are some of those cultures? Those cultures are the cultures that may be promoting efficiency. Right? And maybe the culture said, okay, you know, work on this, you got to work on the biggest monster first.

Speaker 3 33:09

Yeah.

Speaker 33:10

Um but complex trauma is what it is. Right? Complex trauma doesn't care that much about the bureaucratic agendas that we bring to it, right? Which is, and again, that's going to get us, you know, treatment-resistant trauma or treatment-resistant depression is it's what happens when when our our bureaucracies don't actually meet the individual nervous systems that are in front of us.

Lisa Danylchuk 33:39

Yeah. So you've also talked about a four blinks version of Flash. Is that something you've created?

Speaker 33:46

Yes. And four blinks is now, it's got a new name. And again, I've got, I got, yeah. But it's it's predictive processing flash.

Speaker 3 33:54

Okay.

Speaker 33:54

It's predictive processing flash. Because four blinks was the name that that was that I kind of gave it early on. The the kind of update in the last few months is no, we're working with the predictive mind.

Speaker 3 34:07

Yeah.

Microactivation And Memory Bean Slices

Speaker 34:08

We're actually doing, we're leveraging the predictive mind in in this version of Flash.

Lisa Danylchuk 34:14

Yeah. To make it tangible for folks listening, can you give, obviously, without any identifying details, can you give an example of a trajectory? And it could be, you know, a conglomerate or something you use in training of a memory someone worked with and and how they felt sort of beginning after, like what that journey of a single flash or predictive processing uh experience was? Like what's where do they're they're starting, it sounds like with a two or three, they're taking a bean, they're resourcing. And then what do you tend to see happen?

Speaker 34:51

Well, well, first, what we're doing in Flash is we are in this version of Flash. I don't speak about other versions, it's not my business. But in this version of Flash, we prepare people using four core resources. Okay. Right? The strategy to contain, which is whatever we activate, we're gonna send it out of your nervous system because if you keep staring at it, it's gonna grow.

Speaker 2 35:13

Yeah.

Speaker 35:13

Right. So we contain, we have another resource, and I know somatic therapists are like, Tom, we're not gonna vacuum distress out of the body. I spend so much time. Do you know what I mean? Like helping people be with and sit with. This is an approach to therapy that's different.

Speaker 3 35:33

Yeah.

Speaker 35:34

I'm a somatic therapist too, but sometimes our clients just need to heal.

unknown 35:39

Yeah.

Speaker 35:39

Does that make sense? Sometimes they just need to heal. We don't want to make the perfect the enemy the good. The other resource is if we're spending almost all the session in this pleasant scene, this pleasant, disconfirming prediction error generating scene, we need to develop it. And the fourth resource is sensory grounding. I don't know how you do trauma work without some means of grounding, because even looking at a memory quickly, sometimes the memory grabs you and pulls you in it.

Lisa Danylchuk 36:05

So it's the contain, the pleasant scene. Was there somatic resourcing in that?

Speaker 36:10

Vacuum.

Lisa Danylchuk 36:11

The vacuum, okay.

Speaker 36:12

The vacuum, yeah. And again, I'm resourcing you well enough so that you know that distress should not be in your body from that memory. And again, I don't care about your allostatic load, your eight out of 10 stress that you wake up with on a Tuesday morning. What we're vacuuming and what we're moving away from you is what just got worse when you looked at that memory.

Speaker 3 36:33

Yeah.

Speaker 36:33

So you may need to be embodied enough to know that. Does that make sense? But you don't need to be embodied enough to do EMDR therapy. And you don't need to have adaptive information in your nervous system the same way that you do an EMDR therapy.

Speaker 3 36:48

Okay.

Speaker 36:48

You don't. You don't, you can truly believe everything that ever happened to you was your fault.

Speaker 3 36:53

Yeah.

Speaker 36:53

And then once you've done a few small memories to prepare, you can work on a 10 out of 10 memory. So when I say that Flash originally brought heat down, I'm I we're doing very small memories. We're doing three or four relatively small memories, increasingly larger. And then in Flash, we're working on the attachment wounds that most broke you in childhood.

Speaker 3 37:17

Okay.

Speaker 37:18

By the fourth time we do Flash. So what does that look like beginning to end? It looks just like what it would have looked like if you would have done EMDR. And that memory would have resolved in 25 minutes or 35 minutes or 45 minutes.

