What Is EMDR Therapy?

EMDR: An Introduction

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy is an evidence-based therapy that was created to help people process and recover from trauma, difficult experiences, and troubling emotional states. EMDR Therapy is guided by the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) Model, a theory about how the brain stores memories. This theory explains that the brain stores normal and traumatic or overwhelming memories differently.

During ordinary events, the brain stores memories smoothly, including networking them, so that they link with other things you remember. In the case of difficult or overwhelming cxperiences, that networking is disrupted. Instead, a disconnect develops between what you’ve experienced and what your brain stores as the story or meaning of what happened.

Traumatic and overwhelming memories become stuck in a format that doesn’t allow healthy processing and healing. An unprocessed painful experience is much like a wound that hasn’t been allowed to heal.

What EMDR Does

EMDR uses bilateral brain stimulation — guided eye movements, alternating tapping, or auditory tones — to activate your brain’s natural healing capacity. During EMDR processing, stuck memories begin to move. They link up with more adaptive information, the emotional charge decreases, the body releases stored tension, and negative beliefs lose their grip. The memory doesn’t disappear — but it gets filed differently. It becomes a memory rather than an ongoing experience.

When a memory or situation is processed adaptively, you’ll be able to remember it or think about it, but you’ll no longer experience the intense negative emotions around it. Instead, you’ll feel calm and at peace.

The effectiveness of EMDR is supported by over 40 years of scientific study, and is recognized as gold-standard treatment for trauma endorsed by The World Health Organization, The American Psychiatric Association, The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and more.

Unlike many therapeutic approaches, EMDR does not require you to talk in detail about a distressing experience, complete homework between sessions, or challenge your beliefs and thought patterns directly. Instead, EMDR lets your brain do what it already knows how to do — heal — by creating the conditions for that natural process to resume.

What EMDR Treats

EMDR was originally developed for Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and remains the gold standard for trauma treatment. But its applications have expanded significantly, as a treatment that helps when there is a traumatic or emotionally overwhelming component to what underlies someone’s struggles. Today, EMDR is used to treat a wide range of conditions where disturbing life experiences have contributed to present-day stress.

In my practice, I use EMDR to address complex and developmental trauma, anxiety and panic, grief and loss, attachment wounds and relational patterns, chronic stress, negative self-beliefs and limiting patterns, health and medical trauam, and life transitions and identity shifts.

Many of the people I work with don’t identify what they’re carrying as “trauma” in the traditional sense. They’re high-functioning adults who’ve been through experiences (sometimes early ones, sometimes later ones) such as emotional neglect, achievement pressure, relational disappointments, losses they powered through - that left residue and imprinted patterns in the nervous system that persist despite insight, effort, and even previous therapy. EMDR reaches what talk therapy often cannot, because it works at the level where these patterns are actually stored.

How EMDR Is Different From Talk Therapy

Traditional talk therapy is valuable. It builds insight, strengthens the therapeutic relationship, and helps you understand your patterns. But for many people, understanding a pattern and being free of it are two different things.

EMDR works differently. Rather than analyzing a memory through conversation, EMDR activates your brain’s own information processing system to reprocess the memory at a neurological level. You don’t need to talk through every detail of a difficult experience. You don’t need to do homework between sessions. The processing happens in session, driven by your brain’s natural capacity to heal when given the right conditions.

This is why clients often describe EMDR as reaching something that years of talking couldn’t touch. It’s not a replacement for relational, insight-oriented work — in my practice, I integrate both. But EMDR adds a dimension that talk therapy alone doesn’t access.

EMDR Is Not Just A Technique

This is important to understand: EMDR is a comprehensive therapeutic approach, not a single technique applied in isolation. It’s an eight-phase protocol that includes history taking, assessment, preparation and resource-building, targeted processing, and integration. Each phase has a clinical purpose, and are important to integrate and pace within the work.

In my practice, I further integrate EMDR with Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic, and relational therapy - because trauma and overwhelm doesn’t live in just one place, and effective treatment needs to address the whole person. IFS helps us work with the protective parts of you that may complicate the work of healing if not understood, under appreciated, or overlooked in the process. Somatic awareness ensures we’re tracking what your body is holding, not just what your mind is thinking. And the relational framework means the therapeutic relationship itself becomes part of the healing - not just the backdrop for a technique.

This integration matters because trauma doesn’t just live in the body, in protective patterns, in relational templates, and in beliefs about yourself that formed in many cases before you even had words for them. Effective treatment needs to address all of it.