Ohio therapist, EMDR trainer, and consultant Tom Zimmerman is doing something I find genuinely thrilling: taking one of the most promising trauma treatment approaches in recent memory — the Flash technique — and grounding it in a rigorous neuroscience framework called predictive processing.

The result is a model of healing that is both deeply humane and almost startlingly elegant. What if you could help someone process a traumatic memory by barely touching it? What if the brain's prediction machinery — the same system that keeps trauma locked in place — could be gently tricked into releasing it, a micro-slice at a time?

Tom connects Flash to Bruce Ecker's work on memory reconsolidation (which long-time Plant Yourself listeners will recognize, and if that's not you, check out the link to my interview with Bruce below), to the neuroscience of rumination, and to the possibility that modern trauma therapies may be rediscovering what ancient communal healing rituals always knew. And he's building a Cleveland-based nonprofit to study all of this formally.

This conversation left me buzzing. I hope it does the same for you.

Topics We Cover

What EMDR Actually Is (and Isn't)

1. Why "eye movements" is a misleading shorthand — the real mechanism is present-based bilateral stimulation
2. EMDR's "admission cost": why some clients can't tolerate slowing down long enough for it to work

The Flash Technique: Healing Without Reliving

1. How Flash "micro-activates" tiny slices of a traumatic memory — just enough to tag it, not enough to overwhelm
2. Why immediately pivoting to something pleasant (yes, puppy videos) is the therapeutic mechanism, not a distraction
3. The crucial difference between Flash and ordinary scrolling: one is structured processing, the other is escapism

The Predictive Processing Frame

1. How trauma functions as a very loud, very sticky prediction: danger is real, I am not safe
2. Why precision weighting makes it so hard to stay present long enough for disconfirming experiences to land
3. How Flash creates the "juxtaposition" Bruce Ecker identifies as the key to memory reconsolidation — in micro-doses

Why Rumination Is the Opposite of Healing

1. How internally replayed experiences register as new confirming data — reinforcing trauma rather than processing it
2. The feedback loop that keeps people from getting the sensory mismatch needed for change

Flash vs. Coherence Therapy: Fine Paintbrush vs. Wide Brush

1. Why a single powerful disconfirmation often can't unlock a schema built from tens of thousands of hours of adverse learning
2. How Flash targets small representative memories and relies on generalization to update related networks
3. When you'd reach for one approach vs. the other

The Risk of "10-Minute Cure" Marketing

1. Why the early results from Flash look dazzling — and why that makes it vulnerable to repackaging
2. Tom's clear-eyed insistence that complex trauma recovery is not a brief program

Healing as a Revolutionary Act

1. How cultural stories about trauma (reliving scenes until a final cathartic insight) can actually impede healing
2. Whether modern trauma therapies echo ancient communal rituals — drumming, bilateral rhythm, deep witnessing
3. Why healing your own nervous system is a contribution to a more loving world

What You Can Do Right Now

1. Stop feeding the rumination loop
2. Find present-based practices that give your nervous system genuine disconfirming experience
3. Scope-of-practice questions for coaches, teachers, and parents interested in these approaches

Resources

Tom's YouTube Channel: EMDR Tom

Tom's professional trainings

Phil Manfield's work on Flash

PYP interview with Bruce Ecker

The Experience Machine, by Andy Clark

It's a. Very Hollywood kind of narrative, but it's not how the brain works and it's not how trauma healing happens. Today's guest, Tom Zimmerman, has developed a method of flash, which originated in the world of EMDR, which is part of a whole series of new wave trauma treatments that uses the body and awareness.

It's something that every parent, teacher, manager, psychologist can easily develop a facility for and share it. And it's fun. The brain likes it, and that's where healing happens. So without further ado,

Dr Howie Jacobson: thomas Zimmerman, welcome to the Plant Yourself Podcast.

Thomas Zimmerman: Thank you for inviting me.

Thomas Zimmerman: It is, I mean, it really does. I mean the, the, yeah, so the top line, the idea of like being able to heal trauma with remarkably little distress is pretty mind blowing. So yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Yeah. And then I've, you know, I, since then I've gotten very much into memory reconsolidation, so I've studied with, uh, Bruce Ecker, with Tory Olds. I, uh, I studied with Alan Perry and there's, you know, the understanding of the underlying mechanism of memory reconsolidation, uh, which I hope, we'll, we'll, we'll get into.