Speaker 3 37:34

Yeah.

Speaker 37:35

It looks like healing looks every time you do transformational trauma therapy by the time from the beginning to the end, the different, they get you to the same place. So I'm a few miles from Cleveland Hopkins Airport. I can get in a plane in Cleveland and I can fly to San Francisco. And when I'm in San Francisco, I'm going to be in my body in San Francisco. I can drive there. And when I drive there, I'm going to be in my body in San Francisco. I will be at that destination. But what I learned along the way is different.

Speaker 2 38:09

Right?

Speaker 38:09

You want to learn a lot about yourself. Walk.

Speaker 2 38:12

Yeah.

Speaker 38:12

Do you know what I mean? So there are multiple ways to take the journey. And then if you get there, that destination looks the same.

Speaker 3 38:24

Yeah.

Speaker 38:24

Right. And what that means is you'll have a belief that your nervous system subsequently experiences as over.

Speaker 3 38:34

Yeah.

Speaker 38:35

Right? It's experiencing that memory as objectively over rather than as happening now. Right. You will have shifts in how you think about yourself in the world because that's what that's a large part of what healing is. You know, your people will say, EMGR, EMDR therapists, well, I thought I thought only EMDR shifted your cognitions. No, healing. Healing shifts your cognitions. You know what else healing does? It causes generalization. It causes when new learning happens, our predictive mind has to update sub other forms of learning in accommodation of that. Right? Just like when you learn the meaning of a word, you really learn it. You can't hear that word with the old learning. Do you know what I mean? You hear it through the new learning.

Lisa Danylchuk 39:31

It's like for me, listening to the like the hip-hop music that you know, there's all kinds of hip-hop music. There's very positive lyrics in some, but some of the stuff I was raised on in middle school and I listen to now, I'm like, I can't, I can't not hear it. I was 12 and I'd sing along, and I was like, oh, this is fine, right? Oh, they're just kidding, right? They're not kidding. It's not fine. I'm not gonna sing it anymore. It's not okay. You can't unlearn once you see it.

Speaker 39:56

Absolutely. So so yeah, Flash gets you there pleasantly, which is it's weird. So that there's there's a trade-off. The trade-off is we have to learn to engage with things uncomfortably fast. We have to learn to not let things that we've activated move through our viscera and be present with it and notice it. No, we move it away. But if you can make peace with that, if you can find something pleasant on YouTube, or you can dance, you can get up and dance. You can do your favorite Spotify playlist, you can go for a walk, you can do whatever. If you can make peace with what's weird about Flash, you can heal every day for the rest of your life for free. Right? So it's a small price to pay, just like the weirdness of EMDR. People are like, oh, EMDR is weird. Guess what? Yes, it's not culturally normative. But if you can do what we're asking you to do, you might be able to heal, yeah, despite its strangeness. And after a little bit of time, that's gonna be what healing looks like.

Lisa Danylchuk 41:15

Yeah. Yeah. And what's the research status with Flash? I know I'm thinking of the journey of EMDR, how early it was so weird, and then there was more and more robust research, and people go, okay, maybe, maybe I'll try the weird thing because it looks like it really works.

Core Resources Grounding And Parts Consent

Speaker 41:28

Yeah. So for something that was just discovered nine years ago, there is a growing, there's research happening all over the world. And there'll be research that I'll be doing in Cleveland through a nonprofit that I'm forming here, that ironically, flash trainings have funded, right? The formation of that nonprofit. And it's really going to look at transformational trauma therapies. So we want to do some of our own research, but I also want to help other people doing research through the predictive processing lens, right? Through the predictive mind lens, conceptualizing things in that lens. So there's while there are people who say Flash has enough research to support it as an evidence-based psychotherapy, we know who the evidence-based institutions and heads are, the governmental agencies and the VA and all that. So those organizations don't know about Flash yet. So it's coming. But like I tell my consultees, I'm like, you can find ways using language from mindfulness, using language from the work that you're already doing. You can find language to justify Flash clinically. You justify Uno with your kid clients all the time as a pro-social blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can find ways to make sense of this as you're documenting that your clients are getting better and resolving things.

Lisa Danylchuk 43:03

Yeah.

unknown 43:04

Yeah.

