Listen in to hear Jen, Melissa, and Bridger pick back up their journey through Francine Shapiro’s Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy (3rd ed.). In this episode, the hosts begin in chapter four of the book, Client History.
Jen
0:00:00
Welcome to Notice That, an EMDR podcast. Here you will find discussion on all things EMDR, from MDRE approved trainers and consultants, as well as some co-hosts. EMDR is an approach to the entire therapeutic journey, not just reprocessing trauma. This podcast will feature discussion on the therapeutic relationship, understanding and using the original eight-phase protocol, and what to do to bring deeper understanding to the why behind EMDR and the process of psychotherapy.
Jen
0:00:55
We are glad that you’re here.
Bridger
0:01:04
Thanks for checking out this podcast. Notice that is a project of Think Beyond, a listener funded media house focused on connecting humans through therapy and art. To keep this podcast going, we’d love for you to support us on Patreon by searching patreon.com slash thinkbeyondhealing in your favorite web browser. And don’t forget to check out our new merch by going to our website at connectbeyondhealing.com and clicking on the merchandise tab.
Bridger
0:01:38
Hello and welcome back to Notice That, the EMDR podcast.
Jen
0:01:43
We’re back.
Bridger
0:01:44
We’re back, finally.
Bridger
0:01:46
The three of us.
Melissa
0:01:47
Where have we been?
Bridger
0:01:48
Where have we been?
Jen
0:01:50
I’m sure a lot of you are wondering that.
Bridger
0:01:53
Where have you been? Two months and no episode? What is this? How rude, we’ve left him hanging.
Jen
0:01:58
Has anyone reached out? I haven’t gotten any like…
Melissa
0:02:04
There’s been plenty of conversations. Yes..
Bridger
0:02:05
Melissa’s in the know on people wanting more.
Melissa
0:02:08
Like, is everybody OK?
Melissa
0:02:10
I’ve had, you know, loving comments. Just curiosity.
Bridger
0:02:13
Just curiosity.
Jen
0:02:15
Well, maybe we should give our listeners a little bit of context as to why.
Jen
0:02:21
One reason why.
Jen
0:02:22
And there’s one reason why we’re going to be real about it, but one really big, special, adorable, cute, snuggly reason
Jen
0:02:30
why we’ve been gone.
Bridger
0:02:34
There’s another human in the world now.
Jen
0:02:35
A little Bridger. That’s very cool.
Bridger
0:02:37
A little, well, a little Olivia. I don’t know. A little Bridger Olivia.
Melissa
0:02:41
Yeah.
Bridger
0:02:42
She’s a girl.
Bridger
0:02:43
So, I don’t know.
Bridger
0:02:44
Bridger, I don’t know.
Bridger
0:02:45
I don’t know. But yes, there is a now nine pound, two ounce, small human with no teeth living in my house named Goldie Rose Falkenstein. And so that’s very cool. But it has been a journey. We got COVID in the hospital, which was not what we expected. We had an open plan as far as how we were going to give birth, but that wasn’t on it.
Jen
0:03:15
And all of the creative renditions of how will birth go,
Melissa
0:03:20
you forgot to put COVID on it.
Bridger
0:03:22
Didn’t even think about that. Yeah, so perhaps we should have… I can hear many voices in my head saying, “you should have thought of that, that’s why you don’t go to hospitals”. Okay, well, I’m not trying to get into this whole thing right now. We had a lovely experience. We’re good. Yes, we had a lovely experience aside from getting COVID. But about a week after we brought her home, everybody kind of got back to normal… whatever that means now. Yeah, a new normal. A new normal. I was talking with Caleb and the best metaphor or analogy I can use is that I feel like I’m a resident now of two parallel universes that I’m perpetually late to transport between. Like I’m just, I like show up to the one I’m supposed to be in quote unquote, and it’s like I’m late and I have to like orient to where I am. And then at some point I’m like sucked back into the other one of work. And yeah, it feels very disorienting and when you time travel sleep is a bad thing I guess so
Jen
0:04:29
really can’t getting much of that can’t afford it that visualization explains some of the facial expressions that you’ve jumped onto zoom with yeah exactly and you just look like really disoriented yeah because i’m like where am i what time is it what meeting am i in what version of myself was I just before this?
