What You Should Know About How EMDR Works

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and it’s a therapy that focuses on how we can heal trauma.

When we’ve experienced a traumatic event, our brain naturally wants to heal. But sometimes we have difficulties healing and become stuck. When this happens, our fight, flight, or freeze system kicks in and we experience stress. EMDR helps our brain process this stress. We can’t change our past, but we can change how we feel about it.  

One advantage to EMDR is that you don’t have to talk directly about the trauma while you work through it. The processing doesn’t happen because you’ve talked to your therapist about it. So if the trauma is too painful to talk about, then EMDR is still a way that you can process those events. Another advantage to EMDR is that there is no homework to be done between sessions. In many other therapies, there are activities your therapist will ask you to do between sessions. In my experience, it’s pretty common that busy people struggle to do this. But because EMDR is all about the processing happening in our brains during the session itself, there’s no homework to be done outside of therapy.  

So how does it work?

Once you meet with an EMDR-trained therapist and you both agree that EMDR is a good approach for you, treatment often starts by discussing a broad history of traumas and what coping skills you have. A therapist won’t ask you to relive your worst memories if you aren’t ready to do so. Instead, the therapist spends some time trying to help you become ready to visit those difficult memories. Once you begin to feel more prepared, you will begin to focus on a specific traumatic event. You will identify the impact this event has, including how you feel when you think about this event and how you see yourself because of it.  

This is when it might start to feel strange. Once you’ve identified all of these things with your therapist, then you hold onto these thoughts and the therapist will do some form of side to side stimulation with you. This stimulation can come in many forms, including side to side eye movements, taps, or sounds.

There are a lot of things in therapy that we don’t yet know why they work, we just know that they do. Something about this side to side stimulation activates more of the brain than just talk therapy alone and that’s what makes EMDR particularly effective.  It’s one of those things that research shows works, but scientists are still conducting research to learn how and why it does.

This assessment about the impact of the traumatic event and side to side stimulation is repeated until the event has less impact on your daily life. After an EMDR session, you and your therapist will do something calming or soothing, since you will have just mentally visited a difficult moment in your life. This lets you recover a bit before you go back to your daily routine.

A typical EMDR session lasts about 60 to 90 minutes. EMDR should only be attempted with a therapist who has been specifically trained in it.