Module 12 — Modern Developments: The Flash Technique and EMDR 2.0 | EMDR Course
- Jun 5
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 9
Free Course by Everything IFS Academy | Therapeutic Modalities Series
Module 12 — Modern Developments: The Flash Technique and EMDR 2.0
EMDR has not stood still since Francine Shapiro's first studies. It is an active field, and clinicians and researchers keep refining it, looking for ways to make the work faster, gentler, and reachable for more people. This lesson surveys the most notable of those newer developments: two distinct innovations, the Flash Technique and EMDR 2.0, and a few of the ways EMDR has been adapted for new settings. Throughout, one thing is worth keeping in view: the standard eight-phase protocol remains the most established form, and these newer approaches sit alongside it rather than replacing it.
Why the Method Keeps Evolving
Standard EMDR is highly effective, but it is not universal. A meaningful share of people do not fully recover from any trauma treatment, EMDR included, and the standard approach asks something that is hard for some people: to make deliberate, sustained contact with a memory that may be unbearable to face. Those two facts, room for improvement and the difficulty of facing the memory, are what drive the innovation.
The newer developments tend to aim at two goals:
Tolerability. Making the work less overwhelming, so people who cannot bear direct contact with a memory can still be helped.
Efficiency. Making processing faster and more complete, so relief comes sooner.
Both build on what is already understood about how EMDR works, and both are attempts to do the same job better, not to overturn it.
The Flash Technique
The Flash Technique, developed by the psychologist Philip Manfield, is aimed squarely at the problem of tolerability. Its central idea is striking: a disturbing memory can be reduced in intensity without the person having to consciously face it.
In the technique, the person identifies a target memory but then deliberately keeps it in the background, out of focus. Their conscious attention is turned instead to something positive and absorbing: a happy memory, a pleasant image, an engaging activity, a piece of music. While they stay focused on that positive engagement, the therapist periodically gives a brief cue, often the word "Flash," prompting a quick action such as a few rapid blinks of the eyes. The disturbing memory is touched only for an instant, glancingly, before attention returns to the positive focus. Checked afterward, the memory's disturbance has often dropped, sometimes substantially, even though the person never sat with it directly.
How it can work without direct focus is the puzzle at the heart of the technique, and the leading idea ties back to how EMDR is thought to work in general. Even with the memory kept in the background, that brief glancing contact, paired with a demanding action like the rapid blinks, may be enough to engage the brain's processing while the conscious mind stays occupied with the positive focus. The memory is being touched and worked on, just lightly and indirectly, rather than held steadily in awareness. The exact mechanism is still being studied, as it is for EMDR as a whole, but the working idea, that direct, sustained confrontation with a memory may not be necessary for it to be processed, is part of what makes the technique so interesting.
The Flash Technique began as an addition to the preparation phase, a way to take the edge off a memory too intense to approach with standard reprocessing, lowering its charge enough to make the regular work possible. It has since grown into something used on its own as well, and it has proven especially useful in group and disaster settings, where its gentleness and speed are valuable. Early studies are encouraging, showing meaningful reductions in distress, though its evidence base is younger and smaller than that of standard EMDR.
EMDR 2.0
Where the Flash Technique aims at gentleness, EMDR 2.0 aims at power. Developed by the Dutch researchers Ad de Jongh and Suzy Matthijssen, it is an adaptation of standard EMDR built on one of the leading explanations of how the therapy works: working memory taxation, the idea that a memory loses its grip when it has to compete for the brain's limited mental workspace.
The reasoning behind EMDR 2.0 is direct. If taxing working memory is what drains a memory's charge, then taxing it harder should work better. So EMDR 2.0 deliberately pushes the demand further. It uses more challenging and varied tasks during processing, draws on several senses at once rather than eye movements alone, and adds elements of arousal and even an element of surprise to keep the mind fully occupied, all to load the mental workspace as heavily as possible while the memory is held. The goal is processing that is both faster and more complete.
EMDR 2.0 is a refinement rather than a departure. It keeps the overall structure of EMDR while intensifying the engine at its center. It is being studied actively, including in head-to-head trials against standard EMDR, and while early signs are promising, it remains a newer approach whose evidence is still being gathered. It is also not yet widely available, and many therapists are not trained in it, so a person seeking EMDR today is far more likely to be offered the standard eight-phase protocol.
The Wider Landscape
Beyond these two named developments, EMDR has been adapted in other ways worth knowing about, even briefly.
Remote and online EMDR delivers the therapy over video, using the same forms of bilateral stimulation adapted for a screen. Research supports it as a workable option that has made EMDR far more accessible, particularly where in-person care is hard to reach.
Group protocols adapt EMDR for treating many people at once, which is invaluable after disasters, in refugee settings, and wherever large numbers of people need trauma care and individual therapy is not possible. Self-administered bilateral stimulation, such as the butterfly hug, often makes these group approaches workable.
These adaptations share a theme with the Flash Technique and EMDR 2.0: a steady effort to extend EMDR's reach, to more people, more settings, and more circumstances, without losing what makes it work.
Holding These Developments Honestly
A clear-eyed view of all this matters, because newer is not the same as better-established. These developments are genuinely promising, and the field's willingness to keep testing and improving is a sign of health, not weakness. But the standard eight-phase protocol still has by far the largest body of research behind it and remains the form that major health organizations recommend. The fair position is that the newer approaches are encouraging additions under active investigation, not replacements for a method with decades of evidence.
There is one more thing worth stating plainly, because the gentleness and simplicity of some of these tools can be misleading. Newer does not mean self-administrable. A technique like the Flash that sounds simple, or a self-soothing tool like the butterfly hug, is still part of a trauma therapy meant to be delivered with proper training and support. The reprocessing of trauma, in any of its forms, belongs with a qualified professional. The innovations described here change how the work is done, not who it is safe to do it with.
Below this lesson, you'll find an EMDR exercise along with a few ways to begin noticing and practicing it in everyday life this week.
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