Notice That

Recorded at the EMDRIA Conference 2026 in Anaheim, this conversation from the Notice That podcast's Notes from the Hall series features Dr. Sarah Schubert, minutes after her keynote, on what Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy looks like when memory, resourcing, and adaptive information processing are understood as bigger than one person's mind. If phase two is not about building something new but about connecting to what is already there, what does resourcing actually look like?
Dr. Sarah Schubert delivered a keynote at the EMDRIA Conference 2026, her first EMDRIA conference as both attendee and speaker. She works across the lifespan, including children and adolescents in out-of-home care, has done theoretical and PhD research on EMDR, and founded EMDR Therapy Training Australia. Find her at drsarahschubert.com. [OPTIONAL: one-line bio expansion, confirm wording with Sarah]
We talk about why she was asked to keynote (honor Shapiro's vision, and name where AIP has limits); what Indigenous voices in Australia are asking of EMDR ("we don't want EMDR adapted to our culture, we want you to listen to our culture"); what changes when time is not past, present, and future and the trauma is not in the past; memory as something distributed across place, objects, and people rather than held in one mind; why phase two is about connecting to strength that is already there rather than building a resource from scratch; the check-in she calls "finding the you that's you" (when have you been able to be yourself this week, doing what, where, and with whom); the pebbles she keeps in her pocket for clients; the biopsychosocial model of AIP and the idea that the AIP system is an attachment system; why "self-regulated" might be a contradiction in terms; the difference between looking inward as a clinician and turning a training practicum into therapy; the teacher who taught her that a therapist's own nervous system is clinical data; what adolescents in out-of-home care teach you about phase two; and the dual-therapist, group-based way her team works with children in care, drawing on Nacho Jarero's protocols. Her closing question: why are we doing therapy on our own?
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.
Listen/watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/csR0hluKfM0
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Most of us were trained well to sit with someone in the worst hour of their life. Almost none of us were trained to price that hour, or to tell anyone we're available for it. Lilly Risch, an EMDR therapist, group practice owner, EMDR approved consultant, and business coach for EMDR therapists, spent seven years in child welfare intake before a staff psychologist told her there was no option left but to quit. What she found on the other side wasn't a better system. It was a question she now asks every therapist she works with: what identity would you have to let go of in order to build a different life?
Bridger joins her in it. He talks about the counseling program that told him the field didn't need more boutique private practices, about the first two years of his own practice at fifty clients a week, and about the stonemason father whose voice he still hears every time he raises his rate. Lilly names the conflict she has not resolved and does not pretend to have resolved: she runs a private pay practice, she believes that prices some people out of care, and she has done enough of her own work to hold that truth without collapsing under it. They stay in that tension for a long time without reaching for a tidy answer, because there isn't one, and because the not-talking-about-it is doing more damage than the conflict itself.
Then the conversation turns toward visibility, which turns out to be the same conversation wearing different clothes. Why the word marketing makes clinicians flinch. Why the laminated card from a small-town mechanic outperforms an A/B tested content calendar. Why the therapist who says my friend would be better for you is not being humble. And what it costs a community when the people who actually know how to work with trauma are the hardest ones to find.
What this episode is about
Lilly Risch works at an intersection most EMDR consultants leave alone: the place where a therapist's business decisions and their clinical capacity meet. She came to it honestly. Seven years in child welfare intake left her, in her words, burnt crispy, and the staff psychologist who ran her screeners told her she had to quit. There was no other option on the table.
What she built afterward is a group practice outside Milwaukee, an approved consultant practice, and a coaching business for EMDR therapists. What she teaches is not a road map. It's a question.
Key themes
Burnout is structural before it is personal. Lilly loved child welfare and loved the people she worked with. The work was still set up to produce exactly what it produced in her. Naming the structure is not an excuse, it's an accurate case conceptualization.
Every practice transition is an identity transition. Moving from agency to private practice meant deconstructing the helper identity she'd been trained into on a child welfare stipend track, where private practice was never presented as an option at all. Bridger's program went further, framing private practice as a kind of defection. Neither of them was ever taught that they were about to run a business.
The conflict does not resolve, and naming it beats pretending. Lilly runs a private pay practice and believes that prices some people out of care. She holds both without choosing one. She keeps a sliding scale slot, works with victim compensation, runs workshops. It is not a solution and she does not present it as one.
Rate-setting is contextual, not moral. Whether a therapist's spouse works, what benefits they carry, what a market will hold, what the clinician needs in order to be fully present in the chair. A dollar amount doesn't carry a verdict on your character. Bridger's position: charge what will actually support you, then look honestly at the implications for your context.
We all have a money story. Bridger's came from a blue collar family where a dentist was a luxury, moved through raising a painting rate from fifteen dollars an hour to twenty-five and feeling the nervous system register it, and still shows up as his father's voice every time he raises a fee.
Visibility avoidance is clinical material. When a therapist won't build the website or do the outreach, Lilly asks what's getting in the way. The answer is usually some version of it's not supposed to be about me. Bridger names the cost of that belief inside the therapy hour: it omits half the room.
Visibility does not mean Instagram. A newsletter. LinkedIn. Weekly coffee with a new therapist. Twice-yearly networking events. A free workshop at a PT office or a hair salon. A stack of note cards handed around a small town, which is what actually generated referrals for one of Bridger's consultees after she watched a mechanic's laminated flyer do the same thing.
The platform and the work run on different nervous systems. Lilly names the whiplash of doing deep relational work and opening Instagram an hour later. Comparison reinforces I'm not good enough, which is a belief most therapists in this field are already carrying. Her answer has been boundaries: three posts a week, specific days off, an intention behind each post.
What you can bring into your next session
Run your own avoidance through a case conceptualization. What isn't getting done, and what's underneath it?
Ask Lilly's sustainability question directly: what would sustainable look like, and what would have to change?
Notice whose voice shows up when you consider a rate change. That voice has a history.
If raising your rate feels like a betrayal, consider that it may also be a disconfirming experience, for you and sometimes for the client who sees you do it.
Pick one visibility practice that matches what you actually like doing. The one you'll sustain beats the one that's optimized.
Concepts, names, and resources mentioned
Money story. Lilly's frame for the inherited beliefs about worth, labor, and asking that every clinician brings to their fee.
"Shaped like you, not shaped like me." A line from Bridger's Relational Thread essays that Lilly uses in her coaching. No plan fits every therapist, and no plan fits every client.
Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller. Lilly's recommendation for clinicians moving into this work. Its argument, roughly: smart people overcomplicate, and that's the problem.
Jess Bruno. Lilly's UK-based content creator, who limits her to three posts a week and is on record about the algorithm.
Peacefully Booked Out EMDR. Lilly's free monthly workshops.
Overflow. Her group coaching membership for EMDR therapists, with two live calls a month.
Iris Collective. Partner on a course launching in spring covering the business side, ethical marketing, burnout, compassion fatigue, and therapist identity.

Why this episode matters
The field trains clinicians to hold other people's worst hours and then leaves them alone with the question of how to survive doing it. That silence has a cost, and the cost is not only financial. It shows up as the therapist who quietly stops, and as the clients who lose them without warning. Lilly's last word on it is the one worth keeping: an abrupt end has an impact on our clients too.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.