Notice That

The Pendulum Swing: Why Newly Trained Therapists Wait Too Long to Use EMDR | Early LearnerSixteen years ago, EMDR training culture said: go after it. First, worst, present, future, done. Today, a lot of newly trained therapists finish their consultation hours with every resource in place and still haven't run a first reprocessing session. The field swung. This episode is about the middle.One week out from training forty new clinicians, Jen and Bridger go back to their own first sessions. Jen, a year into her provisional license, in substance abuse treatment with a court-mandated caseload and an eight-session expectation. Bridger, a counseling intern seeing men in a residential recovery program for thirty minutes at a time, in a utility closet, on a bucket. One ran a teenager through a full three-prong plan. The other built a calm safe place out of a Coke bottle. Both would do some of it differently now. Both are glad they started.This episode is part of Early Learner, our series for clinicians in their first year after EMDR Basic Training.IN THIS EPISODE• Why we started the Early Learner series, and what newly trained therapists are asking now that they weren't sixteen years ago• Tool in the toolbox, or identity? The question underneath "I'm still integrating it"• Finding yourself inside a structure without letting it define you• Jen's first caseload: court-mandated, complex, and an eight-session expectation• Bridger's first session: thirty minutes, a utility closet, and a Coke bottle calm safe place• Your clients don't have to fit EMDR. Figure out how EMDR fits your client.• Why the hard clients teach you more, and the easier ones keep you going• Pacing as cost-benefit, not gas or brake• The pendulum swing in the field, from "first, worst, go" to never starting• Resourcing should start immediately. With everyone.• "Will you try something with me?"• Homework invitation for every early learnerTHIS EPISODE IS SPONSORED BY THERAPY GROWTH SYSTEMSWebsites and search optimization built for therapists, including the AI-driven search more and more clients are using to find a therapist. Submit your site for a free audit and a free preview of what they'd build for you: https://therapygrowthsystems.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_FirstTimeEMDR_Therapists_Fall_2026RESOURCES & LINKSThe first Early Learner episode: I'm an EMDR Therapist: Amanda Hearne on the First Year After Basic Training | Early LearnerEMDR Basic Training and follow-up consultation with Beyond Healing Institute: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_FirstTimeEMDR_Therapists_Fall_2026The Relational Thread, Bridger and Jen's book and essay series: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_threadABOUT NOTICE THATNotice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage, co-authors of EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread. The show explores the real clinical practice of EMDR therapy: attachment, ego states, somatic processing, resourcing, complex trauma, and the relationship doing the work. Subscribe for conversations that treat both you and your clients as human.#EMDR #EMDRtherapist #EMDRbasictraining #NewTherapist #TraumaTherapy #Resourcing #NoticeThatPodcast #EarlyLearnerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Essay 10 of The Relational Thread, read by the author. Back in the second essay, Bridger promised to write about how presencing collapses under the therapist's own not enough and how it gets restored mid-session. This is that essay. It describes a collapse that looks nothing like the ones our training warned us about: not the still face, not the flinch, not the retreat into protocol, but the therapist fully in the room, leaning in, understanding, and the person quietly replaced by the map of them. It is told through one case in traumatic grief, the kind of work Bridger names as the most honest he knows, and the place where the relational thread matters most and is hardest to hold.Key themesHonest work. In rooms of traumatic loss, violence, and tragedy, nothing can be sugarcoated. The strategies are all present, in the client and in the therapist, but none of them can change the floor. Most of our work has somewhere to hide. This work doesn't.Why grief is the hardest place to hold the thread. The series rests on a mechanism: an old prediction is reactivated, meets a lived contradiction, and rewrites. In traumatic loss, the central prediction (they are gone) is correct. There is no experience in any room that violates it. That makes the therapist's not enough structural, and it makes the relationship the only thing on offer. Grief is relational learning; it cannot be taught, only accompanied.The collapse into competence. Grief theory is rich, and understanding is a comfortable place to stand across from something you cannot fix. The therapist who would never go still has one more place to go when the room becomes unbearable: into what they know.The binder. A mother, an epidemiologist by training, brings a three-inch binder reconstructing the day her son died, with every if-she-had-just in the margins. She holds