What Happens in EMDR Therapy (and Why It Actually Works)
You've likely encountered EMDR in your search for answers—maybe as a recommendation from another therapist, in research you've done on trauma treatment, or through someone who's experienced its effects firsthand.
You may have questions about what the process actually involves, why eye movements seem to matter in processing deep psychological material, or whether it's genuinely effective for the anxiety or trauma you're carrying.
These are exactly the right questions to ask.
What happens during EMDR work is neither mysterious nor simple. It's grounded in neuroscience, refined through decades of clinical application, and fundamentally different from traditional talk therapy.
Over the years, I've witnessed the consistent, observable shift that occurs when someone's nervous system finally processes material it's been holding in an undigested state—sometimes for years, sometimes since childhood.
This isn't metaphorical transformation. It's neurological change that translates into how you move through the world.
Let me walk you through what this actually looks like.
Understanding the Current State
“By the time someone reaches out for EMDR, their nervous system is often in a specific configuration.
Years of unprocessed experience—whether discrete traumatic events or chronic anxiety rooted in attachment patterns, relational wounds, or existential uncertainty—have created neurological patterns that feel like permanent features of their being.
The amygdala remains hypervigilant. The threat-detection system stays active even in safe contexts. The body holds memory that the rational mind may not even consciously acknowledge.
What we're recognizing in this moment of assessment is not pathology, but adaptation.
Your nervous system has been working within the constraints of unprocessed material, and it's done the best it could with what it had.
That capacity to survive, to organize around the unknown, to protect yourself—that's actually evidence of your system's intelligence.
But intelligence and sustainability aren't the same thing. And that's where targeted processing becomes essential.
Before we engage the bilateral stimulation, we do what I call the preparation phase.
We identify the specific target—whether that's a particular memory, a cluster of sensations, a recurrent anxiety pattern, or a deeply held belief about yourself that formed in relational context.
This target is precise. Not vague. Not "my anxiety," but the specific moment when your body learned to brace, or the particular memory where your sense of safety fractured, or the relational pattern that taught you something essential but limiting about who you are.
Specificity matters because the brain processes information in networks. When we identify exactly what we're working with, we activate that particular network. And activated networks are what can be updated.
The Bilateral Stimulation: Neuroscience in Action
There are different ways to do bilateral stimulation. In my sessions, I use an online platform with a moving ball that guides your eyes from side to side — a simple tool that activates something crucial in your nervous system.
And here's where understanding the mechanism matters, because it demystifies what might otherwise seem implausible.
When we experience trauma or overwhelming anxiety, the neural networks associated with that experience become essentially frozen in their original form.
The Adaptive Information Processing model, which underpins EMDR, describes this as unprocessed information.
The emotional charge remains, the sensory fragments stay vivid, and the meaning made in that moment—"I'm not safe," "I can't trust," "I deserve this," "something is fundamentally wrong with me"—persists as felt truth in your nervous system.
The bilateral stimulation replicates the natural brain state during REM sleep, when your brain processes and consolidates memory.
Except now we're doing this deliberately, with focused attention on the specific neural network that's been holding the unprocessed material.
What happens neurologically is that your left and right hemispheres become engaged in alternating fashion. This activates your brain's natural processing mechanisms—the same ones that should have worked when the trauma occurred but couldn't because the experience was too overwhelming.
As this process unfolds, several things typically happen. You might notice shifts in the image or memory—clarity increases, details change, perspective shifts.
Sensations in your body may intensify, move, or dissolve. New memories or insights may surface.
Emotional intensity often decreases markedly, sometimes within a single set of bilateral movements.
Your nervous system is literally updating its threat assessment, rewiring the associations that have been locked in place.
This isn't cathartic release. It's genuine neural reorganization
. The memory doesn't disappear, but its grip on your present moment loosens. It becomes integrated—filed properly as something that happened, rather than something that's happening right now.
There’s a reason trauma healing feels so overwhelming. This blog post breaks it down in plain terms.
Read the post →
Integration and Attunement
Between each set of bilateral movements, we pause. This isn't empty space. This is where integration happens and where my presence as a clinician matters significantly.
Your therapist is listening not just to what you say, but to what your nervous system is signaling.
They’re attuned to shifts in your voice, changes in your breathing, subtle movements in your body. When something emerges—a new insight, an image, a somatic experience— you’ll notice it together.