'cause you have a, you know, a, a very discerning understanding of what it is and how it works. And one of the, one of the things, you know, we're, it's still really early days to understand how it works, but, um, well, you know, I, I'm getting ahead of myself. Why don't you, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do

and I've been

Dr Howie Jacobson: what's that?

Thomas Zimmerman: an EMDR.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Yeah,

Thomas Zimmerman: What is EMDR? EMDR is a way

It has been really, really about. Understanding how, you know, how people heal and how we can actually help make therapy or make therapeutic interventions or even make self-care practices better match the brain and nervous system that we have, rather than the one we've thought we've had for the last 135 years.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Hmm.

Thomas Zimmerman: So, yeah.

Thomas Zimmerman: Um, in some ways, but again, um, EMDR r is unfortunately named because you can do EMDR all the time without doing eye movements at all. It's just we typically engage in some form of present based, left right simulation that can be tapping, that can be headphones, that beep, that can be you tapping your feet left and right.

You were like five. All five year olds are ridiculous.

So what do we do with people that don't have any kind of positive information or very, very little positive information, but have an enormous amount of trauma? And that's where, that's where flash approaches can come in.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Mm-hmm.

Thomas Zimmerman: Yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Okay. So maybe describe what you learned from Phil Mansfield. 'cause I know you've, you've taken it in other directions and refined it based, based on memory Reconsolidation and based on the work of Andy Clark and Lisa Felden Barrett.

Thomas Zimmerman: yeah, so I, um, I took a training with Ricky Greenwald's team, who's one of the people that, that also does flash trainings. And again, flash emerged as a way to take ke out of memories. It was understood as this way to kind of take ke out of memories, but, um, it seemed pretty clear to me that if you do flash well, it fully, permanently resolves them.

We'll be using every metric that you would consider. That memory resolved, however you, you know, however you resolve it. So it also seemed very clear to me initially that Bruce Ecker explains this very, very well. Right? So the lens I take now is, is kind of starts with predictive mind as, as kind of the broadest level of abstraction.

Bruce Ecker shouldn't have to keep saying this 785 times a year, you know what I mean? You shouldn't. So, so, um. And the idea is, is we heal and we learn across prediction error. We heal and we learn across what Bruce Ecker calls, um, juxtaposition. Right? We can do that. So, yeah. So Flash does

Dr Howie Jacobson: So may maybe, um, give, you know, give an example

Thomas Zimmerman: yeah, '

Thomas Zimmerman: As absolutely, and I'm, I wanna be very clear because in general, what Bruce Ecker is trying to resolve is not what I'm trying to resolve. Bruce Ecker is trying to resolve a whole belief about yourself all at once, right? So he's gotta have a really strong juxtaposition for that. My clients, that's too big of a bite. So what are we trying to resolve? We're trying to resolve, not even one memory. In flash, we're trying to resolve a tiny, tiny micro slice of a memory. So if in the memory your father's like, you're so stupid, we're just getting this, just, just one little bitty tiny thing. So what I describe is like, it's like we're not, we're so used to thinking about a memory as being like a bowling ball.

right?

So it's kind of like,

Dr Howie Jacobson: and the expectation is that, you know, to some extent, like this is still happening. Therefore my body has to flood with all of the processes and chemicals of. Of stress, of fight or flight to protect myself to hide.

Thomas Zimmerman: Yes, but that's

what always happens. But what's happening in flash is different than that. Thus the prediction error,

Right.

So in flash we get such a small piece of the memory that your brain's like, uh, this might not be safe. This is from territory that's normally not safe. But look, I'm having an experience of safety.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Mm-hmm.

And that makes perfect sense because those are things, those are aversive. Pay attention to this. This is important. Don't do that, avoid that. Right? So what we're doing in flashes, we're bringing a tiny piece of the memory into working memory, an uncomfortably small piece. We all, we have to prepare people to micro activate.