it out and says: this is my son. The therapist takes it, and says it must have been heavy. Both true. Neither what she said.The coin and the totem. Two objects for traumatic loss. The coin's face is what happened; its reverse is what did not happen that was needed; its edge is what can no longer happen in the form it was supposed to. The totem is whatever the lost person, or the painful response to losing them, is still holding up inside the bereaved person's world: the absolutisms of everyday life, in Stolorow's phrase. A light left on means someone is coming home.Me, mine, not me, not mine. A sheet of paper with four regions, crumpled into a ball, flattened back out. It keeps its creases. The work was never about getting the paper back; it's about learning to read it. Drawn from Bromberg's me and not-me.What the binder was holding up. An investigation has a function a fact does not: someone is still working on it. And every if I had just, turned over, is a sentence that preserves a world in which mothers can keep sons safe. The alternative to that sentence is not relief.Reciprocal dual attention, and one timeline eating the other. The therapist holds the enactment in front of them and the echo of it. In this hour, the timeline where he understood ate the one where a woman was handing him the only thing she had left of her child and watching his face.The sentence. Five weeks of real work, then the totem named carefully, with the right preface, in the right voice. She came once more and stopped coming. The essay refuses to make her leaving into proof of anything.What a husband said. She worshipped that binder like it could bring him back. By the time she carried it into the office, it had already been interpreted, in contempt. Then it was interpreted again, in care. The essay asks whether the difference was as large from where she sat as it was from where the therapist did.The poem. Worn to cloth, read in the middle of the episode. A hand on a piece of paper; the sentence waiting in the air between chairs; a bolt entering its pocket in the wood. Held, not directed.Inscape. Wolterstorff borrowed Hopkins's word for his son's singular way of being in the world. Bridger uses it for the space a person leaves behind, which has their exact outline. The binder was a hand pressed to that outline so it would not soften. A totem is only a totem from the outside. From inside, it is the thing that has to be maintained, every day, by hand, or the world comes down.Four moves for when the map got ahead (offered as practices, not protocol)1. When someone extends the totem, receive the person. Take it with both hands. The only sentence that answers this is my son is some version of: tell me about him. And then go where she points, as many times as she points there, until the day stops being the only day.2. When you notice that you understand, go back to the face of the coin, the one place where the client holds the authority.3. Leave the meaning unnamed for longer than feels competent. The difference between the two cases in this essay is not that one formulation was right and the other wrong. It is who authored it when it was said.4. Let the client crumple the formulation. The map is only shared when disagreeing with it costs nothing.Three things to try on Tuesday1. Notice the moment you understand. Treat the relief of it as a readout of your own not enough.2. When handed the totem, take it with both hands, and then say less than you want to. Someone at home has very likely already told them what it means.3. Run the paper exercise on yourself. Some of what landed on that wall was mine. It usually is.Concepts, frameworks and names mentionedPresencing and the person of the therapist as instrument, from EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (Falkenstien and Savage, forthcoming 2027).Reciprocal dual attention, from The Two Channels (Essay 6).The coin and the totem, Bridger's objects for traumatic loss (face, reverse, edge; the totem as what a loss is still holding up).Absolutisms of everyday life, Robert Stolorow (1999), Psychoanalytic Psychology.Me and not-me, Philip Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces (1998) and Awakening the Dreamer (2006).Inscape, Gerard Manley Hopkins's term, borrowed by Nicholas Wolterstorff in Lament for a Son (1987); extended here to the space a person leaves behind.Grieving as learning, O'Connor and Seeley (2022).Listen and subscribeThe Relational Thread publishes one essay each week, on the space between therapist and client and what actually changes people in it. Each essay is read aloud here. Subscribing is free.Resources and LinksRead the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week): https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_Essay10_Therapists_Fall_2026The Relational Thread, the book and essay series: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_threadThe Two Channels (Essay 6), referenced in this episode: https://www.relationalthread.com/p/the-two-channelsThe Second Mirror (Essay 8), referenced in this episode: https://www.relationalthread.com/p/the-second-mirrorNicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Eerdmans, 