Episode Details

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.

• 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).

• 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.