Jen
0:04:53
Yeah.
Bridger
0:04:53
It’s very disorienting.
Bridger
0:04:55
And I thankfully have so much, like so many people have been really understanding, from clients and consultees. It’s interesting to work with so many people internationally because they’re like, “so you’re like off for like a while, right?”
Melissa
0:05:10
Oh, yeah.
Bridger
0:05:11
Like, no.
Bridger
0:05:12
There is no governmental support for this.
Melissa
0:05:17
Yes.
Bridger
0:05:20
So wild.
Bridger
0:05:22
It’s been interesting, but she is lovely and beautiful and wonderful. She makes amazing faces. Her eyebrows are unbelievable.
Jen
0:05:34
Well, if you ended up making a photo of her, the cover image for this episode, I wouldn’t be opposed to that.
Melissa
0:05:41
I think there’s a few questioners out there that would be thrilled to see her face.
Bridger
0:05:46
There is one that isn’t particularly like cute because her face is like so scrunched, but she’s given the peace sign. That’s my favorite photo of her. And it was caught perfectly where it looks like very intentional, like peace sign.
Melissa
0:05:58
Yeah, I have one like that of Anora at about a month old. She was doing the thinker face right. She had this serious like, you know, hand on chin like there’s something very, very serious happening in there.
Bridger
0:06:12
There’s another picture of Goldie where she’s laying down and she’s like, posing like she’s like full on like arms crossed one hand up like just so.
Bridger
0:06:23
The serene baby pose. Serene baby. Yeah, that’s what it would be called if it were curated. Serene baby. Well, it’s an excellent reason that we have been delinquent in episodes. And I have to say, like, I have definitely missed you guys in this space. I miss you guys just in general, but like in this space as well. This is my first episode, like recorded being back. And it’s just a different space that no other social space offers where we just get to kind of dive in and have fun and know that we’re speaking about something really important and that hopefully a lot of people will benefit from and we’ll get a lot out of it too just
Bridger
0:07:10
in this time together.
Jen
0:07:11
So I’m really excited to be back too. Melissa and I were, didn’t tend to our recording as well as we could have maybe with. We’ve been using our time very well though, I promise.
Melissa
0:07:24
Yes we have.
Melissa
0:07:25
We’re busy.
Jen
0:07:26
So we’re back. We are.
Bridger
0:07:30
And we’re picking up where we left off, which we finished chapter three in our last recording, so you’ll see a two month gap there, but we’re right back to where we were starting chapter four, entitled Phase One, Client History. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today, in part, at least. I don’t think we’re gonna get through the chapter, but. We’re gonna get through at least half of it. That’s our goal.
Jen
0:07:54
That’s our commitment. We’re going to try. Yeah, yeah. And I think similar to our other episodes, we’re looking to follow that same process of acknowledging pieces of the text. There’s going to be much more than what we get to speak to, but then also offering some of our own interpretation or modifications or insight that we have found through experience of EMDR to kind of fold into some of the material that’s in the text. Along with some pretty important kind of updates to the way it was written back then and all the intervening wisdom and research of the field as a whole. What we know now that we didn’t know in terms of safety and updates to traumatology that are very relevant for these spaces.
Jen
0:08:50
So where do you guys want to begin?
Bridger
0:08:52
How do we get started with EMDR? Yeah, I think that is a great place to begin.
Bridger
0:08:57
And speaking to my time traveling self, this is helpful for me as well, just getting back into this conversation of, I feel like when we leave basic training, there’s so much in our head, like, you know, this whole book in whatever PowerPoint form it was presented from the presenters and now we’ve got all this clinical hours going on and the clients that we’re seeing, where do you begin? I think within EMDR’s basic training, like what you leave with is that, well, we just start doing it. We start with clients that we’re already seeing or, you know, we take on new clients and start doing EMDR. I think a lot of that is really muddy. So I’m glad that we have this space to kind of parse out and go segmented or just kind of patiently through what it means to start EMDR with somebody. But in phase one, when it says client history, I think there’s a large spectrum of what that could look like from just inheriting a bunch of documentation that has long histories on it, previous clinical notes, additional diagnoses, medications, whatever. And then you’ve got your personal relational connection being built with your client. So it’s like a wedding of the two.
