Why This Video Matters

In 2021, thirty-six-year-old Prince Harry allowed cameras to film an actual EMDR session with his therapist as part of his Apple TV+ docuseries with Oprah Winfrey on mental health, called, “the Me You Cannot See.” This YouTube compilation includes clips from that session. Whatever your feelings about Prince Harry, this footage is clinically significant — it's one of the only publicly available examples of what EMDR processing actually looks like in real time.

As an EMDRIA-Certified EMDR Therapist and Approved Consultant, I want to walk you through what you're seeing — because what's happening is far more layered than it appears.

What You See in the Video

In the clips, Harry sits across from his therapist. She guides him through bilateral stimulation — in this case, tapping. He's asked to hold a memory or image in mind while the tapping proceeds. You can watch his face shift. His eyes move. His breathing changes. At one point, he becomes visibly emotional. At another, he pauses and reports what's coming up — a new image, a body sensation, a thought.

This is what EMDR processing looks like from the outside: quiet, internal, punctuated by brief verbal check-ins. It doesn't look dramatic. There's no lengthy narration of trauma. There's no homework assignment. The therapist isn't interpreting or analyzing. She's facilitating a process that Harry's brain is doing on its own.

What's Happening on the Inside

During those moments of bilateral stimulation, Harry’s brain is doing several things simultaneously. The traumatic memory he’s holding — likely connected to the death of his mother — is being accessed in a controlled, titrated way. The bilateral tapping is engaging both hemispheres, which appears to activate the same neural processes involved in REM sleep.

His working memory is being taxed — he’s holding the distressing image while simultaneously tracking the physical sensation of the tapping. This dual attention reduces the vividness and emotional charge of the memory. Each time the therapist pauses and asks “what do you notice now?”, she’s checking what’s shifted — new associations, decreased disturbance, emerging body sensations, or spontaneous insights.

There’s also something happening at the level of the nervous system’s safety circuitry. Trauma locks the body into a state of threat detection — the brain is constantly scanning for danger, even when none is present. The rhythmic, predictable nature of bilateral stimulation appears to send a signal of safety to the brainstem and autonomic nervous system. The orienting response — the brain’s natural reflex to track new stimuli in the environment — is activated, which shifts the nervous system from defensive mobilization toward a state of alert calm. In essence, the brain begins to register that the danger is in the past, not the present.

Recent neuroimaging research also points to changes in the default mode network — the brain system active during self-referential thought, the internal narrative you carry about who you are and what happened to you. Trauma disrupts communication between the default mode network, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex. During EMDR processing, these connections appear to restore. The memory begins to be contextualized — placed in time, linked to meaning — rather than looping as a raw, present-tense experience. This may be why clients often report that after processing, the story they tell themselves about what happened fundamentally shifts.

The memory isn’t being erased. It’s being reprocessed — moved from its raw, fragmented, emotionally charged state in the limbic system to a more integrated, contextualized form. After successful processing, Harry will still remember what happened. But the memory will no longer carry the same gut-punch intensity.

What the Video Doesn't Show

The televised session is powerful, but it's a snapshot. What you don't see is equally important.

You don't see the preparation work — the sessions before this one where Harry and his therapist built a trusting relationship, assessed his history, and developed his internal resources for managing what comes up during processing. Phase 2 of EMDR — preparation — is critical and often takes multiple sessions.

You don't see the full processing arc. A single memory may require multiple rounds of bilateral stimulation across several sessions before it's fully resolved. What aired was likely an excerpt of a longer process.

And you don't see the integration that happens between sessions — the dreams, the shifts in perspective, the moments where something that used to trigger reactivity suddenly doesn't anymore. EMDR processing continues after the session ends.

What People Say About the Experience

People come into their first EMDR session with a lot of uncertainty. The most common question is "what will it feel like?" The honest answer is: it varies, but here's what people frequently describe.

During processing, many notice a stream of images, thoughts, body sensations, and emotions that shift rapidly. Some describe it as watching a movie on fast-forward. Others feel waves of emotion that rise and fall. Some experience physical releases — yawning, deep breaths, feeling lighter, a sudden relaxation of tension they didn't know they were holding.

Between sessions, people often report dreams, recalling unexpected memories they hadn’t thought about in a long time, shifts in how they see a situation, or moments of surprising calm in circumstances that previously felt activating.

What almost everyone describes is this: something that felt overwhelming before now feels manageable. The memory is still there, but it's lost its charge. Another common experience is knowing, in a deeply felt sense: “It's like it happened to me, but it's not happening to me anymore."

Is It Normal to Feel Emotional During EMDR?

Yes. In fact, it's part of the process. Emotions that surface during EMDR aren't a sign that something is going wrong — they're a sign that the brain is accessing material that needs processing. Harry's visible emotion in the clips is a perfect example. What you're watching isn't someone being retraumatized. You're watching someone's nervous system finally doing what it couldn't do at the time of the original experience — completing the processing.

That said, EMDR is not about forcing you to feel overwhelmed. Built into the process are the building and accessing of skills to help notice, feel, and manage emotions. A skilled therapist monitors your window of tolerance throughout the session. If the activation becomes too intense, we slow down, resource, and titrate. The goal is processing, not flooding. You stay in the driver's seat. The therapist is there to keep the process safe, contained, and moving forward.