Author: Thomas Zimmerman

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Kerfuffle

I’d encourage anyone with questions about this version of Flash to visit the FourBlinks.com website. Everything in the free or ultra-low cost trainings I do is there. Everything there is free. It is the most comprehensive collection of publicly-accessible resources in once place about how to do one version of Flash well.  My agenda and motivation for developing a separate and fixed version of Flash are there and clear. You will also find a clear articulation of one way to do and conceptualize Flash (and one that is, I hope, both humble and comprehensive).  It has substantial conceptual and practical differences with existing versions, but is essentially a version of Flash. I have never suggested or implied that I trained with Dr. Manfield. I do talk about my Flash training and experiences in detail throughout the site.

Dr. Manfield’s work is credited clearly and explicitly in virtually everything I have ever said about Flash and I appreciate his contributions. He reached out earlier in the year, concerned that I was still not crediting him enough and insisted that I credit him more directly and explicitly. He indicated that I should put the word “Flash” in the title to my approach to make clear that what I’m doing is a version of Flash. He wrote that I should put a link on the front page of my site directly to his website. I have made every change that he suggested and I am open to other suggestions.  I am open to additional suggestions, not because I am obligated, but out of respect for his work and contributions.

If people are getting confused, they may be confused by the reality that there are already multiple ways that people practice Flash-informed therapies.  I have been remarkably clear that this version of Flash is different from other versions and that there are many ways to do Flash-like approaches well (and several ways to be trained in it). I also have consistently stated that if you want to be “officially” trained in the Flash Technique, as defined currently by Dr. Manfield, connect with him to do that through his website. I also encourage them to connect with Ricky Greenwald’s Flash training, which is excellent. Everyone who has taken a training with me has heard me teach this. My website statistics indicate that many people do visits these links.

Developing a psychotherapy technique does not give you intellectual property claims to all subsequent variations and iterations of it. Obviously, no one should pass a copy off as original work. If someone does want to own and fully control a psychotherapy, they can develop it, trademark it, and fully protect that trademark. That will give them the power to say what can happen under the name “Flash” or “Flash Technique.” That is the mechanism to do it. Doing that would provide substantial protection and control in both law and professional standards. Flash is not currently trademarked. Thus, the Four Blinks Version of Flash emerges in this legal and professional context as simply one way to conceptualize and do Flash-informed work.

Flash-informed approaches are one way to do memory reconsolidation work rapidly and effectively. If this is a way that humans can heal, then no one owns that information. That pathway has been inside us for as long as we have been human. It’s twisted into every cell. It is a birthright. We should be teaching what we can learn from this to our children and to our parents. It should be accessible. While this isn’t particularly relevant to the current kerfuffle, I have no interest in owning any of this. I have no interest in competing with anyone. I have encouraged participants to use my scripts, revise them, and to teach these approaches freely and without consent from me. My interest is in changing how we understand and treat mental health issues globally.

Again, my intentions, goals, and agenda are articulated clearly and repeatedly on the site. If you are confused about what I’m up to, check it out. I believe that what we can learn from Flash-like approaches will shape how mental health services are delivered globally in the 21st century. I want to train you how to do one version of this well. Then, I will encourage you to train others. And, put simply, we’re allowed to.

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The Catcher’s Mitt Metaphor in Flash Therapy