Lisa Danylchuk 43:05

I'm really curious about the assessment piece because that's one angle with EMDR that's become really important, right? Assess for dissociation. And then, but in terms of it sounds like if someone isn't able to feel really connected to the present moment or their body, there's this element of sensory grounding that's important as a resource to start Flash. But how do you even back up and introduce it to clients or assess for readiness? Do you have a protocol for that?

Speaker 43:35

So let's think about first, I want to compare it to EMDR.

Lisa Danylchuk 43:39

Okay.

Speaker 43:39

Because to do a psychotherapy well and safely, you have to do what we're asking you to do in it. Right. So to do EMDR therapy, you have to be able to tolerably activate. That might be a pretty significant problem with highly dissociative people. You have to be able to slow down, be present, and notice in This moment, that might be a special challenge for pretty highly dissociative clients. And you have to be able to have enough of the needed adaptive information already in your nervous system. Right. So that's a lot of stuff that's got to be in place. So I really want to know about those things. I want to know about your capacity to do those things.

Speaker 3 44:24

Yeah.

Speaker 44:24

What's your capacity for your nervous system to sit with for long periods of time? Really difficult things. Without parts of you going, yep, nope, I've had enough. You know?

Speaker 3 44:34

Yeah.

Speaker 44:36

What am I asking you to do in Flash? I'm asking you to look at a memory uncomfortably fast. I'm asking you to get a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny piece of it. And if you get more than that, you know what I'm going to do? We're going to do everything we can do to stop that activation. We're going to do everything we can do to move that distress away from you. And we are not going forward until it does. Okay. So microactivation is a skill that people have to develop.

Speaker 3 45:10

Yeah.

Speaker 45:11

Right. But then you know what we're going to do? We're going to sit with a pleasant YouTube video. We're going to let you dissociate into a funny, distracting, engaging. And again, assess for disordered eating. But some of my clients use bubbly hot videos of bubbly hot pizzas coming out of the oven. You know, it could be whatever. And again, some of my consultees are like, I like watching people slip on ice. I'm like, y'all are mean, but whatever. You know what I mean? It's like, whatever, like, you know, whatever, whatever shifts your effective state. Can you do that? Are you here enough to go from here to dogs looking at you like they love you when you're patting them on the head? Do you know what I mean? Are you are you able to do that? Yeah. So that's what that's long and short. My clients that are pretty dissociative do really well in Flash because I'm not asking them to be still in this moment while I set their viscera on fire.

Speaker 3 46:16

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 46:17

You know, I'm asking them to do this in a place of comfort.

Lisa Danylchuk 46:22

Yeah.

Speaker 46:22

With them.

Lisa Danylchuk 46:23

Which is a fundamental reorientation.

Speaker 46:26

It's complete, it's it's mind-blowing, but again, if you can get your mind around it, you can heal forever and for free. Now, the one category of clients, because consent is essential. The one category of clients that I'm doing parts work with first are the people on this end of the dissociation spectrum who the client doesn't or I don't have um ready access to parts. Does that make sense? We just can't, you can't just go resolve trauma when the identity of parts are holding that information to keep the system safe. Does that make sense? So we're definitely doing enough assessment to get a sense of you know how the parts of you communicate with each other. What is your, you know, getting a sense of dissociative identity disorder or of things on that end of the spectrum. And we're gonna slow down because then trauma is even more deeply identity entrenched. It's more yeah.

Lisa Danylchuk 47:37

You know, I found myself thinking as you were talking about the different videos people enjoy about different positive. It doesn't have to be videos, you know, it might be listening to an audiobook for a child part, or it might be anything along those lines of resourcing different parts in different ways. Like one part might like people slipping on ice, one part might like pizza, one part, right?

Speaker 2 48:01

Yeah.

Lisa Danylchuk 48:02

So it's it's interesting and and infinitely more complex when we talk about dissociative identity or OSD or you know, otherwise specified diagnoses. But yeah, it sounds like if there's amnesia for memories within parts, then that's a time when you increasingly slow down and don't bring a technique or or even a piece, don't even attempt to bring a piece of a memory to progress. Yeah.

Speaker 48:31

And this version in every step of Flash, this version is part centric. Does this resource work for all parts of you?

Speaker 2 48:39

Yeah.

