EMDR Therapy
EMDR Therapy: What It Is, How It Works, and Why the Research Supports It
Some treatments sound more complicated than they are. EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — is one of them. What people actually experience, however, is something much simpler – symptom relief. And the research supporting it is among the strongest in all of mental health treatment.
This page is here to help you understand what EMDR actually is, what happens during a session, how you’ll know it’s working, and why we believe it’s one of the most powerful tools available for healing trauma, PTSD, complex trauma, and complex PTSD. We’re also going to tell you a little about who we are and how we offer this treatment — including something called an EMDR intensive, which is worth knowing about if you’re ready to move faster.
Where EMDR Came From
EMDR was developed in the late 1980s by Dr. Francine Shapiro, a psychologist who noticed something unexpected during a walk one day — that moving her eyes back and forth seemed to reduce the distress she was feeling around some difficult thoughts. That observation became the seed of a lifelong body of work that transformed trauma treatment around the world.
Over the years, and in the face of initial skepticism, Dr. Shapiro’s work developed from a hypothesis to a formal therapy process. EMDR has been demonstrated to be effective for treating trauma in randomized clinical trials, case studies, and millions of clinical hours treating trauma and trauma-related disorders across the globe. Today it is practiced by trained clinicians in more than 130 countries and is recognized by virtually every major mental health and medical organization on the planet as a first-line treatment for trauma.
What EMDR Is — And What It Isn’t
A lot of people come to EMDR after years of traditional talk therapy that helped them understand their trauma but didn’t seem to move it. They can tell you exactly what happened. They can trace the roots of their patterns back to specific experiences. And yet something still feels stuck. Something still fires in the body when a particular memory surfaces or a certain situation triggers an old response.
That’s not a failure of insight. That’s what trauma does when it hasn’t been properly processed.
EMDR therapy is a structured therapy that encourages the patient to focus briefly on a trauma memory while simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation — typically eye movements — which is associated with a reduction in the vividness and emotion associated with the trauma memories. In simpler terms: you hold the memory in mind while your eyes track a moving stimulus, or while you feel alternating taps, or listen to alternating tones. And something shifts.
EMDR therapy does not require talking in detail about the distressing issue. It is designed to resolve unprocessed traumatic memories in the brain. You don’t have to narrate your trauma at length. You don’t have to relive it in vivid detail. The processing happens largely below the level of language — in the nervous system, in the body, in the deep brain structures where trauma actually lives.
What’s Actually Happening in the Brain
Our brains have a natural way to recover from traumatic memories and events. This process involves communication between the amygdala — the alarm signal for stressful events — the hippocampus, which assists with learning including memories about safety and danger, and the prefrontal cortex, which analyzes and controls behavior and emotion.
When trauma happens, this natural processing system gets disrupted. The memory doesn’t get filed away properly. It stays raw, vivid, and charged — stored as if the threat is still present. That’s why trauma memories don’t feel like ordinary memories. They feel like now.
When distress from a disturbing event remains, the upsetting images, thoughts, and emotions may create an overwhelming feeling of being back in that moment, or of being frozen in time. EMDR therapy helps the brain process these memories and allows normal healing to resume. The experience is still remembered, but the fight, flight, or freeze response from the original event is resolved.
That last sentence is worth sitting with. The goal isn’t to erase the memory. It’s to change your relationship to it. To remember what happened without your nervous system treating it as an ongoing emergency.
What Actually Happens in a Session
EMDR follows a structured eight-phase protocol. The first two phases involve history-taking and preparation — getting to know your story, identifying the experiences that need to be processed, building the therapeutic relationship, and making sure you have the internal resources to do this work safely. We don’t rush this. Your readiness matters.
Your therapist will help you identify important aspects of your life story. You will discover the connection between your current problems and your past. You will identify your strengths and resources.
When you’re ready to begin processing, your therapist will ask you to bring a specific memory or experience to mind. Your therapist will ask you important questions about the event including your thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and images. Then the bilateral stimulation begins — typically eye movements but sometimes tapping on specific parts of the body is used instead. You therapist will work with you to find which way works best for you.
Your therapist will stop eye movements periodically and say: “Tell me what you notice now?” You will briefly report what you notice. You continue to notice any changes in thoughts, feelings, images, and body sensations while continuing eye movements until distress is reduced or eliminated.
People often describe this part of the process as strange at first — and then surprisingly natural. The mind tends to move. Memories shift. Emotions rise and release. Associations appear that you didn’t expect. You’re not analyzing any of it. You’re just noticing it and reporting what comes up. The therapist tracks your responses and guides the process accordingly.
You will link the event with an adaptive positive belief while continuing eye movements. You then think about the original event and a positive belief while scanning your body. Lingering tension or unusual sensations are identified and reprocessed. Your therapist then helps you return to a calm state, and strategies for containment are discussed.
No session ends with you flooded or destabilized. Your therapist will work with you to reregulate your nervous system prior to ending the session so that you can go on about your day.