Catcher’s Mitt Metaphor in Flash Therapy

  • Something remarkable is happening right now in trauma recovery.  But, because we’re talking about trauma and our relationship with trauma is both too close and too dissociated, it’s really hard to see and it’s even harder to get any perspective on.
  • For 130 years, we have assumed that clients need to have certain types of catharsis, distress, or reexperience as a prerequisite for healing from traumatic experiences.
  • A large part of the point of exposure is to go there, get more comfortable going there, and to see that you have survived. 
  • In EMDR, we engage in lengthy preparation to make sure clients are able to sit with and digest the distress that comes. Noticing the distress that comes is the active ingredient in EMDR Therapy.
  • Noticing the distress that comes in Flash is an invitation for a mess.
    • Noticing distress in Flash will junk up your calm scene
    • Too much distress (including protective responses) from a memory reconsolidation perspective are confirming experiences rather than disconfirming experiences.
    • Activation (as in selecting a particular slice of memory) is key component in Flash, but what we do with that activation matters.
    • One of the things that Flash teaches us is that activation and distress are not equivalent.  We can activate and container the distress and the memory will still resolve if we are doing the other core tasks of Flash.  In fact, if we are doing anything else, Flash will result in a crawl.
    • In some of other versions of Flash, the therapist encourages the client to lightly activate, then encourage the client to talk about something pleasant.  This pivot from the limbic brain to the cortical/language centers of the brain serves as a kind container and the activation is likely to quickly self-extinguish from the quick pivot away from it.
    • The Four Blinks Version of Flash has an explicit container, where the content and distress will be into (so it doesn’t hit the body).  If it does hit the body, we have resources like the vacuum to container that activation.
  • As a bridge to the container, I like to use the Catcher’s Mitt metaphor.  A catchers mitt is designed to receive fast things coming at it.  The catcher will often quickly toss the ball back to the pitcher or give it to the umpire.  In Flash Therapy, whatever comes out of the memory when we “open the door and close it” goes into the imaginary mitt and then goes directly into the container.  Again, we want to route whatever comes out as soon as we can into the container.  We don’t want to talk about it, explore it, or allow what comes out to connect to other things.  We want the client to identify the activated content, but not attach to it.
  • In Flash therapy, activation and noticing are separate.  The very idea that we can separate activation and the results of that activation is pretty novel in modern psychotherapies.    All noticing is done in the calm scene.  We want that activated microslice to go straight into the container and out of awareness so that all of awareness is available to the calm scene.  If activation is showing up while we are trying to have an experience in the calm scene, Flash can stop working because the experience we are having is confirming instead of disconfirming of the expectation in the bad memory.
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What is Different About the Four Blinks Version of Flash

There are multiple conceptualizations of Flash and I am not claiming that the version I am advocating is more effective, more right, or even more sensible than other versions.  It’s just the version that makes the most sense to me and works really well for my severely traumatized clients.  And as versions change—and they have–it is possible that they can change so much that the working mechanisms that underlie them may change.  And this is why I wanted to make very, very, clear how to do one specific version of Flash, identify a clear method and methodology that may allow us to do that version repeatedly, consistently, and globally.

And since my version is getting some attention, there is a need to take both a broader view and to see how my specific version fits into that broader view.

What’s the same?

  • Light activation
  • Calm scene, calm focus
  • Blinks in the calm scene, calm focus, calm process
  • Light activation (pivot away from activation), calm information and blinks
  • And that cycle until the distress is zero.

Why develop a distinct version of Flash, when there is already a conceptualization articulated by its developer?