It's not what they're used to. And then we push it away. And then we do something, another thing that we never, ever do when we handle trauma, which is we immediately engage, like immediately engage in something pleasant, which is letting us see experientially, letting our brains see that bad thing isn't happening right here, right now

because puppies are something else is.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Mm-hmm.

Dr Howie Jacobson: All right. So I'd love to tie this process to, um, to, to what, to like the difference between what you're doing and what Bruce Ecker is doing in terms of, so, um, right, like the trauma that people arrive with or that they live with. Could be something like, like I never speak up in meetings and I've lost opportunities and I have, you know, or I keep sabotaging relationships, so Right.

Most people don't come because of a particular memory or set of memories, although, you know, from PTSD, from, you know, there's certain things that of course can, but you know, like most of the people that I deal with as, I mean as, as a coach, I deal with human beings and we're all traumatized to some extent, and it's usually sort of behavioral or emotional.

Thomas Zimmerman: yeah,

Dr Howie Jacobson: and, and how do you know, how do we know that that's the memory or that's a memory that relates to this?

So you activate something difficult and you sit with an experience that is, that is different than the expectation in the bad memory. What's different with Bruce Acker is Bruce Acker is trying to change a whole neighborhood all at once, right? A whole part, a whole belief about yourself all at once. My clients have 55,000 memories, right?

That that may under underlie the belief. What I want doesn't matter,

You know, they don't come, they come, they come with a dumpster fire, right? They come with a, they come with really life having been awful, awful, awful, awful. So, um, so yeah. And again, as, as a trauma therapist particularly with really, really significant lifelong trauma, every chance I get, I want to say this is not a brief approach to therapy recovery. If childhood was 158,000 hours, recovery's gonna take some time. It's gonna be your life's work, right? And it can get better, much better in the short term, but there's not

a. There's not a two week program for the recovery of complex trauma.

And there shouldn't be, right? There shouldn't be.

Yeah.

And, and, and people are going to be misled about it's, you know, it's global efficacy.

therapy, in groups, in individual sessions. And it works very, very well as a self-administered exercise. So, um, I can only control what I do and, um, I have no doubt that, um, we need to learn how to teach it well, because AI's probably gonna be teaching it to us two years from now.

You know, like some kind of, yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: right. I mean, you know, that the, the, you know, the, one of the other things that I thought, so I, I attended, I watched, um. Many, many hours of you teaching on YouTube. And I wanna, you know, people should find your YouTube channel because the, the generosity with which you share this with the world, you know, b borders on the Messianic.

Thomas Zimmerman: yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: right? So it's almost like this is kind of a cheat code. Like, I, I kind of wanna keep this to myself and just be amazing.

Thomas Zimmerman: yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: And, um, and also. I, you know, you, you caution about, you know, certain things that you could, that you have to pay attention to that could go wrong. It's actually extremely subtle, and I'm finding that, you know, after three or four sessions, I've got the script down. I can say, you know, know, catch it, uh, container it, push it, you know, push it far away like I can, so I can say things.

Thomas Zimmerman: yeah. And it is deep. It works because it's non-intuitive. I mean, again, so many things that we've done for all of our lives to survive. Have become intuition. We just do it reflexively, instinctively. Plus the cultures that wound us. Fill us with intuition about what we're allowed to count as wounding, what we're allowed to, how we should heal, right?

It's like a car where if you want to go left, you have to turn right. Do you know what I mean? That that is so that just doesn't feel, and if you want to turn right, you have to press the gas pedal. You know, it's like

we have to rewire, um, we have to rewire what, what we do when we try to heal. Because what you need to survive requires one set of intuition. But what we need to heal is going to require a different set of intuition.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Hmm.

Thomas Zimmerman: How elegant and how democratizing, how compatible with the Western ethos, if you were to, if this, I jokingly say that if Flash were a restaurant, it'd be right next to a Taco Bell or a, do you know what I mean?

It's, it's the kind of thing that can be everywhere and accessible and it is the kind of thing that I believe has the potential to rescue ourselves as a species.

And the last two days I've been watching video after video of people, um, reviewing backpacks. And for me that's like, you know, such a guilty pleasure. And it's just, you know, when I, when I let go of the guilt, it's just so much fun. Oh, look at this one and look at, these are Velcro and this is a, you know, and to me that's, um, escapism.

