EMDR Therapy: A Gentle Path to Healing
EMDR Therapy: A Gentle Path to Healing
Written by: Janine ChengPublished on July 20, 2025If you’ve lived through a traumatic experience, you may sometimes feel like the past is still happening.
Certain triggers—like a sound, a smell, or a thought—might snap you back to the original event, bringing with it intense fear, sadness, panic.
Living on this edge, bracing for possible triggers, wondering when the past might come crashing back into the present is not only painful but also exhausting and disruptive to daily life. Traditional talk therapy can sometimes fall short in moving from understanding to processing traumatic events. EMDR therapy—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—offers a way to help your brain and body experience a release of the pain tied to traumatic memories.
What Is EMDR Therapy?
EMDR is a well-researched, evidence-based therapy that supports the brain to heal from trauma and related emotional distress. It is grounded in the Adaptive Information Processing model (API), which suggests that trauma can fragment and "freeze" negative experiences in memory, trapping raw emotions and sensory details outside of adaptive memory networks . These untreated memory fragments continue to trigger distress when recalled. EMDR aims to "unlock" and integrate these memories into more adaptive cognitive schemas, reducing their grip on your present experience.
The brain doesn’t process traumatic material the way it processes everyday memories. Instead, it can get “stuck” in a raw, unprocessed form. That’s why a single traumatic memory can feel so vivid—and why it can keep triggering intense reactions. Think of your brain like a filing cabinet. Most experiences get neatly stored away. But trauma? It’s like a messy stack of papers that keeps falling out whenever you open the drawer.
In EMDR:
You’ll briefly focus on a difficult memory.
At the same time, your therapist will guide you through gentle bilateral stimulation—such as moving your eyes side to side, hearing alternating tones, or feeling light taps.
This process helps your brain “file” the memory properly, like it would during REM sleep (the part of sleep where emotional processing naturally happens).
The result? Over time, the memory loses its emotional charge. It’s still there, but it doesn’t control your present anymore.
What Can EMDR Help With?
EMDR is best known for helping people heal from PTSD, but it’s also used for many other issues, such as:
Anxiety and panic attacks
Childhood trauma and attachment wounds
Phobias (like fear of flying or driving)
Grief and complicated loss
Low self-esteem and negative self-beliefs (“I’m not good enough”)
Distressing life events (accidents, medical trauma, breakups)
Chronic pain connected to trauma
What Does EMDR Feel Like?
Most clients are surprised by how gentle and empowering it feels.
You won’t be forced to talk about every detail of your trauma.
You stay in control the entire time—your therapist is there to support you.
Some people feel emotions during a session, but many also describe a sense of relief, like a heavy weight has started to lift.
One client described it like “watching an old movie fade into the background—it’s still there, but it doesn’t feel like it’s happening to me anymore.”
What Clients Often Say After EMDR
“I still remember what happened, but it doesn’t hurt like it used to.”
“I feel like I can finally breathe again.”
“It’s like the memory lost its power over me.”
If you’re interested in learning more about EMDR, schedule a call with our EMDR therapists!
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