  • Multiple and changing versions
    • This is probably inevitable.  However, Flash needs to be made concrete, repeatable, itemized, scriptable–with clear steps or phases.
  • Flash need to be simplified.  Its core qualities need to be defined and what isn’t essential need to be removed: is bilateral stimulation important, is deep breathing, is counting, or is it important that the client narrate to the therapist about the calm scene?  How can we strip what we know about Flash down to its central elements?
  • What its central elements are depends on how you conceptualize what is actually happening in this approach.  Much of the Flash world seems to think that the blinks disrupt attention and focus on the calm scene (putting the working the working memory mechanism more in the camp of EMDR 2.0 than Bruce Ecker’s memory reconsolidation work).
  • Plus, Phil Manfield is chasing a concept that he calls subliminal activation that seems to uproot Flash from both memory reconsolidation and disrupting memory camps.  This is evidenced in his APP, which is built around his subliminal activation hypothesis and bears little resemblance to any of the prior versions of Flash he has developed and promoted.
  • My concern is that subliminal activation goes against many of the things that we actually know about both memory reconsolidation and disrupting working memory hypothesis.  In short, Manfield’s Flash keeps evolving in ways that are making it difficult to nail down.  I want to nail it down and make it concrete enough to become a practice.  I want to nail down what is effective in one specific version of Flash, so that it’s repeatable, reliable, predictable, consultable, and when used it looks like the work of a talented and practiced therapist… rather than the work of a magician pulling imaginary rabbits out of unseen hats.  There is something here that is real, reliable, reproducable, and revolutionary.  I am deeply appreciative of Dr. Manfield’s work and contributions.  I’m just trying to carve out a way to do this and train this that is stable enough to grow.
  • So, how we conceptualize Flash matters.  Because that is how it will be explained and justified.  If this is a way that people can heal, we need to be clear about the model of action.  The Four Blinks Version of Flash puts all of its chips on memory reconsolidation being the primary mechanism.  Memory reconsolidation is going to be how we will make sense of the transformative trauma therapies of the 21st century.  It just is.  It’s simple.  It’s intuitive.  And, anytime you have ever healed, or ever gotten past anything, this is how you have done it.  It doesn’t need magic.  It doesn’t need less distress.  How we actually heal is incredibly simple.  We get exposure to disconfirming information in ways that are tolerable to our systems. That’s it.  And, Flash does this in the Four Blinks Approach very well.
  • If this is a way that people can heal, then we need to think and practice big.  Continuing to conceptualize this as a technique is problematic.  It needs to be conceptualized as a stand-alone approach to healing.  It can’t simply be EMDR’s awkward little sister.
  • It this is a way that humans can heal, then this has to become a psychotherapy.  It has to.  Every other transformative trauma intervention that started as a technique has become an approach to psychotherapy or is in the process of becoming one.  We have a tiny, tiny, handful of ways that humans can heal that are reliable, tolerable, safe, and fast.  We don’t have time to think too small.  Or somehow make this a competitor to an approach that we already do.
  • And, that psychotherapy that we make from Flash needs to be accessible.  Continuing to require advanced training in another evidenced based trauma therapy to even get trained in Flash is a problem.  That’s why I’ve been informally training as many people as I can for the last six months for free.  Everything I have ever written or said about Flash is public domain and not a word of it is copyrighted… including these words right here.
  • We have remarkably few ways for people to reliably, safely, and rapidly heal.  We don’t have time to ration healing pathways that have been with us for as long as we have been human.  This pathway exists.  It is in your genes.  It is redundantly twisted into every cell.  The fact that it has taken us this long to discover it has more to say about our cultural blindness to trauma than the simplicity of this approach. If you are already a trauma focused therapist, I don’t have to explain this to you.  If this is a way that humans can heal from the longest and most pervasive public health crisis in the history of humanity, nobody owns that.  We should be teaching this to our parents and we should be teaching this to our children.
  • I’m incredibly hopeful that what we learn from Flash will eventually inform the first trauma therapy that can go global, including in parts of the world where there isn’t a person with a masters degree for hundreds of miles.

What is different?

Steps that are not essential to Flash from a memory reconsolidation perspective are removed. There is no bilateral, counting, breathing, or extended client talking in the Four Blinks Version. Steps that support memory reconsolidation are enhanced.  It understands that we are working with a system of parts and provides guidance about how to do this well in coordination with a system of parts.

It does this in six simple to understand and simple to teach steps.

  • Step One: Develop, test, and practice an explicit container.  When clients struggle to visualize, helpful interventions to outsource the visualization of the container are provided.
  • Step Two: Develop and test the calm scene/focus/process.  When clients struggle to visualize, helpful interventions to outsource the calm scene/focus/or process are provide.
  • Step Three: Identify the memory and immediately container it.
    • We are careful about when and how we check the SUDs, since that requires that we handle more of the memory than is ideal in an approach where we are trying not to activate.
  • Step Four: Engage the calm scene and go in and out of it through a series of guided blinks. In the Four Blinks Version of Flash, there are:
    • Many options for the calm scene or process
    • Consistent with memory reconsolidation, the blinks produce a large number of disconfirming experiences as the active ingredient, rather than somehow disrupting working memory.
  • Step Five: Lightly activate the memory and container that activation.  Go back to step four until the distress is zero.  In the Four Blinks Version of Flash, there are:
    • Concrete strategies to assess for and container/vacuum body distress
    • Concrete strategies to practice light activation when clients overly activate
    • Built into the Four Blinks Version are instructions for dealing with flashbacks
  • Step Six: Walk through the memory and pick up the debris (just like in Ricky Greenwald version).  Room metaphor.

In short, the Four Blinks Version of Flash shrinks Flash.  It puts a fence around just one way to do it, so that we can understand how to do that well, how to train it well, and how to provide clear guidance when something goes sideways.

Flash lets us do memory reconsolidation work quickly and with little preparation.  It lets us rescue the self from the past safely.