So how, what's the difference between me doing that and having people in a flash session watching their guilty pleasure videos, that that put 'em in a good mood.

And in very specific times. So we're using. We're using the thing that humans do more than they sleep, which is looking at a screen, right? We're using the dissociative experience of looking at a screen to heal, a micro slice of a memory at a time until the full memory resolves. So you're doing half of it when you're engaging in your backpack videos,

but you're not micro activating and doing the other parts of it.

And if you did, that memory would resolve with a great deal of reliability and predictability.

And, and it becomes this sort of big fight with dad and he takes me out and the whole thing is like, what's the relationship of that to the other, you know, 9,000 hours that, that are similar.

And one of the things we know about the predictive mind is that new learning has to, causes updates that trickle through the whole rest of your brain and the whole rest of your system. So, So, we're causing very important, very relevant, new learning. So, and it's not gonna be, after we work on that first memory, it's not gonna be that what I, I believe now what I want matters not with complex trauma, with a relatively healthy person. Absolutely.

With someone with complex trauma. That memory, you look at that memory and you will believe very strongly, if that's the right cognition, what I want mattered.

So again, I have clients that say, oh, we're working one memory at a time. Well, you better plan to live 487 years because I've got a lot of them.

Well, no, no, no. We're working on representative memories. And when representative memories resolve generalization occurs, which means that lots of other learning happens as a byproduct of this learning. They get updated

potentially dozens and dozens of other experiences.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Gotcha. So, so one thing that I learned from Bruce Ecker is that it doesn't take much to dis-confirm,

Thomas Zimmerman: That's

Can undo what he calls the schemas this entire way of looking at yourself or, or the world. Uh, so does that, does that sometimes happen with, with, uh,

Thomas Zimmerman: Absolutely. Absolutely. But this is very important. I think Bruce Acker is working with healthier people than I am.

Does that make sense? Because you're just not gonna unlock a schema that's built upon tens of thousands of hours of horribly averse learning. With new learning that only lasts a few minutes.

right?

We need the, you know, ways of, of healing and reconciling ourselves with ourselves. So, um, yes, but I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm also, I have a bias, and again, even predictive processing, you know, predictive processing suggests that if you have an enormous, enormous amount of learning, that learning isn't meant to be updated easily. Right,

because it, we need to give it the right type of sensory disc confirmation. We need to give it the right type. We need to give it a very compelling, present based reason to update the little piece of the model that you have of yourself in the world.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Right.

Thomas Zimmerman: And

these little updates can och toward big changes.

Really big life schema changes

Dr Howie Jacobson: I mean, one, one of the things that I'm wrestling with in, in Andy Clark's book, the Experience Machine, about, I think his most recent book about the Brain and predictive processing is that one of the things he says is that our brains are updating all the time. Like, that's, that's their, you know, one of their main jobs.

Um, and I think, you know, I've thought of this for a while as sort of Bayesian updating where you get, you know, keep things keep happening and you get more and more confident in your predictions. But like, you know, and I don't, I don't feel like he really goes into the trauma literature, um, in a way that was satisfying to me.

'cause if I'm pulled into the bad memory, my predictive mind is generating predictions of unsafety, which are showing up in my body, flooding me with a confirmation of, uh, it's like a, it's like uh, a microphone. Feedback loop, you know, it's like a microphone, speaker feedback loop.

So the moment we're pulled in, we're not here in the present enough to have a disconfirming experience to allow it to update.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Hmm.

Thomas Zimmerman: Yeah,

They just reinforce so,

Dr Howie Jacobson: So we're just, we're just double dipping and triple dipping. If this, if this was a research study, we would, we would, we would get fired, right? Because

Thomas Zimmerman: would get fired, so,

Dr Howie Jacobson: taking the same evidence, replaying it over and over again and counting each one as a, as a new experience. Wow.

Your brain automatically. Gets precision waiting and shifts it all the way toward the lessons in that bad memory all the way toward the experience of that bad memory. You can't update it until you have an experience with it that is different and you can't have an experience with It is different until I'm telling you, no, put your focus here. Watch those golden retrievers. Don't fall into that black hole. Come here, come here. Stay with me. We're gonna ground, we're gonna be here in the present moment. We have to be present for healing in this approach. You have to be in this room for it.

what it is when you're having a flashback.