How You Know It’s Working
This is a question we get a lot, and it’s a fair one. EMDR can feel different from anything you’ve tried before, and it’s not always obvious in the moment what’s happening.
Here’s what working tends to look like: The memory you’re processing starts to feel less sharp. Less charged. You can think about it without the same spike of emotion or physical activation. The story doesn’t change — what happened, happened. But the weight of it shifts. People often describe it as the memory becoming more like a fact and less like a wound. An important statement to remember is: “You can’t change the past, but you can change how the past is stored in your body.”
Between sessions, you may notice that things that used to trigger you don’t hit as hard. Sleep sometimes improves. The body — which was braced and vigilant — starts to relax a little. Old beliefs like “I’m not safe” or “I’m to blame” begin to loosen their grip as more accurate beliefs take root.
While at the beginning people rarely believe that how they feel can ever change, EMDR therapy does help people reprocess traumatic events so that they are no longer stored in that raw, vivid state. That shift — from disbelief to lived experience — is one of the most meaningful things we get to witness in this work.
Why the Research Is So Compelling
We don’t use the phrase “gold standard” lightly. In trauma treatment, it means something specific — it means the research is robust, replicated, and recognized by the institutions that set the standards for clinical care.
EMDR therapy is recommended as a first-line treatment for PTSD and other trauma-related disorders in the treatment guidelines of top health organizations, including the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association, and the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense.
Randomized Controlled Trials are considered the gold standard for clinical research, and EMDR therapy has been extensively studied using this methodology, with studies demonstrating EMDR’s efficacy and safety for a range of conditions and across diverse populations. The evidence is clear – EMDR significantly shifts and heals the symptoms of PTSD, complex PTSD, childhood trauma events, anxiety, depression, grief, chronic pain, and more.
Who We Are — And Why It Matters
Not all EMDR is the same. The quality of your experience depends enormously on the training and skill of your therapist.
We are EMDRIA Certified Therapists and EMDRIA Approved Consultants. That’s not just a credential on a wall — it reflects a significant investment in clinical training, supervised hours, and ongoing education that goes well beyond basic EMDR training. EMDRIA Certification requires demonstrated competency in the full eight-phase protocol, a substantial number of supervised clinical hours, and a commitment to continuing education. It signals that you’re working with someone who has made EMDR a serious area of clinical focus — not just an add-on technique.
As EMDRIA Approved Consultants, we also work with other EMDR therapists — supervising their clinical work, helping them develop competency, and supporting the broader field of trauma-informed care. We don’t just practice EMDR. We train others to do it well.
EMDR Intensives: Going Deeper, Faster
Standard EMDR therapy happens in weekly 50–55-minute sessions, often over many months. That format works well for many people. But for some — especially those with complex trauma, those who have limited time, or those who simply want to move more efficiently — a weekly cadence can feel frustratingly slow.
That’s why we offer EMDR intensives.
An intensive is exactly what it sounds like: a concentrated block of EMDR work done in a single extended session rather than spread across weeks. We offer two formats — two-hour intensives and four-hour intensives — depending on your clinical needs, your goals, and where you are in the process.
The advantage is significant. In a standard session, much of the time is spent re-orienting, warming up, and closing down. In an intensive, you have the space to go deeper into material without the pressure of the clock, and to process more completely before the session ends. For people dealing with complex or longstanding trauma, the extended format can accelerate progress in meaningful ways.
Intensives are not appropriate for everyone. We assess carefully during your consultation to determine whether the intensive format is a good fit for you. When it is, the results can be remarkable — not because we’ve done anything different, but because you’ve had the time and space to actually finish what the work starts.
Frequently Asked Questions About EMDR Therapy
Healing from trauma is possible. EMDR is one of the clearest, most research-supported paths we have toward that healing. If you’ve been carrying something for a long time and you’re ready to actually move it — not just talk about it — we’d like to help you figure out what’s possible.
Reach out. We’ll start there.
This is one of the most common concerns people bring to us — and one of the most important things to understand about EMDR. No. You do not have to narrate your trauma in detail. You don't have to tell the whole story. You don't have to relive it out loud.
EMDR works differently from traditional talk therapy. Rather than asking you to describe what happened at length, your therapist will ask you to briefly bring a memory to mind — the image, the feeling in your body, the belief about yourself that came with it — and then the processing begins. Your brain does most of the work. You report what comes up in short check-ins. That's it. Many people find this one of the greatest reliefs about EMDR — that healing doesn't require verbal re-traumatization.
People describe it in different ways, but a few things come up consistently. Strange at first. Then surprisingly natural. Then something shifts.
You'll be asked to hold a specific memory in mind while following a moving stimulus — usually eye movements, sometimes taps on your body, sometimes alternating tones in your ears. Your therapist will pause periodically and ask, "What do you notice now?" You answer briefly — an image, a feeling, a body sensation, a thought — and the process continues.