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Flash is Also for the Healthy

 

Why Your Healthiest Clients Need to Know About Flash Too

  • Flash emerged about five years ago as a technique to work on lava hot memories in EMDR before complex trauma clients were resourced enough to handle memories of that intensity.
  • Process that “as low as it will go” in Flash (we’ve since learned that memories don’t fully resolve in Flash most often because we’re not doing Flash well, rather than there being some limitation or defect in Flash itself).

What is Flash?

  • Pact with the client not to activate.
  • Lightly activate.  If clients struggle with this, we help them.
  • Disengage, distract, or container the activation (depending on the version)
  • Focus on something pleasant, then go in and out of that focus through a series of guided blinks (these guided blinks turn one exposure to the calm scene/process every thirty seconds into six exposures into the calm scene every 30 seconds).
  • Go back, lightly activate, pivot away from the activation, calm scene/blinks.

What Flash Teaches Us About Memory Reconsolidation

  • Micro-activation is enough.  Minimizes defenses.  Memories clear one slice, one microslice, at a time.  (This is probably true of all transformative trauma therapies).
  • The sheer number of exposures is more important than the quality or the duration of the calm scene if we want to resolve a memory quickly.
  • The mismatch between the calm scene and the schema information in the memory can be general… we do not need to construct directly disconfirming information.  Food can work for safety, pets can work for sexual abuse memories, etc.
  • When memories resolve in any transformational psychotherapy, they all resolve the same way.  Much of what is in the AIP model is true for any model that is transformative:
    • decrease in distress
    • transformation in beliefs about the self and the world
    • effortless recall
    • transformation of sense of age, time, perspective, including appropriate attribution of responsibility

What Flash Teaches Humans about Healing

  • That healing individual memories is easy.
  • Healing individual memories (including the memories associated with having a really difficult day) is easy.
  • Flash is a great way to process difficult experiences generally.
  • This is a powerful resource for life.
  • This is a powerful resource for parenting.
  • This is a powerful resource if you ever intend to live close to someone, because you will have elbow collisions.
  • This is a powerful resource if you have ongoing insecurities.
  • This resource is 100% effective self-administered.  Most other transformative trauma therapies are not.

Humans Have Been Trying to Heal Forever

  • And this is one way to do it that is incredibly Western-compatible.
  • It works even for the lazy and the non-introspective.
  • It’s easy to self-administer and it doesn’t just recontainer trauma the way every other resource does, it gives humans a high probability of resolving what is wrong with us… what has always been wrong with us.
  • If this is a way to heal…
  • If humans can heal in this way… this way that has been with us for as long as we have been human… probably longer.
  • Then, this is our common heritage and birthright.
  • Nobody owns that.
  • If this is one way that humans can heal themselves, then we should say that clearly and repeatedly.
  • We should teach people how to do this.
  • We should teach them clearly and repeatedly.
  • You have been trying to heal for as long as you have been human.  You have been doing it… I have been doing it… over and over in ways that simply don’t work.
  • This way works.
  • That’s what I’ve been saying clearly and repeatedly.
  • Let me show you.
  • Then, let me teach you how to teach this.
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Working with Client Parts in Flash Therapy

Working with Client Parts in Flash Therapy

  • In this video, we’re focusing on a system of parts, but that is often only part or only one aspect of what we mean by dissociation.
  • Lots of things may become dissociated/disconnected/severed.
    • Black box that we throw stuff into that is loosely connected with the freeze response.
    • Memory or parts of memory
    • The body or parts of the body
    • Disconnection from a sense of reality or personhood
    • Emotions
    • Disconnecting from the present
    • Parts of the self can become disconnected from each other
  • Regardless of the form that dissociation takes, Flash seems ideally suited for the treatment of these issues.
  • Best done in the context of normalizing and working with parts effectively outside of Flash
  • We want to engage parts because it’s the right thing to do
    • It’s something we’re going to want to do regardless of our approach
    • Failing to do that cause a wide range of problems
  • In general, clients with identified parts really like Flash, compared to EMDR
    • They like doing the work in the calm scene, instead of sitting in the distress (kid parts may view the clam scene as a kind of play)
    • They are more confident that other parts aren’t going to cause significant disruptions

Container Selection

  • As with any resource, we want to make sure that containment works for all parts. It’s okay for one part to container using a box and another to container using a safe.  We want to think in terms of parallel processes.  Long story short, containment need to work for all parts.