1987).Robert Stolorow, "The Phenomenology of Trauma and the Absolutisms of Everyday Life," Psychoanalytic Psychology (1999).Philip Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces (1998); Awakening the Dreamer (2006).Mary-Frances O'Connor and Saren Seeley, "Grieving as a Form of Learning," Current Opinion in Psychology (2022).See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Treatment planning for complex trauma works differently than planning for single-incident trauma. Instead of tracing one symptom back to one memory, the clinician maps a network: the before, during, and after of many connected experiences, and the identity structure the client built to survive them. This episode is the full audio from a free Beyond Healing Institute workshop in which Dr. Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage walk through the five-step process they use with complex trauma and C-PTSD presentations.The five steps1. Identify the theme. A complex trauma theme is an identity structure, not a single negative cognition. It takes the form "I am ___ because ___, therefore I must ___," and it is built collaboratively in the client's own language.2. Map the network. Past experiences, missing experiences (what the client needed and never got), current symptoms reframed as strategies, relational patterns including the therapeutic relationship, and strengths.3. Sequence by distress. Theme-linked memories grouped into low (SUD 1 to 4), moderate (5 to 7), and high (8 to 10) bands, starting low to build tolerance and momentum. The "three doors."4. Pendulate. Move between distress-focused and resource-focused work within and across sessions. In complex trauma, the window of tolerance is narrow on both sides, so clients need capacity for connection and resource as much as for distress.5. Integrate. New responses with real people, a new felt sense outside the room, old expectations updated by new experience, and one small step in daily life each week. Integration starts in the first session.The framework draws on Somatic Integration and Processing (SIP), Beyond Healing's case conceptualization model, which looks at every case through three lenses: relationship (attachment and neurodevelopment), body (somatic psychology), and memory (adaptive information processing and memory reconsolidation).The caseAbout two-thirds of the way through, Bridger and Jen present Cora, a composite client in her late twenties: autistic, diagnosed late after years of masking, raised in a high-control religious environment, sexually abused by a family member between ages nine and twelve, and disbelieved by her mother when she disclosed. In session she describes a memory she has never spoken aloud in a flat, precise voice and rates it a 2 out of 10 while the therapist's own body registers a 9. The workshop uses her case to show how a theme gets built, what resources fit that specific theme, and four low-distress entry points that could open the network without going straight to the abuse memories.Also covered- Why comprehensive trauma timelines can work against complex trauma clients, and what to do instead- Reframing symptoms as strategies and asking what each strategy still protects- What to do when a new crisis or a second theme shows up mid-treatment- Reading the therapist's own activation in the room without overriding the client's reportWho this is forTherapists, counselors, and social workers working with complex trauma, C-PTSD, dissociation, and relational trauma, whether you use EMDR, TF-CBT, somatic approaches, or relational therapy. The planning process is modality-agnostic.Content note: this episode discusses childhood sexual abuse and dissociation in some clinical detail.This was recorded live on Zoom. You will hear references to slides, a Venn diagram, the chat, and a shared screen. The teaching holds without the visuals. For the slides, the recording, and the treatment planning worksheet walked through near the end: connectbeyondhealing.com/txp/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ComplexTraumaPlanning_Therapists_Fall_2026Upcoming from Beyond Healing Institute- Free workshop: The Case Beneath the Case, November 4, 12:00 to 1:30 pm Central: calendar.connectbeyondhealing.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ComplexTraumaPlanning_Therapists_Fall_2026- Somatic Integration and Processing training, November (last offering of 2026; 2027 dates posted on the course calendar): institute.connectbeyondhealing.com/somatic-integration-and-processing/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ComplexTraumaPlanning_Therapists_Fall_2026Links- Beyond Healing Institute, EMDR training and SIP case conceptualization for therapists: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_ComplexTraumaPlanning_Therapists_Fall_2026- The Relational Thread, Bridger and Jen's book and weekly essay series: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread- Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thinkbeyondhealingNotice That is hosted by Dr. Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage, co-owners of Beyond Healing in Springfield, Missouri, and produced by Think Beyond Media.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 Ann Beckley-Forest, LCSW, RPT-S, on what has changed in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy with children since her book came out, why the next edition leans into the parents in the room, and the pre-verbal trauma work she is most excited about now. If the biggest payoff is in the caregiver relationship, how do you lead a session with more than one nervous system in it? Ann Beckley-Forest, LCSW, RPT-S, is a Registered Play Therapist Supervisor based in Buffalo, New York, co-founder of Playful EMDR, and co-editor, with Annie Monaco, of EMDR with Children in the Play Therapy Room. Find her at annbeckleyforest.com. Ann is a returning guest, and she brings news she says she has not said publicly yet: Springer has asked for a second edition of the book. We talk about what the new edition will add (a chapter on neurodiversity, more population-specific chapters, updated research, and a chapter on targets related to racism, oppression, and diversity from two contributors she describes as very deep thinkers); why the heart of the new content is mobilizing caregivers and parents even when that is messy; what it takes to lead a session with multiple nervous systems in the room; the small European study of the EMDR storytelling method with children from birth to four that she found exciting enough to go get trained in an infant mental health play therapy model; the perinatal and early childhood summit she is planning with Mara Tesler Stein and Annie Monaco for September 2027 in Niagara-on-the-Lake; why she thinks community is the missing link for child therapists and what she tells anyone feeling anonymous at a 2,000-person conference; what Derek Farrell's keynote affirmed for "the kid people"; what it feels like to reread your own chapter six years on; and how she keeps the play in a high-pressure week (capes, mugs, a booth team, and a trip to Disneyland). 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. Ann's earlier conversation on Notice That: https://art19.com/shows/notice-that-an-emdr-podcast/episodes/7b8a5ee5-c7e1-47d4-897b-7f60e7ec89b9 Listen/watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yXF0oeyVFfQSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I'm an EMDR Therapist: Amanda Hearne on the First Year After Basic Training | Early LearnerBasic training gives you the model. It can't give you the first year. That's the year where a lot of trained therapists quietly set EMDR down, and it's the year this conversation is about.Amanda Hearne got trained about five minutes after finishing her master's program and walked back into a domestic violence agency where nearly every client carried complex trauma. Eleven years later she's an EMDR Certified Therapist, an EMDRIA Approved Consultant-in-Training, and the voice behind @theemdrhealingpractice. Bridger and Jen sit down with her to talk about what held: a cohort that trained together, clients who could tolerate a therapist reading from a binder, and a decision about identity that changed everything downstream.This episode is part of our series for clinicians in their first year after EMDR Basic Training.IN THIS EPISODE- Getting trained straight out of grad school: the case for it, and the one honest con- Why empathy didn't feel like enough, and what a structured model gave a new therapist- The two things that buffered Amanda against never using EMDR: community and client trust- Walking in with the manual open, and letting clients know why- The twelve-to-twenty-session caseload, and why the full three-prong plan didn't fit- The recent event protocol, EMD, and why that is still EMDR- Capacity as the work, not the warm-up- The pressure to collect every advanced training right away, and why to hang tight- Consultation twice a month, and why CITs are a route worth knowing about- "Do you do EMDR?" "No, I'm an EMDR therapist."- The fear underneath "I'm still integrating it," and why no modality can satisfy it- Instagram, community after a move, and nurturing content for newly trained clinicians- Go with that, or notice that: the neon sign pollRESOURCES & LINKSAmanda Hearne — Live and Align Therapy: https://www.liveandaligntherapy.com/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=NT_HearneFirstYear_Therapists_Fall_2026Instagram: @theemdrhealingpracticeIndividual consultation and therapy (CA and TX): book through the Calendly on her siteMentioned in the episode:Recent Traumatic Episode Protocol (R-TEP), Elan Shapiro & Brurit LaubWhen There Are No Words, Sandra PaulsenMichelle Gottlieb, EMDR trainer and chronic pain specialist (Amanda's professor at Cal State Fullerton)Trauma Recovery/HAP (where Amanda's agency cohort trained)Lilly Risch — Burnout, Money, and Visibility with Lilly Risch | Notice That (the earlier episode on EMDR therapists and social media)The Relational Thread — Bridger & Jen's book and essay series: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_threadABOUT NOTICE THATNotice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage, co-authors of EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread. The show explores the real clinical practice of EMDR therapy: attachment, ego states, somatic processing, resourcing, complex trauma, and the relationship doing the work. Subscribe for conversations that treat both you and your clients as human.