I learned about Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) long before I ever experienced it. People described it almost reverently, as a kind of last resort that actually worked, something that helped people recover when other approaches hadn’t. Of course I was curious. It took me years to fully understand how much of what I was struggling with was rooted in trauma, so I didn’t seek it out even when I probably should have. It wasn’t until I was physically assaulted that I finally made the call.
I won’t go into the details of what happened, but what I can tell you is that it cracked something open in me. Before the assault, I moved through the world with a fairly basic sense of safety. I trusted people. I didn’t think much about who was behind me on the sidewalk. That all changed. After, I couldn’t tolerate someone walking behind me without my body flooding with adrenaline. Wherever I sat (a coffee shop, a restaurant, a library) I had to position myself with my back to the wall and a clear view of the door. I was always scanning, always tracking. I avoided the neighborhood where it happened entirely. I didn’t want anyone touching my hair.
My first attempt at EMDR didn’t go well. The therapist may have been skilled, but I don’t think she was prepared to see someone so close to the event. I had thought that the sooner I got support, the sooner I would feel relief. I was barely sleeping, crying constantly, desperate to feel better. The therapist seemed genuinely eager to help, but we spent the session on things that didn’t feel relevant: my history of depression and a promise that I’d never feel depressed again after treatment. When we got to the actual exercises, she walked me through a resourcing exercise, the kind where you try to locate a sense of safety or calm. But nothing felt safe at the time. Trying to find that feeling just seemed to spread the fear further. I left less hopeful than when I’d arrived. I didn’t go back. Over time the sharpest symptoms softened on their own, but the impact of the assault stayed with me in quieter, more persistent ways.
Years later, I tried again. The hypervigilance still surfaced sometimes, and I had also begun connecting some longer threads, recognizing how earlier experiences were still quietly shaping the way I moved through the world and showed up in relationships. This time, I worked with a therapist I genuinely felt safe with. I’ve since learned that EMDR follows a standardized protocol and that the therapeutic relationship isn’t considered a core ingredient of how it works. My nervous system might disagree with that, but I understand the reasoning. Through that work, I reprocessed the assault and found a kind of freedom I hadn’t expected. The memory didn’t disappear. At one point I’d wished it could, but what changed was that it stopped feeling charged. I could hold it without feeling swallowed by it. I also worked through older experiences I hadn’t fully recognized as formative, things that had been shaping me for years without my quite knowing it.
I had gone into EMDR skeptical. I tend to live in my head, and the research was reassuring but I wasn’t convinced it would actually work on me. It did. I’ve since been trained in EMDR myself, and what I understand now, both from my own experience and from sitting with clients, is that the results aren’t magic, even when they feel that way. There are real reasons it works. So let’s get into those.
What is EMDR, in plain language? What does “reprocessing” actually mean?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a type of psychotherapy that treats trauma and other distressing experiences by targeting how memories are stored in the brain. Developed by Francine Shapiro in 1989, it’s now recommended as a first-line treatment for PTSD by organizations like the World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association.
The premise is actually fairly simple. Your brain has a natural system for processing experiences, not unlike the way your body heals a wound. When it’s working, disturbing events get integrated into memory in a way that lets you learn from them without being controlled by them. But trauma can overwhelm that system. Certain memories get stuck, continuing to feel as vivid and immediate as when they first happened, never quite settling into the past or connecting with the rest of your experience. Unlike memories that have been processed and gradually fade into the background, unprocessed experiences keep triggering emotional and physical responses as if they’re happening right now.
And those experiences don’t have to be dramatic or obviously traumatic. Ongoing stressors like a tense relationship, a toxic work environment, or years of feeling unseen can leave just as deep a mark as a single acute event. Sometimes deeper.
“Reprocessing” simply means helping your brain update what got stuck. During EMDR, you hold a difficult memory in mind while following your therapist’s hand movements with your eyes, or sometimes with alternating taps or tones through headphones. This bilateral stimulation activates the brain’s natural processing system and helps file the memory away in a less charged form. Unlike therapies that teach you to manage or work around distress, EMDR actually changes how the memory feels when you recall it. Research shows measurable brain changes: reduced activity in the amygdala (the brain’s threat-detection center) and stronger connections between its emotional and thinking regions.
What kinds of symptoms are tied to unprocessed experiences?
Unprocessed experiences show up in how you feel, think, and move through the world. Persistent anxiety and fear that don’t match the current situation are common, like feeling your heart race at a family gathering or dreading a routine meeting. Depression, emotional swings between overwhelming intensity and numbness, and pervasive shame or guilt are also typical.
Cognitively, you might notice intrusive memories or flashbacks, difficulty concentrating, trouble making decisions, or beliefs about yourself that feel true even when you know they shouldn’t. I’m not safe. I’m not enough. I can’t trust anyone. The body carries it too: chronic pain, headaches, digestive issues, fatigue, sleep disrupted by insomnia or nightmares. A nervous system that stays on high alert even in objectively safe situations, which researchers call hypervigilance. Unresolved trauma creates noticeable changes in the nervous system, trapping it in dysregulated states that alternate between high alert and shutdown.
Behaviorally, this looks like avoiding places, people, or conversations tied to past events, withdrawing socially, struggling to trust or maintain relationships, and sometimes using self-destructive behaviors like overworking or drinking to manage difficult emotions.
What does EMDR help with?
EMDR is best known for treating PTSD, but the research extends well beyond that. Depression, anxiety, OCD, chronic pain, eating disorders, substance use, and even psychosis all show up as conditions that can respond meaningfully to EMDR. This breadth makes sense once you understand that so many of these struggles are rooted in experiences that the brain never fully processed, and EMDR is specifically designed to help the brain finally do that work.
