About EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is recognised as an effective treatment option for anxiety, PTSD, and other conditions.
It can help people process and recover from traumatic memories through guided bilateral stimulated eye movement. Bilateral stimulation (BLS) is a technique that alternates sensory input between the left and right sides of the body or brain and eye movement is one form of BLS.
Your brain will change after a trauma
Research shows that the traumatised brain functions differently from a brain that has not experienced trauma.
For example, after trauma the part of the brain that manages our fear response becomes overactive. This can leave us feeling constantly on edge, as if we are stuck in fight‑or‑flight mode. At the same time, the areas that help us relax and fall asleep are less active, which makes it much harder to switch off.
EMDR can help the brain re‑engage and rebalance the areas involved in threat, memory, and calming responses, supporting a shift out of survival mode.
How EMDR therapy works
EMDR helps shift the emotions, thoughts, and behaviours connected to past trauma. Traumatic memories are often stored differently from everyday memories, sometimes in a way that stops the brain from fully processing them. When these memories remain unprocessed, they can continue to trigger distress long after the event itself has passed.
By bringing a traumatic memory to mind while following the movement of the clinician’s finger or tapping, the brain can begin to reprocess the memory and change the way the experience is stored.
Unlike traditional talking therapies, EMDR doesn’t require you to describe distressing events in detail. This can be especially helpful for people who find it hard to put their experiences into words. Many clients also find they can recall past events during EMDR without feeling the same intensity of emotion that originally accompanied them.
What EMDR can help with
EMDR therapy is recognised as an effective intervention for addressing psychological trauma, which can stem from a diverse range of experiences, including:
war-related experiences
childhood sexual and/or physical abuse or neglect
surgical trauma
natural disaster
road traffic accidents
assault
panic attacks
complicated grief
workplace accidents
domestic abuse/violence, phobias
EMDR therapy has been demonstrated to be effective in addressing a variety of mental health conditions. Treatment is highly individualised, and the application of EMDR is determined by the therapist's professional assessment of its potential benefits in each unique case. Nonetheless, EMDR has been found to be beneficial in the treatment of:
anxiety disorders
depression
bipolar disorder
dissociative disorders
eating disorders
Grief
personality disorders
PTSD and other trauma-related conditions
substance abuse
What happens in an EMDR session
Your therapist gathers information about your history and identifies the specific memories or issues to target in therapy.
It’s normal to feel nervous
Embarking on a therapeutic journey can be a liberating yet scary endeavour. You may experience some trepidation about undertaking this venture especially if this is the first time you are speaking to a professional about what you have been carrying. You may worry about what might surface, and that uncertainty can make silence feel safer.
"It’s completely understandable to feel this way," Dr Opoku-Lageyre says. "But staying silent can reinforce what Judith Herman calls the 'godforsaken isolation of trauma.'" Finding the words for what happened can begin to restore a sense of control and agency.
You might feel a bit ‘weird’ after a session
You may find yourself thinking deeply about the experience. You may find that you have vivid dreams about the experience and or notice yourself feeling more emotional than usual. You may also notice sensations in your body after the first few sessions. This is perfectly normal as your brain continues to make sense of the experience after each processing session. These changes will reduce over time, and as the sessions go by you will begin to notice positive changes in how you are functioning and observe changes in your outlook.
At the end of your EMDR therapy session, you can expect to feel differently about the experience. You may find that you can talk about it, should you wish, without experiencing flashbacks, physical sensations or all the negative thoughts and emotions associated with the experience. Most people say at the end of their EMDR therapy that the experiences become memories like any other, something that happened but doesn’t continue to have a negative psychological effect.
Some people report that after using EMDR to treat specific phobias, for example, animals, planes etc., the thing they feared or were phobic about, becomes just a ‘thing’. It becomes, “just a spider, or a plane”, and they no longer feel fearful or overwhelmed by it.