#EMDR #EMDRtherapist #EMDRbasictraining #NewTherapist #TraumaTherapy #TherapistsOfInstagram #NoticeThatPodcast #EarlyLearnerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A couple of weeks ago, I cried in a therapy session. Not the quiet, contained tear that can still be folded into a professional nod. I mean cried. My client was reading me something she had written, and it struck me in a way I didn't anticipate. And underneath the emotion was another reaction entirely: This is so unprofessional. Pull it together. What would a supervisor say if they saw this?Most of the time I no longer organize my work around those rules. And still, in that moment, the ghosts of professors, supervisors, consultants, and old versions of professionalism surfaced almost intact. They had been quiet for a long time. They were not gone.This week's essay is about what we were taught to hide. When ethics is taught primarily through prohibition, we may not be teaching therapists how to practice ethically. We may be teaching them how to follow rules, and then how to feel shame when they find themselves outside them. Restraint can be an act of care. But somewhere along the way, restraint became confused with disappearance. The therapist doesn't stop being human because the session begins, so the question was never whether our humanity enters the room. It already has. The question is what we do with it once it's here.Along the way: the questions I wish more clinicians were taught to ask in the moment; why the same disclosure can be deeply useful with one client and intrusive with another; why we can outgrow a rule intellectually long before our bodies stop bracing around it; and why "therapists are human too" can become its own excuse. Being genuine and being uncontained are not the same thing.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_2026The 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_threadNotice 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.

It's just the two of us this time. Bridger and Jen return to the model that sits underneath nearly everything we talk about on this podcast: Somatic Integration and Processing (SIP), Beyond Healing Institute's case conceptualization approach.Seven years and more than a thousand trained therapists in, we look at where SIP started, what has changed, and why it matters most at the stuck points in EMDR. We cover its three spheres (relationship, body, and memory) and the intersubjective space where they meet between therapist and client. Then we zoom in on one of the hardest stuck points: the SUD drops from a 9 to a 2, the client keeps answering your questions, and the activation is gone. We talk about why that moment usually doesn't call for another protocol or tool, and why the relationship itself can become the disconfirming experience.Stick around after we close for the full audio of the "What Is SIP?" case walkthrough, a composite case involving complex trauma, religious rigidity, and neurodivergence.In this episodeThe three spheres of SIP and why intersubjectivity matters so muchHow SIP has evolved as a living model over seven yearsWhy a falling SUD with vanishing activation may not be progressBefore, during, and after: seeing trauma, and in-session enactments, as patterns and not single momentsEarly attachment trauma and why the therapist can feel like the threatThe "what do I do?" question, and why it works best after you zoom outShared language for clients, colleagues, and ourselvesResourcesWatch the "What Is SIP?" video and download the free companion worksheet: connectbeyondhealing.com/sipSIP alumni can retake the training for freeUpcoming trainings and workshops (calendar.connectbeyondhealing.com)SIP: When the Target Won't Move, our first training for Australia and New Zealand (8:30 PM to 1:30 AM Central)Enactment Focused EMDR: Nov 11, 12:30 to 4:30 PM CentralAI in the Therapy Room: Dec 2, 9 AM to 1 PM CentralEMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Dec 9, 12:30 to 4:30 PM CentralEMDR and Grief: Jan 6, 12:30 to 4:30 PM CentralFree workshops and longer CE workshops ($95) can be filtered on the course calendar.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 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. 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/csR0hluKfM0See 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 aboutLilly 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 themesBurnout 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 sessionRun 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 mentionedMoney 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 mattersThe 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_2026The 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_threadNotice 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.