Flash Technique: Is it Magic?! No - It's Neuroscience.

The Flash technique is a pretty new (and powerful) psychological technique. It helps to heal traumatic memories with minimal distress.

What does it look like? 

First:

We practice a few different resources to help you to remain centred and regulated. This helps to reduce activation in your body and prevent distress. 

Next:

You choose a memory to work on, and think about at a tiny slice of the memory for a fraction of a second. 

You then focus your attention on something that you like. 

This could be anything that shifts your mood. Something pleasant, funny, or engaging to you, like your pet; funny highlight reels; a delicious sandwich; a beautiful garden…etc. 

While you are doing that, the therapist will instruct you to blink a few times over 30 second time periods. 

You do that a number of times, repeatedly until the memory is no longer distressing, or has significantly reduced in distress.

That is a brief overview of the Flash technique.

Sounds like magic right - but actually, it's pure neurobiology.

Your mind does the background work to resolve traumatic memories, one little piece at a time, while watching funny videos or looking at photos of baby animals. 

The therapist's job is to guide you, to make sure your system doesn't become overwhelmed, and to help you through this if it happens. 

Once you have mastered this technique and understand how to safely use it, you may be able to use it yourself as needed. 

How / why does this work? 

To put it simply, when we think of our unresolved traumatic memories, our systems are used to experiencing an activation response (e.g., increased heart rate, sweating or even flashbacks). 

When we only slightly activate the memory, and then immediately watch something pleasant and engaging, we have a new and unexpected internal experience instead of the expected trauma response.

Our system (mind / body) experiences a prediction error.

We expect a trauma response, but instead experience pleasant activation. 

This can cause our brains to update the internal models for how to react to traumatic memories. It essentially ‘refiles’ the traumatic memory as a normal memory. 

Something that happened to us in the past but is over and not happening now. 

After successfully processing the traumatic memory (one tiny part at a time) the memory should feel distanced and less activating.

This technique shows our minds how to heal themselves, and tends to generalise. What this means is that we shouldn't have to resolve every single piece of the trauma individually, as healing a few pieces should start to resolve the connected pieces of memory attached to this event.  

If you want to learn more about how this works, this is based on the understanding that our brain is a predictive processing machine.

It learns from making predictions about the world and our experiences and then using our senses to confirm or disconfirm them.

You can hear more about this from Thomas Zimmerman here:

https://fourblinks.com/2023/05/20/understanding/