Dr. David Bullard demonstrates the FLASH technique with couples whose nervous systems are flooded with anger. He uses brief somatic interventions to shift them from rage to calm, then guides each partner to process childhood wounds like maternal absence or paternal criticism. A final flash creates a shared positive memory, counteracting the brain's negativity bias.
Chapters
The first time I used FLASH with a couple, it was a referral from a dear friend of mine who's an emotionally focused couples therapist, quite skilled, and she had a woman and a man. One of them was originally— and she said, David, I cannot keep them in my office. We— they come in together, they sit down, and before I know it, they're— one of them or the other is activated, and one or the other gets up leaves and slams the door. I cannot get them to stay. They both get so upset. So I said, well, we'll give it a try. So it's kind of fun because they came in to see me for sort of ancillary care, and I just said, let's acknowledge that each of you has a sympathetic nervous system that gets so upset that you have to fight or flee. And I appreciate if you need to leave the room, leave the room. Then I usually like to tell people that a wonderful British scholar of religion, and I'll remember her name in a moment unless somebody can remember it for me. She's, she was about 84 years old and she was at City Arts and Lecture in San Francisco. It's a book interview with, with an author, and she's tiny And she used to be a nun and she's brilliant. And she said, "We have to remember that the human nervous system evolved in order for us to kill predators larger than us." And to me, that said it all. We have to really respect the sympathetic nervous system and how it works. So over. Um, it worked really well. I had them, um, do it midway through the session if I felt like the energy was getting a little too high. And they saw in session something they'd never seen at home, which is they could go from all this tremendous anger and upset to feeling much better after a little bit of this flash. Then we were able to determine what each had a trigger from, what, what triggered one and what triggered the other from their own early childhood. Something on the order of, you know, my mother was an airline pilot and she left all the time, so I have separation anxiety. And the guy would possibly have had a father who always nitpicked and complained and never praised him for anything, so he didn't like criticism. So it played off each other, and I would have them each think about a memory involving their own particular wound or trauma and then do the flash. So then we would also just do it at the end of the session. And I've, I've really enjoyed doing this with couples, even when you get a sense that, okay, they come in the door. Peter Levine would say with Somatic Experiencing that you have to imagine a kayak going down a river and you get into the trauma vortex and you whirl around. And then with SE, or in this case, the flash, you get them over into the healing vortex. I have that sense of couples work that they kind of have to experience it in the session some of the upset that they're feeling. And then hopefully you have tools and techniques to help them get into the healing vortex. And for me, even when you've had a successful talking session and they've heard each other, it might be 10% that's still a little bit feeling blamed or blaming, which is great to help them not to see that blame is really an illusion. And we can talk about that soon. But at the very end of the session, if you do some flash and suddenly, as Celeste is pointing out, they're doing the shared moment, "Oh yeah, remember that?" And they're augmenting each other's memory. They walk out of there feeling really, really good. It's funny, you know, the whole— we've all heard the negativity bias of the nervous system. I heard that from Rick Hanson. Many years ago. He wrote a book called Buddha's Brain. Well, that's our inclination, and we, we all need a little encouragement to get into the positive, engaging focus of life. We all have them, and we can have more of them. So