Speaker 48:40

You know, does this, and again, I've I just because there's I have lenses of having worked with now, you know, plenty of clients with DID in Flash. They're colb scenes. Like I have a client who uses an aquarium for a colm scene, and different parts like different aspects of the aquarium. Like some parts like these fish, other parts like the the environment and the structure and the fauna in the aquarium, right? Other parts like the sucker fish and the, you know, the mechanics and the manage and homeostasis of the aquarium and some of the kid parts like the little clowny-like fish. And do you see what I mean? So again, we ask, and again, that's one of my I'll kind of give an example in and from an EMDR lens, but when we're engaging with a memory, the core question we ask is before we even begin, do all parts of you think working on this memory is a good idea today?

Speaker 3 49:38

Yeah.

Speaker 49:38

And a lot of people are like, what if your client says no? I'm like, that's the greatest gift in the universe.

Lisa Danylchuk 49:44

And we don't do it.

Speaker 49:45

Why do I, why do I, why am I deciding that that's the memory the client has to work on today? That's awesome if the client says no. So, but again, if I were to go to even the most rigidly trained EMDR therapist, and I were to say out loud, hey, but EMDR is not a machine that we cram people through. You know, they'd go, oh, that's right. Yeah, that's right. But if I were to say, hey, what's wrong with just asking at the beginning of phase three? Do all parts of you think working on that memory is a good idea today? They'd probably go, oh, well, but no, but that's just gonna get us in this whole other territory that we don't really want to go. People need to heal. Let's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So somewhere in the middle, there's gotta be something reasonable.

Speaker 3 50:41

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 50:42

And I think a lot of this would be solved if we would just say out loud in foundational EMDR trainings, hey, we're training you to work with relatively healthy people.

Speaker 3 50:53

Yeah.

Speaker 50:53

If that's not the people you see, you're gonna need to learn to make sensible adjustments to match the nervous system that is in front of you. But many of the consultants that I hear from other places, they're like, we're training you to work with any client.

Speaker 3 51:08

Yeah.

Speaker 51:09

In this amazing therapy, and you do it exactly this way every time. And I'm like, I'm sorry, that is a recipe for harm.

Lisa Danylchuk 51:19

Well, that's that's the point in any training where I start to distrust it or I stop trusting it, right? When someone says this always works for everyone. But if someone introduces and says, This is who this works really well for, this is who we're not sure, this is who we found some feedback that indicates it might be harmful. Yeah, okay, I'll keep listening. But when someone starts a book or a training with this is always great for everyone, you know, but it's interesting. I mean, even something like puppy video is always great for everyone. I had a client who came to me for a dog bite. So probably not, right?

Speaker 51:54

Like it is nothing, no one's and again, there are people for whom flash, and again, flash, flash is, I think it's the closest thing we've got to the magic wand that we thought EMDR was. Does that make sense? It's like, you know, EMDR, EMDR is not a magic wand. It is it is an amazing and remarkable psychotherapy for people who can tolerably activate, slow down, be present, and notice, and have enough of the needed adaptive information. Now, that is not everybody.

Speaker 3 52:24

Yeah.

Speaker 52:25

Right? So Flash can meet clients down here, but not everybody down here can do Flash. There's just certain people that it's not a good fit for. And it's people who can't, with any memory, tolerably active. Again, if you can't do what I'm asking you to do, you can't do that psychotherapy well. And if I'm asking you to have a pleasant experience in the calm scene and you're completely and totally emotionally dead, you can't do that. Flash isn't going to work for you. Now you're not going to be harmed because you're not going to be able to activate, but also you're not going to be healed because you're not going to be able to have the prediction error that the experience in your pleasant scene generates.

Speaker 3 53:11

Yeah.

Speaker 53:11

So flash isn't for everybody, but it works for a good 95% of people with really severe trauma when nearly nothing else does.