Your therapist won’t force interpretation or push toward a particular outcome. Instead, they’ll follow what's alive in your system.
This is where mind-body integration becomes explicit. EMDR is often presented as purely cognitive—processing memories, updating beliefs.
But the work is thoroughly somatic. Your body is the archive of your experience. Trauma isn't stored as narrative; it's stored as sensation, as protective patterns, as held breath and braced muscles.
When we process, we're working with all of it—the images, the emotions, the physical sensations, the beliefs, and the existential knowing beneath it all.
Consider the person who experienced early relational rupture—a parent who was unpredictably available, who responded to a child's vulnerability with rejection.
That child's nervous system didn't just think "I can't trust." The nervous system learned it at the level of felt experience.
The body learned to withdraw before being rejected, to hide needs before they could be dismissed. EMDR processes that living knowledge.
As the bilateral stimulation continues across multiple sets, that somatic armor often begins to soften. Not because we've talked about it extensively, but because the nervous system is finally updating its assessment: "That was then. This is now. It's safe to exist here."
This is also where your neurodiversity, your attachment history, your cultural context, and your existential questions matter. EMDR therapist do not apply a protocol mechanically.
They’ll attune to you as a whole person, following what emerges, and creating the conditions for your own innate wisdom to surface.
One more important note: this work translates seamlessly to the online environment. The bilateral stimulation is just as effective when delivered through your screen.
What actually matters—the activation of your neural networks, the presence and attunement of a trained clinician, the safety of focused processing—is completely preserved online.
In fact, many clients find that processing in their own space, in an environment where they feel naturally held, deepens the work.
What Changes Over Time
By the end of a session, something measurable has shifted. Not always everything—complex trauma often requires multiple sessions to fully process, but the neural networks involved in a particular target have been activated and reprocessed in a way that reduces their charge and updates their associations.
What you might notice in the hours and days following a session is revealing.
A situation that would normally trigger a cascade of anxiety might instead feel like background noise—still present, but not commandeering your entire nervous system.
A memory that held emotional intensity might now feel more like a factual account of something that happened, without the visceral grip it once had.
You might find that your body doesn't respond with the same protective bracing. You might sleep differently. You might notice you have access to curiosity or compassion in moments that previously activated only fear.
This happens across sessions as well. Over weeks and months of processing, something more substantial reorganizes.
Patterns that felt immutable start to show their contingency. Beliefs you held as absolute truth reveal themselves as conclusions your mind made in circumstances of overwhelming threat—circumstances that no longer obtain.
Your relational templates shift. You find yourself responding rather than reacting. You can tolerate discomfort without it meaning danger.
This is the work of updating your internal models.
Not through intellectual understanding alone, but through the nervous system's direct experience of safety and integration.
You're not fighting against your symptoms or talking yourself out of them. You're giving your system what it needed all along: the opportunity to process and move forward.
Why This Matters
EMDR represents a genuine departure from traditional talk-based psychotherapy.
You don't need to excavate your entire history or spend years analyzing how your childhood shaped you.
Those insights may emerge, but they're not the mechanism of change. The mechanism is neural reprocessing. It's the activation and update of the networks that have been holding your experience.
This is not theoretical. This is what the research consistently demonstrates, and it's what I observe in session with remarkable consistency.
People who have been living with intrusive memories experience relief.
People who have organized their lives around anxiety find their nervous systems can tolerate what they feared.
People carrying existential weight—questions about meaning, safety, belonging, authentic self-expression—find that when the underlying trauma is processed, those existential questions become alive again, available for genuine inquiry rather than defensive speculation.
If you're considering EMDR, you should know what you're consenting to: focused, efficient, neurologically grounded work on the material that's been shaping your lived experience.
Not endless processing. Not the requirement to relive your trauma in exhausting detail. Instead, targeted reprocessing that allows your system to finally integrate what's been fragmented.
I work with clients who've experienced discrete traumatic events and those navigating chronic anxiety rooted in attachment patterns. I work with existential dimensions—the fundamental questions about meaning and safety that often underlie symptomatic presentation.
I work online, using bilateral stimulation that's just as effective as in-person work, and I'm trained to attune to the full complexity of what you carry.
If you've been searching for a treatment that actually works, that respects your intelligence and your autonomy, that meets you where you are without shame or pathology, this might be it. I'm here if you want to explore what's possible.