Welcome to the Leading Edge in Emotionally Focused Therapy, hosted by Drs. James Hawkins, Ph.D., LPC, and Ryan Rana, Ph.D., LMFT, LPC—Renowned ICEEFT Therapists, Supervisors, and Trainers. We're thrilled to have you with us. We believe this podcast, a valuable resource, will empower you to push the boundaries in your work, helping individuals and couples connect more deeply with themselves and each other.
IWe aim to equip therapists with practical tools and encouragement for addressing relational distress. We're also excited to be part of the team behind Success in Vulnerability (SV)—your premier online education platform. SV offers innovative instruction to enhance your therapeutic effectiveness through exclusive modules and in-depth clinical examples.
Stay connected with us:
Facebook: Follow our page @pushtheleadingedge
Ryan: Follow @ryanranaprofessionaltraining on Facebook and visit his website
James: Follow @dochawklpc on Facebook and Instagram, or visit his website at dochawklpc.com
George Faller: Visit georgefaller.com
In this Stage 2 AIRM episode, Ryan and James dive deep into one of the most tender, high‑risk, and high‑reward parts of EFT: working with attachment injuries in Stage 2. Building on de‑escalation work from Stage 1, they explore how to move past “talking about the injury” into fully opening the scene of the wound so that real limbic revision can occur.
Ryan shares how his own disorientation around when and how to work with injuries led him to train intensively with George and Karen, and how doing solid attachment‑injury work actually taught him how to do all of Stage 2. James opens up about his personal learning edge—how hard it can be, as a caregiver, to invite vivid pain into the room—and what helps him stay present instead of pulling back.
Across the episode, they unpack:
Why “you cannot change what you cannot open”
How to set a platform for attachment‑injury work that stabilizes both partners
The art of scene work: evoking 5–7 concrete sensory cues to move from summary into live experience
How to hold the injured partner’s pain open long enough for the offender to truly feel the impact
Why clients are “not fragile, they’re too stable”—and what that means for our stance as experiential therapists
They also connect this process to AIRM, the EFT World Summit, and the broader map of Stage 2—reminding us that deep injury work is not a side path, but a powerful way into the heart of restructuring the bond.
Key Teaching Points from This Episode
1. Why Attachment Injury Work Belongs in Stage 2
Most clinical conversations get stuck in “What do we do with injuries in Stage 1?”
Stage 1 is about stabilization and de‑escalation, not “doing surgery” on the injury.
Once there is enough stability and safety, Stage 2 is where we go to the heart of the injury to create lasting change.
For Ryan, learning to do good Stage 2 attachment injury work was how he learned to truly do Stage 2 at all (vs. just using its concepts).
2. “You Cannot Change What You Cannot Open”
Effective injury repair requires fully opening the synaptic memory system of the event.
Therapists must help clients move from summary (“this thing that happened back then…”) to live, embodied experience in the room.
If the pain stays in the background, it acts like a “boogeyman”—emerging unpredictably and hijacking the bond.
The task is not to “make them hurt,” but to give the pain that already lives in them a chance to be explicitly on stage, in a safe, co‑regulated frame.
3. Scene Work: How to Open and Stay in the Injury
Ryan describes his scene‑based approach:
Set a clear platform (framing why you’re going here, for both partners).
Open a specific scene of the injury and stay there (often 20+ minutes, “circles and circles”).
Focus primarily on one partner’s deep experience at a time.
Use 5–7 concrete physical/sensory cues to shift out of summary and into experience:
What do you see?
What do you smell?
Temperature on your skin?
Textures around you?
What’s happening in your body? In your eyes?
“You can’t revise what you can’t open”: the deeper and clearer the scene is evoked, the more powerful the potential for revision.
4. The Therapist’s Own Edges and Nervous System
James shares that, from his caregiving/medical background, watching vivid pain come alive in session can be hard on his own nervous system.
The temptation is to protect clients from feeling too much, but:
We are not creating pain.
We are bringing existing pain into shared awareness so it can be held and transformed.
Therapists must train themselves like firefighters:
Trust your training
Trust your equipment (the EFT map, Tango, AIRM)
Trust the people you’ve trained with
A healthy fear of what could go wrong is important, but must be balanced by a clear vision of what is lost if we never go there.
5. “Right Dose at the Right Time”
Drawing on Bruce Perry’s work: therapy requires the right dosage at the right time.
Do not do this kind of deep, evocative surgery in Stage 1—that would be an overdose on an unstable system.
In Stage 1:
We treat the injury (acknowledge, validate, build some safety),
But we do not do full surgical repair yet.