When you're ruminating or when this, when your brain is con constructing a whole bunch of trauma predictions.

Yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Wow. So what's coming to mind is like every scene in a movie or a TV show that shows someone healing from a trauma is really the opposite of this. Right. It's like, you know, they keep going. They go back to the scene again and again. It's like, oh, now I, now I see the thing. Now I see the face of the person.

Now it, right, it resolves through.

Thomas Zimmerman: And now you're at the punchline. And the punchline is that we don't have to do that. It is the same cultures again. Families, culture, neighborhoods are cultures, community, mental health clinics or cultures, right? Parts of the country are cultures. Social, ethnic, racial groups can be cultures.

It's, it's the same cultures that wounded us that construct obstacles to healing, right? So, so I'm looking at you culture for why.

'cause one of the big questions in trauma work is why life had to have been harder 20,000 years ago, had to have been harder than it is now. Why is trauma so darn sticky now?

Cultures.

Cultures we're being gaslit constantly by the same cultures that wounded us,

Dr Howie Jacobson: Uh

Thomas Zimmerman: which is why healing yourself may be one of the true revolutionary acts an individual can do and still keep their freedom,

Dr Howie Jacobson: Ooh, I think, I think we got the title for this episode right there that, uh, that gave me some chills. Um, I'm, I have, I'm having a thought. I have no idea if you wanna follow it or have, have thoughts on it, but I'm, I'm very interested in, you know, as, as someone who has been a victim of this culture for most of my life, and gradually come to see that there are other options out there.

You know, invent a, uh, a profession to do it.

Thomas Zimmerman: Yeah. So, um, you mentioned MDR R earlier, EMDR sounds weird, doesn't it? From our light cultural intuition, we're gonna, what? We're gonna activate a memory, we're gonna slow down, be present, notice and do this like left right stimulation. Well, a lot of us EMDR practitioners are like, wait a minute, wait a minute. What if humans, what if trauma was once a community problem and

Dr Howie Jacobson: Hmm.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Hmm.

Thomas Zimmerman: Right. So I think the things that have kept us stuck are cultural. The things that have kept us blind are cultural. Yeah.

We have to, we have to teach people how to do it and we gotta teach people how to do it in a way that doesn't package kind of the worst of the Yeah. Which is ironic 'cause I'm like using YouTube to like spread the word and I'm using YouTube to.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Uh.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Yeah. Well, I, I mean, I love the irony of that because when I first encountered your work, and, and it's, it's changed over, over the years, you know, with different, uh, tweaks and discernments. When I first encountered your work, you were talking about the calm scene exclusively. So something. And so I was working with a, with a client of mine who's very spiritual, and he had a sense of the calm scene, what it should be, you know, I don't know what it was, but, you know, I'm imagining something angelic or cosmic or, you know, like an Alex Gray painting come to life on YouTube, and it wasn't quite working.

And then I, I attended one of your, your live sessions and you talked about almost like a guilty pleasure video. And I used that language for him. And now he's, you know, watching sports and, and it's, it's, you know, there's, there's something really lovely about, you know, the master's tools, dismantling the master's house.

Thomas Zimmerman: Yeah. Yeah. And we, it's, what that means is it's accessible and flash turns every resource, every re it flash, turns a sandwich into an opportunity to heal.

You know, flash, turns, flash, flash democratizes healing, right? It really does. And again, as much as it is, I think it is important that people with really complex trauma see a really good trauma informed therapist that gets it.

as a species.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Mm-hmm.

Thomas Zimmerman: Yeah,

Dr Howie Jacobson: Yeah. So one of the things that's reminded me of in terms of, of potential in scope is, uh, like tremoring, uh, right? So, gosh, I'm all of a sudden I'm blanking, uh, on the guy I interviewed who, who wrote the book on the, you know. Trauma release. Um, but you know, his, his story was he was working in, um, war torn countries where he, where he couldn't speak the language and kind of getting hundreds or thousands of people to, to shake to get the trauma out of their bodies.

