After you’ve mastered the four necessary skills (container, calm scene, sensory grounding, and ShopVac), we can finally start working on a memory.
Consider your current level of stress when you want to work on a memory. If you’re coming into this with a lot of overwhelm, exhaustion, or tension, it will likely be harder to have a good experience with this method. Before you even think about the memory, check in with yourself. If 0 is no stress at all and 10 is the most stressed you could be, where would you be?
If it’s a 5 or higher, you should probably address that first. Do something that lifts that stress a bit before we pile more onto it. Something like going for a walk, petting an animal, listening to your favorite song, or doing some deep breathing could help get that stress out of your body. You could also practice some of the skills that have been taught so far.
Let’s talk about how the memory processing phases work. Don’t worry about memorizing any of this because the website will walk you through it.
We will start by rehearsing the process of Four Blinks. You will turn on the calm scene, start the audio recording on the same page, and when you hear the word “Blink,” you will quickly blink. If you have concerns about eye irritation, you can instead look away from the video for a half second and then go back to watching the video. We will do a few rounds of this without thinking about the memory as practice and to solidify the calm scene as something that will give you a positive response.
Once the calm scene is working well, we will identify a memory together. Start small with one that isn’t one of the worst experiences of your life. This process becomes easier with practice, so let’s tackle the big stuff once you have some more experience with this. Imagine hovering over the memory like a file on your computer, but don’t open it just yet. Just glance at it, put it into the container, and push it away.
We will now play the calm scene along with the blink track, but now when it say blink, glance at the memory you selected. Immediately catch any distress, put it in your container, and move it far away. We will repeat this process until you no longer feel distress when glancing at the memory.
We will then guide you through the memory one frame at a time, finding points where there is any distress, putting it in a container, and pushing it far away. For each frame with distress, we will go back to the calm scene and play the blink track. Each time you blink, you will think of that single frame. We will continue the blinks with the calm scene until that frame no longer causes distress. This will continue with each frame of the memory until you can play the memory back from beginning to end without any distress.
After that, we will practice using this newfound resilience to anticipate a future scenario. We will think of an event that is likely to happen in the future that may trigger similar feelings to the past memory we processed earlier. We’ll work through the same process as before, but with this future scenario instead of a memory.
It may take 30 minutes or longer before you notice changes to the memory. This process may also feel repetitive, and that is by design. The way this works is by repeatedly shifting in and out of the calm scene to process tiny bits of the memory at a time, instead of all at once and becoming overwhelmed.
In the same way that a dog learns the sound of their food bag might mean it’s time for dinner, we tend to associate thinking about a difficult memory with pain and being overwhelmed. However, if we disrupt the connection between thinking of the memory and a negative result, we can relearn something new. By switching back and forth between thinking about the memory and a positive result (like the calm scene), we start to show our brain that just thinking about the memory won’t harm us.
This Flash approach should fully neutralize the initial memory by taking away the sting of the past, feeling more present in the now, and feeling more prepared for the future. In other words, your brain should feel more confident that things are different now and it can move on. That it can’t hurt you anymore because things are different now. You will likely feel more positive about yourself and the world as a result.
Next: Rehearsal