Jen
0:10:22
I’m trying to remember right now if we’ve spoken to this on this podcast, we’ve talked about it in so many other places, but I think maybe it’s been on here to just our conceptualization of our phase one and two as linear as the other phases. Or can we really acknowledge, like, the, the real life experience of those experience of those 2 phases is not necessarily like as linear as what it’s written as. And so practically speaking, phase one and two kind of flow, ebb and flow together. And like relationship is being built through history taking and relationship is being built through experiencing resources together and preparing them for what does EMDR even look like and what does that mean. And so depending on the complexity of the case, we can’t say we’re going to collect a full history before we start preparation, or maybe we start with preparing before we even ask any history. There’s so many nuances to those two phases. I think one thing that I think is pretty confusing is the fact that we call them all phases gives this feeling that they’re remarkably different. You know, the process of doing a phase three assessment, which is a very discrete worksheet with a set of questions, and this is what we’re doing, is vastly different to the complex nature of something like a history-taking phase, which could roll out over years, where an assessment worksheet, if done well, is a two-minute experience, right? So even calling them the same thing creates a sensation for our clinicians that somehow they should be kind of similar to each other experientially and they’re not. It’s sort of like if you were to say that a marriage is the same thing as the moment of wedding vows. Well, I mean, I guess sort of, but like you can barely talk about the two as if you’re having the same experience, and yet they’re very linked to each other, right? They’re in the same category of marital experience, right? Things that we do is marry people, but it’s not real useful, I think, to label them as if they’re the same kind of thing. And so when we try to talk about these, and you know, we’ve been working on like creating images and visuals to try to represent this in some way, because it is complex. I think that imagining the first two phases as these very kind of broad and wide open experiential encounters that we have over long lengths of time, and the later phases are much more discrete and black and white in some ways. And so just to kind of mentally separate those two and say these are very different experiences that we’re gonna have.
Bridger
0:13:14
Yeah, the way I think about it is that phase one and two aren’t necessarily specific to a target, whereas the later you go, you know, phase three and on, with some, you know, reevaluation bringing us back to the larger picture, but those phases three through seven, you’re working very, very discreetly in a memory likely or a series of memories, a channel of processing, like you’re doing some very specific and intentional work and then zooming back out into this larger unfolding process that’s kind of just continually going. I love, Melissa, you just noting that one of the assumptions even in the language of a phasic treatment approach is an assumed consistency across each of these phases, even in our relationship to time. Like, if assessment phase is going to be the same as our preparation or our history-taking phase, you’re gonna be in a world of hurt. You’re gonna miss so many things and have to objectify, yeah.
Jen
0:14:20
You know, as you were saying that,
Jen
0:14:22
both of you talking about the broad categories of phase one and two, it’s interesting because they each hold some pretty specific, even target specific pieces, but they’re more than that. So they are very broad, fluid, relational, but then there’s like to identify like a, say, float back technique, for instance, is a specific history taking tool that gets us to the target we’re going to be working on. And it is more of a step-by-step process or specific, like, target resourcing. like, target resourcing.
Melissa
0:14:59
We know what schemes.
…
Transcribed with Cockatoo. More Transcriptions coming soon!
Did you know? After full completion of Beyond Healing Institute’s Somatic Integration and Processing training, each participant can receive 21 NBCC hours.
Executive Directors: Jennifer and Ryan Savage, Melissa Bentinnedi, Bridger Falkenstien
Hosts: Jennifer Savage, Melissa Benintendi, and Bridger Falkenstien
Podcast Producer: Bridger Falkenstien
Original Music Composers: Bridger Falkenstein and Caleb Boston