Research Status Limits And Who It Fits

Lisa Danylchuk 53:26

Yeah. And it sounds like it's it's so titrated and so focused on resourcing that given everything I know about working with complex trauma and dissociation, again, it's that it's that inverse approach. Rather than let's really focus on the trauma and the impact of the trauma and the symptoms and the triggers and the and the whole cascade in your nervous system, let's not focus on that. Let's see if we can tolerably activate the smallest grain of sand of it and then give the predictive processing a different experience. Yeah. And just do that. And I think the the brilliance of that is because I've known so many people and through colleagues that have decompensated with EMDR, had a really hard time, um, left treatment in the middle of feeling harmed. Yeah. People have come to me years later saying, I did an EMDR before, but it was really hard and I didn't have enough time. And there was the in between the weeks was really difficult. I didn't feel like there was, you know, in other language, enough resourcing. But if you're you're not in avoidance of that truth of the impact of the memory, you're taking the most titrated little piece and dousing it with resources, right? So again, it's inverse of let's really focus on the resource without being in avoidance with a client, which can happen, right? We're gonna we're gonna acknowledge it's there just enough to take this tiny little piece and then we're gonna put it back away because that's where it was and that's where it's gonna stay for now, and then we're gonna have a new experience. Yeah. And so it feels like flipping it for this population where there isn't often there isn't, oh, a strong attachment figure to go back and lean on, right? There isn't resourcing of, oh, I'm gonna go to my childhood room and that's a resource. No, right? Like there's so many pieces that I think EMDR can assume can assume resources that aren't there or can be aware of a certain level of harm, but not the other context behind it. So flipping it in this way uh also is of service to to those clients who are the most complexly traumatized, we'll say.

Speaker 55:38

Yeah. Yeah. So again, for in a predictive mind, what we need for information to update is we need to access a tiny piece of it.

Speaker 3 55:46

Yeah.

Speaker 55:47

And then you need to have redundant experiential learning that demonstrates that that little piece isn't happening right here, right now. Because you're the the idea of of things happening right here and not happening right here is just one of the last tricks of your predictive mind. So your your mind doesn't make a distinction. We know this. I mean, ask anyone who's had a flashback if if there's a clear distinction between now and then.

Speaker 2 56:15

Yeah.

Speaker 56:16

So yeah, so so flash is incredibly non-intuitive. It doesn't feel right. I'll only say endlessly, what does feel right is what's kept you from healing for the last 47 years.

Speaker 2 56:39

Right?

Speaker 56:40

We will endlessly do what makes cultural sense. We'll endlessly avoid, we'll endlessly numb, we'll endlessly catharsis. Some people will endlessly try to make themselves whole by loving a broken man, right? Some people will, you know what I mean, and we'll do that endlessly, even though there's no evidence that it's ever helped shift anything dramatically.

Speaker 3 57:04

Yeah.

Speaker 57:05

We'll do that endlessly, and we'll die carrying much of the wounding that we have gone through trying to survive. You know what I mean? What we've been through. And another thing people say is, well, Tom, if this is so easy, why people do intense resourcing all the time. People dissociate all the time into YouTube. People who dissociate into YouTube should be the healthiest people on the planet. I'm like, they're not leveraging the predictive mind, they're resourcing without getting this pump going. And what I will say is that people who have been to yoga and had a good experience there, I'll say this. What you've gone to a yoga class with something in your nervous system activated. And by the time that class is over, some part of it has shifted. You're certain of it, aren't you? Some part of that, maybe that's the part I can't fully put my finger on, but it's almost like that class gave me just the right disconformation for some part of what I was carrying to shift. But you know what you didn't do in yoga? You didn't keep going back and activating a little micro piece of that. And if you might have, if you would have, you would have turned yoga into a transformational trauma therapy. Do you see the difference? So it's it's how we're interacting with this little piece of the model of ourselves in the world and how we're interacting with the resource that is allowing the update to happen.

Lisa Danylchuk 58:46

But that that part's interesting. And the last thing I want is for yoga teachers listening to start trying to activate a little piece of traumatic memory at the beginning of a yoga class. No, it might be helpful. Let's please stay in our lanes here. But yeah, it makes me think of though, when when you come to yoga class and have something going on in your nervous system, but there's enough slowing down and stillness for a piece to emerge and digest. And there's almost like a subconscious, um uh a subconscious decision of like what emerges, or maybe it's based on the movements of your body and what's a muscle or a position you're in, or something. But but I think it's common for folks to feel like, okay, my nervous system came in maybe rushing and I was late. And yeah, by the end it's shifted because I'm no longer rushing and I've done all this slow deep breathing. But it's also super common for folks to have little bits come back in a way that often, not always, feels digestible.

Speaker 59:48

Yeah, and we feel the same way when we've been relationally wounded, and then when we have corrective relational experiences. Does that make sense? You know, some little bit of it gets updated.

