What is Different About the Four Blinks Version of Flash?
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
o 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).
• 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.
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.
o 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:
o Many options for the calm scene or process
o 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:
o Concrete strategies to assess for and container/vacuum body distress
o Concrete strategies to practice light activation when clients overly activate
o 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.