One of the more unexpected applications of EMDR is in treating chronic pain. Studies have shown that EMDR can help reduce or even eliminate a range of persistent pain conditions, like phantom limb pain, chronic back pain, migraines, and fibromyalgia. This might sound surprising, but it actually fits with what we now understand about the mind-body connection: trauma doesn’t just live in our memories, but can also show up in the body as ongoing pain. And living with chronic pain, in turn, can become its own form of trauma, affecting every part of daily life and well-being.
What connects these different conditions is that they grow out of experiences that haven’t been fully processed, and those experiences don’t need to be catastrophic. In fact, research shows that ongoing stressors, like a tense relationship or a toxic work environment, can sometimes leave deeper scars than a single, obvious trauma. What’s even more remarkable is that EMDR has been shown to help people make meaningful progress (in some cases, experiencing significant relief from long-standing symptoms) in as few as three sessions.
What does an EMDR session actually look like?
EMDR follows an eight-phase protocol, though not all phases happen in every session. The early sessions focus on history-taking and preparation. You’ll identify specific memories, beliefs, or associations that still carry emotional charge, learn grounding techniques, and become familiar with the process.
During reprocessing sessions, you’ll be asked to recall a memory or issue that troubles you, the negative belief connected to it (like “I’m unsafe” or “I’m worthless”), and a positive belief you’d like to have instead. You’ll rate how disturbing the memory feels on a 0-10 scale and how true the positive belief feels on a 1-7 scale. After that, bilateral stimulation is introduced. This can involve following your therapist’s hand with your eyes, receiving alternating taps on your hands or knees, listening to tones that switch from ear to ear, or watching a light bar. After each set of movements, the therapist asks you to simply notice what comes up, whether that’s thoughts, feelings, images, or body sensations.
Every session closes with grounding techniques, so you leave feeling stable, including when processing isn’t finished. Sessions typically run 50-90 minutes, and the number varies depending on what you’re working through.
Do you have to relive the trauma?
Not in the way most people fear.
Unlike trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR does not involve detailed descriptions of the traumatic event, direct challenging of beliefs, or homework. And you won’t be asked to recount what happened in detail or narrate the experience out loud.
The work is internal: holding the memory, along with its associated feelings, sensations, and beliefs, while the bilateral stimulation does its work. Some clients move through reprocessing with relative ease and are genuinely surprised by how manageable it feels. And research does show that when intensity does arise during EMDR, it generally lasts only moments before decreasing. There are clients who do find it more intense, and there are moments where the memory can feel close and present again, not like a story from the past but something happening right now. That’s real, and it’s worth knowing going in.
What makes this different from simply being retraumatized is the container around it. Before any trauma processing begins, we spend time in the preparation phase: building resources, practicing grounding techniques, and developing a “safe place” visualization and a “container” exercise to help you manage distress. This work expands your window of tolerance, the range where you can process difficult material without either shutting down or becoming overwhelmed.
You are in control throughout. If at any point you need to stop reprocessing, you can. We pause, we resource, and we only continue when you’re ready. If you feel overwhelmed or start to dissociate, feeling disconnected, numb, or not quite present, your therapist is there to help you come back to the present and remind you that you’ve already lived through what you’re revisiting. The pacing is always adjusted to you, and the goal is never to push through at any cost. It’s to move at a pace your nervous system can actually work with.
How do you know if EMDR is working? What happens between sessions?
One of the first signs that EMDR is working is that traumatic memories start to feel more distant. The memory doesn’t disappear, but it feels like it’s fading into the background rather than happening in the moment. Sensory details that were once sharp and vivid become less clear, and triggers that used to feel overwhelming become less intense. You might notice you can recall what happened without the same rush of fear or shame, and situations that used to reliably derail you simply don’t anymore. Physical symptoms like hypervigilance, sleep disturbances, and chronic tension tend to improve, and daily functioning gets easier as well.
Between sessions, your brain continues to process for one to three days after each appointment. This is normal and actually means the therapy is working. Many people experience fatigue during this time, but it’s nothing to worry about. This is just the brain working hard to reorganize memories even while you’re sitting still. Vivid dreams or nightmares are extremely common and typically increase for one to three nights before subsiding. New insights, other memories, or shifts in how you see yourself may surface unexpectedly. Most of these experiences resolve within a few days. If you’re struggling to function in daily life or feel persistently overwhelmed, reach out to your therapist so you can adjust the pacing.
How do you find an EMDR therapist you can trust?
You can start with the EMDRIA Find an EMDR Therapist directory, which lists over 18,000 members trained to provide EMDR therapy. The directory lets you search by location and shows each therapist’s credentials.
That said, credentials alone don’t tell you everything you want to know. EMDR requires completing an EMDRIA-approved basic training program, which includes 50 hours of instruction and consultation. Certification is optional and indicates additional hours, client work, and continuing education.
It can help to ask EMDR trained therapists how they know when someone’s ready to begin reprocessing and what preparation they provide beforehand. Many skilled EMDR therapists don’t rush into trauma work and will prioritize building safety and resources first.
The therapeutic relationship matters here, too. While EMDR’s protocol-driven structure led some early practitioners to treat it as almost incidental, research suggests otherwise: the therapeutic relationship accounts for a significant portion of treatment outcomes, and the deep internal work EMDR asks of clients requires a genuine sense of safety and trust. Most therapists offer free initial consultations, which gives you a chance to notice how you feel speaking with them: whether you feel seen, respected, and unhurried.
Here at Take Root Therapy, we have skilled clinicians trained in EMDR who bring genuine care to this work. If you’re curious about whether it might be a good fit for you, we hope you reach out.