Positive Scene Selection

  • Is there a scene or process that all parts can endorse?
  • I have clients whose parts appreciate different aspects of the calm scene.  Some parts focus on the sky, others focus on the waves, others focus on the seagulls, etc.
  • Or, maybe there is an alternate activity that a part can engage in while most of the parts are focusing on a particular scene.

Target Selection

  • Target selection must involve participation of all accessible parts.
  • Don’t be surprised if parts that have not had much to say in the past suddenly present with opinions, guidance, cautions, or concerns.
  • Asking permission from a place of openness and curiosity is key.
  • Be prepared to address concerns of parts, “This part is worried what will happen if we ‘forget’ that memory.”  “This part is worried what will happen if a flashback happens.”  Be prepared to answer questions like this.
  • Sometimes parts that appear to be “contrarian,” may grumble about almost any plan.  Often these parts will permit the work to continue, but they may reserve the right to comment on the process if things don’t go as planned.

While Inside Reprocessing in Flash

  • We want the see-saw to keep going, but we also want any part to  raise concerns if they appear.
  • If any part has relevant information to communicate, we want to hear it out.
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Strategies for Target Memory Selection in Flash Therapy

Strategies for Target Memory Selection in Flash Therapy

  • Steps One and Two should always be completed, tested, and practiced first with each client in the course of their treatment.
  • Identifying a memory to work in any individual session on should be done only after we have confirmed that the container is still accessible and we have selected and verified that the scene/experience is accessible.
  • Step Three is very rapid, 10 seconds or less.
  • The act of identifying it is paired with the act of containing it.

Dilemma:

  • What allows this approach to be remarkable and rapid also introduces the potential for peril.
  • Need to target a specific memory AND it needs to be a memory
  • We don’t want to talk about it.  Talking = activating, but we may need to do some talking to select that specific memory out of the whole of experience

Strategies to identify target memories

  • Identify themes in prior sessions and get consent to work on something around that theme next session.  When the next session starts, ask for consent to work on a memory that is relevant to that theme.
  • Target parts of the elephant in the room.  You can suggest targets related to presenting issue.  This can be lined up in the prior session, although I’m more likely to get general consent to work on something in prior sessions to avoid the client coming to session over-activated.
  • Still a good idea to work on smaller targets first, to “test the gear.”
  • If the client is in preparation phase for EMDR, one of the best strategies is to target memories (or memories insides of themes) that are most resonating lately.  This will help clients because we are targeting what has been most contributing to instability… client will get healthier faster because we are targeting the presenting issue sooner.
  • The clients I’m most likely to be doing Flash with are the same clients where I’m probably not doing a detailed and chronological targeting sequence plan with… our energies are focused on trying to find somewhere to work that might be both helpful and tolerable to the system’s parts.  If you are working with a client with identified parts, invite the system to provide input on target selection and open the door to let any part veto that memory as a target today

Don’t like to take the SUDs until the client is starting to struggle finding the distress to container.  Whole podcast episode on this.

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Why Body Activation is a Problem in Flash and How to Shop-Vac It

  • Overview of where problems occur in Flash approaches
    • Overactivation
    • Activating something other than a memory
    • Activating multiple memories
    • Anything confirming of the bad memory coming into awareness, including relationships between the memory and the calm scene
    • The calm scene not inducing an experience
    • Somatic disturbance is often why the SUDs is a “two” and won’t go lower
  • Overactivation is inevitable sometimes
  • It most often occurs in the first handful of times we check in on the memory
  • Why activation and noticing in the same scene are problematic
  • For EMDR and somatic practitioners, this is anathema, but… we do it in the service of recovery.
  • Scoop it up
  • Vacuum it up
  • Shop-Vac
  • Even if it doesn’t get all of it, simply some of the gunk going into the shop-vac is helpful
  • The shop-vac canister is a container, send it out of awareness
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About Flash

The Flash technique was developed by Philip Manfield (2017) as a way to decrease distress in traumatic memories. If you would like to get trained in Flash by its creator, please see:

http://FlashTechnique.com

Manfield, Philip & Lovett, Joan & Engel, Lewis & Manfield, David. (2017). Use of the Flash Technique in EMDR Therapy: Four Case Examples. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research.