In the preparation phase she builds a place. It has a porch, a particular light, a dog that is not hers, and she can reach it in under a minute now. You have practiced the stop signal until it is automatic. None of this is the reprocessing, and all of it is why the reprocessing will be tolerable, and the weeks spent on it are not delay.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing rests on Francine Shapiro's adaptive information processing model, the proposition that distress persists when an experience has been stored in a form the system could not integrate and eases when the memory is reprocessed. The eight phases run from history taking through preparation, assessment, desensitization, installation, body scan, closure, and reevaluation, and the work during desensitization depends on dual attention, the client staying in both the memory and the room. Prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy work the same territory by other methods.
The path takes no part in any of that. It asks for no recall, and it does not process a memory. What it examines is the structure that formed while the memory was being carried: the role a child adopted in the house after the event, the rule she followed so it would not happen again, the fear that became reasonable. The negative cognition you write on the target sheet, I am not safe, I am not enough, I should have known, is often the clinical face of one of those rules. It is useful to know, when you choose targets, that the belief has a history beyond the incident.
Sequencing is a clinical decision. The opening of the path, the recognition that continuing as before is no longer possible, often coincides with the decision to seek treatment like yours, and the preparation phase and the path's early reflection can run side by side without touching each other. During active reprocessing you may want reflection paused, or limited to the stable weeks between targets. The path stays outside the target memory.
Installation strengthens a positive cognition that you and the client choose together. Reflection on the self beneath the masks may give her a fuller vocabulary to bring to that choice, and the choice itself stays hers and yours. The path supplies no cognitions and installs nothing.
The one page brief sets the eight phases beside the path and notes where the two can be scheduled around each other.