What you'll likely notice over the course of the session is that the memory starts to change. Not the facts of it, but the charge around it. The emotional weight. The way it sits in your body. People often describe feeling something loosen. Something that felt frozen beginning to move. By the end of the session, your therapist will help you come back to a calm, grounded state before you leave. You will not leave destabilized.
Possibly, yes — and we'd rather tell you that upfront than let you be surprised by it.
Processing trauma means making contact with difficult material. Some people feel emotionally tired after sessions, especially early on. Some notice that memories or dreams become more active for a day or two after processing. This is normal. It's actually a sign that the brain is doing its work — integrating and filing experiences that were previously stuck.
What we want you to know is that this temporary discomfort is part of the process, not a sign that something is wrong. We move at a pace that your nervous system can actually handle. We don't rush it, and we make sure you have tools to regulate yourself between sessions. The goal is always to keep you within what's called your window of tolerance — close enough to the difficult material to process it, but not so overwhelmed that you can't function.
There's no single answer to this question, as there multiple variables at play including the uniqueness of how your mind works through this process.
For some people — particularly those with a single traumatic event that is otherwise well-contained — significant relief can happen in a relatively short number of sessions. Research supports that single-event trauma can sometimes be substantially resolved in as few as three sessions. For others, particularly those with complex or long-standing trauma, childhood abuse, or PTSD that developed over years rather than a single incident, the process takes longer.
What we can tell you is that EMDR tends to produce results faster than traditional talk therapy for many people, and one of the few, somatic-based therapies that will get the body to stop physically and emotionally reacting to these memories. You will be engaging in an on-going dialogue with your therapist about what you are noticing, how it is helping and what the next steps are in the treatment process.
A standard EMDR session runs 50-55 minutes, typically once a week. That format works well for many people. This format does have a limitation — a significant portion of the session is spent warming up and closing down, which means the actual window for deep processing can be relatively short.
An EMDR intensive is a longer, concentrated block of work done in a single extended session — either two hours or four hours. The extended format allows you to get deeper into material without feeling rushed, and to process more fully before the session ends. For people with complex trauma, or those who want to make faster progress, the intensive format can be remarkably effective.
When the intensive is a good fit, people often describe it as covering ground in a single day that might have taken months in weekly sessions.
No — and this one comes up a lot.EMDR is not hypnosis. You are fully awake and in control during every moment of the process. You are not in a trance. You are not being given suggestions. You can stop at any time. You are always aware of where you are and what is happening.
The confusion probably comes from the eye movements, which can look unusual from the outside. But what's actually happening is neurological — the bilateral stimulation activates the brain's natural information-processing system in a way that allows stuck memories to finally move. It's closer to what happens during REM sleep than anything resembling hypnosis. Your brain is doing what it was always designed to do. We're just creating the conditions for it.
Yes. In fact, many of the people we work with have been carrying their trauma for decades.
Trauma doesn't have an expiration date. A memory that happened thirty years ago can still be stored in the nervous system exactly as raw and charged as it was the day it occurred. That's not a personal failure — that's what happens when the brain's natural processing system gets interrupted and the experience never gets properly filed away.
EMDR works with the memory as it is stored, regardless of when it happened. What matters isn't how old the wound is. What matters is that you're ready to address it.
This matters more than most people realize. Not all EMDR is the same — and not all EMDR training is equal.
Basic EMDR training is a starting point, not a destination. Our therapists hold EMDRIA Certification, which requires a significant number of supervised clinical hours, demonstrated competency in the full eight-phase protocol, and a commitment to continuing education. We are also EMDRIA Approved Consultants — which means we don't just practice EMDR, we supervise and train other therapists in how to do it well.
When you're considering EMDR with any provider, it's worth asking: Are you EMDRIA Certified? Are you an Approved Consultant or are you working with one? How much of your clinical practice involves EMDR specifically? You deserve someone who has invested deeply in this work — not just someone who took a weekend course and added it to their website.
This is a question we get often. Both approaches work with trauma at the level of the nervous system. Both bypass the thinking brain to reach where trauma is actually stored.
That said, there are some general patterns worth knowing. EMDR follows a structured eight-phase protocol, which many people find reassuring. There is a clear map to the work — a beginning, a middle, and a defined process for moving through material. For people who feel safer with structure, or who are working with a specific traumatic memory or event that is relatively well-defined, EMDR often fits naturally.
EMDR also has a longer and more extensive research base, which matters to some people. If you want the treatment approach with the most published studies behind it — the one that has been formally recognized by the most major health organizations worldwide — EMDR is that treatment.
Brainspotting, by contrast, is more flexible and intuitive. It follows the body's lead rather than a predetermined protocol, which can be particularly powerful for trauma that is harder to name or locate — the kind that lives in the body as a felt sense rather than a clear memory. Some people find that Brainspotting reaches something that feels deeper or less verbal than EMDR, and for complex trauma with many layered experiences, that quality can be significant.
The truth is that many of our clients use both at different points in their healing. Your therapist will work with you to figure out which approach — or which combination — makes the most sense for where you are right now.