Thomas Zimmerman: Yeah. I'm not sure because I'm not sure about where the, I'm very clear about what the boundaries and scope of practice of a therapist is. I'm not as clear about what the boundary and scope of practice a, a coach is,

Dr Howie Jacobson: well, let's, let's, let's, um, let's generalize even more to a school teacher, a parent, a, a manager, a hu, a human being who's not a licensed therapist, right? To democratize this, we need, we need to get it out there. How, how, how do you, uh, so let's talk to, you know, my audience now, and, you know, and they don't know what it is yet.

I'm, I think I'd like to spend a couple minutes with you just describing it, and then we'll give them all the resources where they can go and, and learn it in depth for absolutely free. But, you know, what's your vision of how this goes out into the world responsibly?

I find a little bit of a sore spot, okay? And I'm gonna push it out of my awareness, and then I'm going to get up and I'm gonna turn on my dance music. And I'm gonna dance for a little while.

Okay,

mean? So many of us have noticed that if you go kind of heavy hearted to yoga or if you go with like something on your mind, we have a sense by the end of that class that some aspect of that has shifted. Like

the whole thing hasn't. But the thing that we like went into the class with has shifted.

Does that make sense? So what you've just done is you've done around the flesh.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Mm-hmm.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Mm.

Ways that we've been gaslit into believing might be productive. Rumination, never, ever, ever, ever, ever is is, is it result? I've never ruminated my way out of a trauma. I've never, I've never had a flashback and been, that's the guy with the knife like they do in the movies. You know? In the movies. It's like you have the flashback.

have YouTube, we have, yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: yeah. Uh, so that, I mean, that idea of fun, you know, I've, I've been, I've, I moved to Spain three years ago and I'm trying to learn Spanish, and there's a way in which my default programming is like, well, you know, the more effort I put in, the more I'm gonna learn. And of course, it turns out that's not the case at all.

That, that my, my, that there's some part of me that's trying to direct my brain. You know, the organ that keeps my pH within, you know, microscopic homeostatic limit. Like this brain is so smart. The part that I don't control that I've never been able to identify with or connect. And it feels like, you know, flat part of flash is like trusting that part of the brain

Thomas Zimmerman: Yeah,

Dr Howie Jacobson: to like, if it's having fun, it's do, it's something good is happening.

Do you know what I mean? If you're having fun, that's a pretty good indicator that you're actually here, because here is what's generating the prediction error. It's what's generating the mismatch, right? So, so yeah, I can imagine, by the way, learning a language, how do we learn a language?

Do we learn it across prediction error? Right. Everything our brain does, right? I mean, everything our brain does, all learning is a cross, is a cross prediction error. So again, you don't wanna learn a language by using the schema. This is hard. I'm just gonna push, push, push, push, push into the hard. Does it make

sense?

That's Yeah. Yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Yeah. And as an, as a, as a, you know, citizen of the US it's very easy to, to go abroad and think, well, this is hard. 'cause everybody else in the world can speak nine languages, but I can't.

Thomas Zimmerman: Right?

Thomas Zimmerman: Yes. And language is cultural and every experience we've ever, we've ever had has cultural fingerprints and agendas on it, right? So of course, many of our schemas, of course, many of our predictions are culturally shaped. Expectations, you know about what we think. Again, if your brain, if the, if the, if the generative model of yourself in the world is made from every experience you have, we don't have any experiences completely immune of the cultures that we, we find ourselves language as a cultural artifact.

It's all, it's all implicated and tainted.

Thomas Zimmerman: yeah, yeah. Great example. Great example. And again, science. It is amazing. It's wonderful, it's great. But science is also a cultural artifact

because it's based on language and assumptions and, and and populations that we're testing. And are those populations,

Dr Howie Jacobson: Yeah.

Thomas Zimmerman: is there is that, are the populations skewing what we're finding?

the brain that we've been told we had, or the brain that we assumed that we had, or the brain that industry wants us to believe we have or, yeah,

Dr Howie Jacobson: Right. So we're, we're at the end of the hour. Um, I think, I hope we've described it enough for people to have a sense of what's going on, even though we didn't get to the step-by-step details. But I would love for you to kind of invite my listeners to like, if they're, you know, they're interested, which I imagine many of them will be like, this isn't a huge time investment to learn enough to be able to start using this.