In Stage 2:
The partner is more available to co‑regulate and respond.
The bond is more ready to sustain deep limbic work and revision.
6. Clients Are Not Fragile—They’re Too Stable
Ryan’s provocative teaching line:
“Your clients are not fragile. They’re too stable.”
They are stable in their woundedness and rigid organization:
Rigid protective strategies
Rigid negative self/other models
As experiential therapists, if we treat clients as too fragile to go into these places, we:
Collude with the stability of the injury
Miss the opportunity for deep restructuring
We must hold both:
Tenderness and strong alliance (like a good mom with a third grader)
Relentlessness in going after the dark places
7. Two Core Goals of Attachment Injury Repair (AIRM)
Ryan summarizes the two main goals of attachment injury repair:
The injured partner sees their pain reflected back in the eyes of the injurer.
Not just verbal apologies
The limbic system needs to register: “You are with me in this pain now, not talking me out of it.”
Often assessed by asking (carefully): “Do you feel like your partner really gets the depth of this?”
A felt sense of confidence that, given the same circumstances, this would not happen again.
This is not cognitive reassurance alone.
It’s a body‑based sense that something fundamental has shifted in the bond and in the injurer.
When both are present (often over multiple sessions), the injury can be considered functionally repaired, and the couple can return to the previous stage of EFT work.
8. Platform Building: How Ryan Sets Up the Work
Ryan starts with a platform conversation before opening the scene:
To the offender:
“I’m not doing this to make you feel bad. You deserve not to have this event be the story of you.”
Frames the work as a way to retire the “Scarlet Letter” and integrate the event into a larger, more hopeful story.
Uses metaphors like sleeping on an unpinned grenade—life is too precarious if the injury is never addressed.
To the injured partner:
Names that a part of them is still stuck in that place (delivery room, the moment they discovered the affair, etc.).
With their permission, he proposes spending several sessions there to go find and bring back that part of them.
This platform:
Clarifies what they’re doing and why.
Re‑establishes consent and collaboration.
Begins stabilizing the offender’s shame and the injured partner’s fear before going deeper.
9. The Five “People” in the Room
Ryan offers a helpful image: during injury work, there are effectively five people involved:
The therapist
The adult injured partner
The adult injuring partner
The younger/earlier version of the injured partner in the scene
The younger/earlier version of the injurer in the scene
The work is about going after all of them in a redemptive way—bringing those divided versions back into connection and coherence.
10. From Scene Work to Tango Move 5 and Back to the Map
Once the scene is open, Ryan sees the work as “old‑school Step 5”:
Deep affect assembly in the injured partner
Clear enactments to the offender
Sculpting the offender into A.R.E. responsiveness (Accessible, Responsive, Engaged)
Helping the injured partner take in that responsiveness
He often uses multiple, small enactments rather than rushing to one big one:
Micro‑processing present‑moment shifts
“What do you see in their eyes right now?”
“What happens in your body as they reach for you?”
Crucially, after deep injury work:
Don’t get so disoriented that you abandon the EFT map.
Ideally, you return to where you were (e.g., late withdrawer re‑engagement) and complete the rest of Stage 2:
Full withdrawer re‑engagement
Pursuer softening
11. Using Yourself and Accepting Disorientation
Ryan normalizes that, in late Stage 1, Stage 2, and especially Stage 2 injury sessions:
He often leaves feeling completely disoriented (in a good way).
It takes a minute to re‑orient, use the bathroom, splash water on his face.
This disorientation is a sign that:
He has fully entered the memory with them.
He is using himself deeply as an experiential therapist.
He distinguishes this from burnout:
Burnout was more present when he tried to work these places without scene‑based experiential depth.
Deep scene work, while intense, is actually more effective and less demoralizing than spinning in summary and argument.
12. Honoring Clients and the Mission of EFT Therapists
Both highlight:
Clients as major teachers—it’s worth explicitly thanking them at times.
Sue’s stance: even at the end of her career, she was “excited to go up the hill and see what my clients are going to teach me today.”
They frame trainers (and this podcast) as trying to be like:
Military commanders who can’t go on every mission, but must equip the troops well:
Best training
Best equipment
Clear mission
The closing tone:
Deep appreciation for therapists who are willing to go to dark, painful places with their clients.
Reassurance that with the map, the tango, and the AIRM frame, you are not walking into those places alone.
If you like the concepts discussed on this podcast you can explore our online training program, Success in Vulnerability (SV).
Thank you for being part of our community. Let's push the leading edge together!
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