Teaching the Shop-Vac Resource
This information is in the script, but I’m also walking you through it here.
Many other versions of Flash produce sessions that end with residual distress and often it is not clear why. This version of Flash is grounded in memory reconsolidation as its working mechanism, which has its focus on the client experiencing the calm scene in ways that are disconfirming the expectation/schema in the bad memory. If the client is having body activation from the memory, the client may be having a confirming experience of the expectation in the bad memory (“I’m feeling how I felt when the bad memory was happening”). Body activation is a problem in the Four Blinks Version of Flash for this reason. When it appears, the client should be instructed to tell you, so you can help them “scoop” it out and put it in the container or Shop-Vac it out and push the Shop-Vac canister out of awareness. In Flash, the goal is to process the traumatic information as information and not as distress.
As with all resources, it is a good idea to develop and practice this resource before it is needed. It is very difficult for clients to learn a new resource when they are flooded or in significant trauma-related distress.
Script: Have you ever used a Shop-Vac or a large coin vacuum at a carwash?
Can you imagine holding the hose of a vacuum with one hand and feeling its suction with the other?
Can you imagine it picking up a small pile of dirt or sand?
If you quickly scan your body right now, can you find a knot, pressure, tension, or emptiness, even if only a little bit?
Can you imagine the “gunk” of that going into your Shop-Vac hose and just try to see the stress or feelings leaving those places and going into the hose like it is colored smoke? Note: It is not important that the client feel it all (or even most of it) go away. The Shop-Vac can become a ritual-like resource that may help direct attention and awareness away from that triggering sensation in the body.
Good. Can you see the canister of the vacuum get pushed far out of awareness… just send it several hundred miles away?
Four Blinks Version of Flash: An Open Approach To Trauma Reprocessing 