Thomas Zimmerman: yeah. So it's hard for me to like tell people just in the world, you know, start doing flash without me having. Like a means to teach them this. So a lot of what my focus has been on has been teaching therapists. Um, and again, one of the things I'm doing here in Cleveland in the next month is starting a nonprofit research to really research from a predictive processing lens.

We're gonna research, flash research, EMDR, um, real, doing some really, really cool things. So the take home message, at least now until I have like concrete interventions to give people, like things that, these are kind of things, the take home message is, number one, you need to find something to do other than ruminating.

So,

Dr Howie Jacobson: sure. Um, you do have a website and you do have a YouTube channel, and you do offer trainings that, that anyone can sign up for. Can you let people know how to find those?

you know, like, I feel like you, you know, you get, you get the complexity that I have.

And, um, yeah. So YouTube, yeah.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Okay. And, um, I'll, I'll put a link in the show notes, but, uh, what's, what's the channel?

Thomas Zimmerman: Um, I, uh, you, the channel's, EMDR, Tom home

Dr Howie Jacobson: EMDR Tom, TOM.

Thomas Zimmerman: YouTube. Yep.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Okay, great.

Thomas Zimmerman: All one word. Yep.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Okay. Um, great. Yeah, so I think that's a fantastic place for, for people to start. Um, you know, so I'm, I'm, I'm rooting for resources for people to learn how to heal themselves, how to use this, uh,

Thomas Zimmerman: Then let's meet, let's talk about that. Let's develop that. Let's do that.

Right. Let me know how I can help. Let's, let's con let's do part B of the conversation.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Fantastic. All right. Um, '

Thomas Zimmerman: cause if this, I can't, I can't come and say, this is an easy, remarkable way to heal and then not, not help people do that.

Do you know what I mean? That's a, that feels inherently incomplete.

Dr Howie Jacobson: Yeah. Well, you, you know, you could take the model of I'm gonna charge $5,000 an hour and, and just,

Thomas Zimmerman: uh, no ga ga kept therapies are not what I'm up to.

No.

Dr Howie Jacobson: So, yeah. Yeah. So, Tom, thank you so much for, for the work you're doing in the world for the generosity with which you're, you're sharing it and explaining it and for taking the time to talk to me in my, in my crowd today.

Thomas Zimmerman: Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. And let's, let's do it again soon.

Dr Howie Jacobson: I would love that. I'm gonna stop the recording. Maybe we can hang on for a minute to say, uh, it's private. Goodbye.

Thomas Zimmerman: Okay, Bye-Bye.

Fortnightly uh, publishing schedule. There's a lot of people I wanna talk about, and I'm feeling renewed energy to share. Um, this healing tra trauma healing work, um, especially as it relates to what's going on in the world these days. 'cause I think there's a powerful link and I'm exploring it more in my own work with leaders with organizations as well.

And after a couple months of wallowing, I, I'm, I'm beginning to put myself back together and, um, some, some real energy. Around. Here's what I've got to contribute and here's where I think we need to move to, to create a, uh, a more loving world, um, movement news. Um, still working out. Uh, got a couple of, uh, ultimate Frisbee tournaments coming up.

One in Aliante in a week and a half. Looking forward. We may not have a ton of players, so I may have to run more than I would actually like. Um, but the other thing I've added, um, and I've, I've done it once, but I'm starting to, um, to build up the, um. The schedule for it. I'm gonna go do it today as well, is rucking.

And the idea is, so I, you know, you know, I've been a runner for a long time and my knee's been bothering me, and ankles and running has not been my friend lately. And as a result, I haven't done as much movement and cardio as I would like. And Rucking is walking, but with weights. And typically weights in a backpack so that it kind of forces my posture upright against, you know, the, the pull of the, uh, computer turtling.

So, um, gives me good posture and allows me to walk at a natural pace without pounding, without running, and still get, uh, a cardio workout. So right now I'm just loading. Um. Water bottles into a backpack. It's not perfect. The weight is a little bit low down my spine. The weight from the backpack is, uh, far away, relatively from my spine.