Speaker 3 1:00:02

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:00:02

So what Flash does is says, okay, let's leverage that. Now the next little piece, then the next little piece, then the next little piece.

Speaker 3 1:00:12

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:00:13

Right? So, and again, the idea that we heal a cross-prediction error that shouldn't be as hard to sell to therapists as it is. I tell your therapists, you don't have a bat in your office that you just beat your clients with when they come in. We're like, we're trying to hold them in a way that's different than their mom. You know, we're trying to hold them, we're trying to be patient and careful and kind and be flat mirrors and be affirming and be warm and listen deeply and attune. We're trying to do those things because we understand that when someone has been very wounded, they're expecting things and the way our nervous system is can help their nervous system not just regulate but heal.

Speaker 3 1:01:10

Yeah.

Speaker 1:01:11

Right? So it's a really good time, I think, to be, I think it's a really good time to be a trauma therapist, but but we have to be careful that we're not too attached to the wrong intuitions. And one of the things, as excited as I am about EMDR therapy, and as excited as I am about Flash, if we find a way for people to stand on their left legs, left leg, hop backwards four times, and then they can heal, I'm like, how do we strengthen our clients' left legs?

Speaker 3 1:01:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1:01:46

Like, how do we do that? Does it make sense? So I'm I'm really, really, while I have an identity, core identity is an EMDR therapist. And while I think Flash is going to not only change how we think about healing and how people might recover, I think Flash can make, and I think Flash can make you a better, more effective EMDR therapist. Ultimately, I'm in the business of helping people in internal suffering. I'm in the business of like helping people reconcile themselves with themselves because when they don't, they grow up and become monsters in this world and cause an enormous amount of harm. So, um, or they may, I don't mean they inevitably, but some versions of it grow on, go on and spread trauma like a bad inheritance.

Speaker 2 1:02:38

Yeah.

Speaker 1:02:38

Right. So I don't know, people need to heal. And I'm telling you, it's going to take a little bit of time for our minds to get around it. But if people can heal while having fun, that's a psychotherapy that is every bit as accessible as Taco Bell.

Speaker 3 1:02:55

Yeah.

Nonprofit Trainings Book Club And Hope

Speaker 1:02:56

And as gross as that is, they're everywhere. Do you know what I mean? They're like everywhere. You can fall over sideways into them.

Lisa Danylchuk 1:03:05

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what's coming up for you next? You're working on the nonprofit and doing some more research.

Speaker 1:03:12

Nonprofit is coming up. David Archer and I are doing a training. We wrote a foundational training curriculum around racial trauma and complex trauma that got approved last year by Imdria. We're busy training that. We have training starting in two days that we're doing. So there's training, training, training. I'm doing a lot of refreshers. I do a lot of flash training, just a lot of trainings. But we're doing a book club. Dave and I are doing a book club to try to introduce predictive processing to therapists. Just the principles of it.

Speaker 3 1:03:47

Yeah.

Speaker 1:03:47

The therapist. Because I think I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about the predictive mind.

Speaker 3 1:03:53

Yeah.

Speaker 1:03:54

We're going to be hearing a lot more about the adaptive mind. We're going to be hearing a lot more about the brain. Not as a broken structure, but a brain as an always-on, ever-changing, you know, a mind is the present embodiment of trillions of experiences. Right. And then to update it, we need to help people have different experiences that leverage prediction error in therapeutically helpful ways. So we're doing free book clubs just to try to get out. The idea that you know that an this updated version of the mind is really good news. And from this conceptualization, we can rethink how we do resourcing. We can rethink how we meet pervasively traumatized nervous systems. So there's an enormous amount of hope in it. So I'm excited. I'm excited about the nonprofit, the ability to do more research. I would love, it's not going to happen, but I would love for the Veterans Administration to do flash groups. I can't think of anything that would be more transformational than veterans who generally don't want to feel, don't want to go there, don't want to experience it, but urgently need to heal to be able to heal and to be able to heal in individual flash sessions and in flash groups. I think this is going to reshape the landscape of possibilities.

Speaker 3 1:05:30

Yeah.

