Notice That

There's a session most of us have had. The thing underneath the thing finally gets said, the client stays with it, you stay with them, and the hour ends in that particular quiet neither of you wants to close. You write your note half thinking, this is why I do this. And then they cancel the next appointment.
Our training supplies a reading for that: too much, too fast. Sometimes that's exactly right. Sometimes the breakthrough was a performance you built together without noticing. But there's a third possibility our field rarely names. Sometimes the session went well, and that's the problem.
This week's essay is about the two mirrors. Every client walks in holding one they didn't choose, issued by the family, the marriage, the congregation, the workplace. It has a small vocabulary and it repeats: you're too sensitive; that's not what happened; after everything we've done for you. Then therapy starts working and the room becomes a second mirror, one where their needs are not too much and their perceptions count as real. The mirrors don't agree. And your client spends one hour a week in front of the second one, and the other 167 in front of the first. The new learning isn't fragile because the work has been shallow. It's outnumbered.
This is the part after the slide deck ends: the client who carries a newly named need home and hears "isn't what we have enough?"; the client who gets worse because it's going well; the client who leaves, and why that isn't a failure. Along the way: what secondary gains gets right and what the word "resistant" hides; the silent contracts our clients unilaterally amend when the work works; and how a despair-shaped question, addressed to no one, can become a grief-shaped one, addressed to someone. Plus three practices for the middle of the work, starting with telling your client about the contrast before it arrives.
A note: a short passage in the middle of this essay touches on suicidality. Take it at your own pace.
Read the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week):
https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_EssayNN_Therapists_Summer_2026
The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage:
https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread
Notice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recorded at the EMDRIA Conference 2026 in Anaheim, this conversation from the Notice That podcast's Notes from the Hall series features Prof. Derek Farrell MBE — fresh off his keynote — on why Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy needs its critics. When a paper calls EMDR pseudoscience, do you argue back, ignore it, or ask "Where might you be right?" Derek chose the third option, and this episode is what that looks like.
Prof. Derek Farrell MBE delivered one of the keynotes at the EMDRIA Conference 2026 and was part of the EMDRIA–MQ Mental Health Research funding process from start to finish; his research unit focuses on military and veteran populations.
We talk about why this year's keynote deliberately continued last year's debate on adaptive information processing; whether EMDR is "a terrible name for a therapy" and what it would cost to change it; why randomized controlled trials move the dial and why that means investing in early-career researchers on a ten-to-fifteen-year horizon; the strange rules that get treated as law (a four-year-old, eye movements, and a rejected accreditation video); where qualitative and mixed-methods research fit in a field that runs on RCTs; the many narratives a client's partner can add to the one the client brings; what the EMDRIA–MQ funding actually is and isn't; why the answer to a research communication problem turned out to be podcasts; and the oak tree in a Cornwall biodome that fell because nothing had ever pushed back on it.
Derek has been on Notice That before, this one picks up like a conversation between colleagues who've done this before.
Notes from the Hall is a 26-episode series from the Notice That podcast, recorded on the floor of the EMDRIA Conference 2026 in Anaheim — a window into the largest gathering of EMDR therapists in the United States, for everyone who was there and everyone who couldn't be. Hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage. Produced by Beyond Healing Media. Explore the full series at connectbeyondhealing.com.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There is a particular kind of grief in understanding someone you can no longer be close to in the same way. Sometimes not understanding would be easier; a villain simplifies grief. But many of us who find ourselves estranged from someone we love are left with something far more complicated. We understand.
This is Jen's first essay for The Relational Thread, and it's about that grief. In close relationships we don't simply learn things about one another, we learn choreography. Relational memory is the implicit knowing carried forward from repeated experience: what closeness requires, what conflict predicts, what shape we need to take to preserve connection. With enough repetition, those adaptations stop feeling like strategies at all. They simply feel like who we are. One child learns to disappear. Another learns to perform. Some of us learn to rescue.
The essay follows what happens when one person stops taking the familiar step — how the relationship begins reaching for the old version of you, because that is the version it knows — and how the question of estrangement becomes something more subtle than whether you want someone in your life: who do I have to become for this relationship to continue in its familiar form?
It ends with a poem about the difference between recalling who we once had to be and "re-membering": gathering those fractured pieces of myself back into the shape that once made the relationship possible. Understanding someone's pain is not the same as organizing your life around it. Distance does not require a loss of empathy. And another person's pain can move us without becoming an instruction.
Read the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week): https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_EssayNN_Therapists_Summer_2026
The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread
Notice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recorded at the EMDRIA Conference 2026 in Anaheim, this conversation from the Notice That podcast's Notes from the Hall series features Jennifer Bohle of Jennifer Ann Counseling (@jenniferanncounseling) on what happens when the therapist half the internet follows walks into a building full of colleagues who recognize her. A few years ago she attended her first EMDRIA conference unnoticed; this year she was approached the moment she walked into the lobby.
Jennifer is a trauma therapist and content creator behind Jennifer Ann Counseling, and the creator of Permission to Post, a course helping therapists show up authentically on camera. Find her at @jenniferanncounseling.
We talk about her first podcast ever (on Notice That), staying yourself when everyone wants a moment with you, "embracing the cringe," what it takes to make personality-driven therapist content ethically, and the intention she set walking into the conference, one worth borrowing at any training: be kind to yourself first.
This episode opens with a short introduction to the series.
Notes from the Hall is a 26-episode series from the Notice That podcast, recorded on the floor of the EMDRIA Conference 2026 in Anaheim; a window into the largest gathering of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapists in the United States, for everyone who was there and everyone who couldn't be. Hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage. Produced by Beyond Healing Media. Explore the full series at connectbeyondhealing.com.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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_2026
The 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.