Speaker 1:05:31

Um for what healing might look like for the people who most need to heal, but for whom the the current deeply transformational ways of healing might actually be too intense or too harmful or too too overwhelming, or might, you know, Shapiro, Francine Shapiro's very clear in her, you know, book on EMGR that EMGR, EMGR might send you off a cliff, right? It just might. So it's not a therapy immediately for everybody and we need to have other interventions that meet people effectively safely in quotes you know safe safely as you know safe safe enough you know yeah yeah you mentioned some of the things that bring you hope what brings you joy in this work I mean it's great to see people heal it's great it's also great to see people heal while having fun yeah so I learn about music that I would have never been exposed to I learn about you know just whatever my clients are interested on on on YouTube I get to see them heal and I get to just learn stuff you know learn stuff about I think I don't I don't know what to make of this it's a little kind of an existential thought but it feels at the very moment that I'm kind of the most pessimistic about the state of the world I'm most optimistic about the capacity for an individual human to reconcile themselves with themselves. So it's kind of a I think you know many of us are overwhelmed by the by what's going on in the world but yet I think we found out some really compelling accessible tolerable works very very very regularly and even when it doesn't it doesn't tend to cause harm. Therapies and my goodness it feels like the world needs that.

Lisa Danylchuk 1:07:34

Yes right it feels like the world needs that and um so people are swimming around in the impacts of trauma at so many levels and so yeah and we don't want to just dissociate into puppy videos but if we can actually process and digest the tiniest bit and change our prediction maybe we won't need to spend hours in front of YouTube videos use them for teaching.

Speaker 1:07:58

Maybe we can use these strategic ways of dissociative healing to actually create the space for people to become more present based embodied yeah to create the capacity create the room in their nervous system to be present with their own children to be present with themselves in their own lives yeah yeah and that's powerful yeah so what's the best way for folks to connect with you is it Thomasimmerman dot us your website Thomasimerman.us um for training stuff I do free flash trainings every two weeks I've done that for nearly five years nice emdrcleveland.com and I've been out there training a lot of EMDR therapists for free and and in refresher classes therapists that have and David and Art David Archer and I are I think by the end of this year probably will be training more people on scholarship than I I would argue a higher percentage of scholarship. So we we want to train people in transformational trauma therapies. So one of the things I I love about about David is we have a very similar mission we're like we're we just want we want to share what we're excited about whether that's EMDR therapy whether that's flash informed therapy how that can help you be a better EMDR therapist or can help you reach clients that yeah so and how can people find the the book club and the trainings that you're doing together would those be on your website or EMDRcleveland.com.com yeah and again you can I don't whatever else you can do you can probably train for me and will train with me in some capacity for free in the next few weeks. I mean it's it's there's we're I just don't want people because of financial constraints not to be able to get the support that they need and and enough people show up who do pay that subsidizes all of it. So it's nice yeah that's great. Yes so yeah so right now I don't need more money I need a more just and equitable world.

How To Connect Listener Prompts And Closing

Lisa Danylchuk 1:10:16

Yeah so yeah I think a lot of people can relate to wanting that more just and equitable world right now. Yeah yeah well thank you so much Tom Thank you it's been lovely yeah it's been great to hear more about Flash and David recommended you and I'm glad that he did it's been wonderful to learn from you today and to be able to share this with the audience too. All right thank you to the end of the episode thanks for listening all the way through now that you've been listening for a while I'd love to hear back from you. What's an idea or a story from this episode that sticks with you as we wrap up or what's one small thing you can do today to choose a step in the direction of healing or growth? Share your answers and what's been healing for you in the comments below on YouTube, on Instagram at how we can heal or send me a message at info at howwecanheal.com also check out howwecanheal.com for free resources, trainings and the full transcript of each show. If you're listening and loving the show, please leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you're listening right now. If you're watching on YouTube, click the buttons to like and subscribe and keep sharing the show with anyone it could benefit. Before we wrap today I want to be clear that this podcast isn't offering prescriptions, it's not advice nor is it any kind of mental health treatment or diagnosis. Your decisions are in your hands and I encourage you to consult with any healthcare professionals you may need to support you through your unique path of healing. In addition everyone's opinion here is their own and opinions can change. Guests share their thoughts not that of the host or sponsors I'd like to thank our guests today again and everyone who helps support this podcast directly and indirectly. Alex thanks for taking care of the babe and the fur babes while I record last and never least I'd like to send some love to my big brother Matt who passed away in 2002. He wrote this music and it makes my heart so very happy to share it with you. Till next time