Understanding why you react a certain way doesn’t always change how you feel. EMDR works with emotional and physical responses that persist long after the experiences that shaped them.
Maybe you know exactly where your anxiety comes from. You’ve read the books, done the journaling, talked it through in therapy, perhaps more than once. You understand your triggers, recognize your patterns, and can probably explain how your childhood contributed to both.
But all that understanding doesn’t necessarily change how you react when something brings those old feelings back. For example, someone makes an off-hand comment and suddenly your stomach drops, your chest tightens, or your inner critic launches into a familiar monologue. Intellectually, you understand that the situation isn’t particularly threatening. Your body, however, seems to have reached a different conclusion.
If you’ve ever thought, I understand why I do this, so why am I still doing it?, you’re asking a perfectly reasonable question.
We tend to assume that understanding a problem should help us solve it, and often it does. But when it comes to our emotional and physiological responses, insight doesn’t always translate into change quite as neatly as we’d like.
When this is the case, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) could help shift your responses that have not resolved through thinking alone.
Why Understanding Something Doesn’t Necessarily Change How You Feel
When we encounter something stressful or threatening, our minds and bodies respond in ways designed to help us navigate, or even survive, the situation. Depending on our experiences, those responses might involve becoming hypervigilant, withdrawing, trying to anticipate what other people need, or working very hard to avoid making mistakes.These strategies can be remarkably effective in the circumstances where they develop. The trouble is that our nervous systems aren’t always particularly interested in whether those circumstances have changed.
Consider someone who grew up in an environment where a parent’s mood could shift unpredictably. Learning to monitor subtle changes in someone’s expression, tone of voice, or behavior might have been a useful way to anticipate conflict.Years later, that person may be in a stable relationship with someone who isn’t unpredictable or threatening, yet still find themselves closely monitoring their partner’s mood and becoming anxious at the slightest indication that something might be wrong.
They may understand perfectly well where that response comes from. They might even recognize it while it’s happening.But recognizing a response and no longer experiencing it are two different things.
This is partly because our emotional learning doesn’t happen exclusively through conscious thought, especially when it comes to getting through situations where our safety was threatened. Experiences also shape automatic associations, expectations, and physiological responses, many of which occur before we’ve had an opportunity to consciously evaluate what’s happening.
Sometimes your nervous system just hasn’t gotten the memo.
What Is EMDR Therapy, and How Does It Work?
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a structured psychotherapy approach originally developed to help people process traumatic memories.
When an experience is traumatizing or particularly distressing, memories associated with it may continue to evoke intense emotions, negative beliefs, or physical sensations long after the experience itself has ended.EMDR is intended to help people process these distressing experiences so that the memories become less emotionally disruptive and the beliefs associated with them can shift. They become memories of something that happened in the past rather than something that feels like it’s still happening in the present.
During the reprocessing (or desensitization) phase of EMDR, aspects of a target memory are brought to mind while you engage in bilateral stimulation—that is, alternating sensory input from one side of the body to the other. This can be tapping back and forth on opposite sides of your body, or following a therapist’s fingers or another visual target with your eyes, or hearing tones or sounds and alternating ears. As you do this, you’re invited to just observe whatever comes up in your thoughts, emotions, or sensations as you’re processing the memory.
Rather than analyzing,, we witness what emerges and pay attention to how your experience changes throughout the process. This continues until the memory no longer has the emotional charge it once did.The goal isn’t to erase the memory or convince yourself that something difficult wasn’t actually difficult. It’s to help the experience become something you can remember without the cascade of distress that previously accompanied it.
The Science Behind EMDR: What Do We Actually Know?
If you’re someone who likes to understand why something works before deciding whether to try it, you may be wondering what moving your eyes back and forth has to do with processing a traumatic memory.
It’s a fair question! EMDR does sound a little strange, and actually doing it is a bit of an unusual experience
EMDR has been studied extensively as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and research supports its effectiveness for many people experiencing PTSD symptoms.
What’s still being researched is precisely how it works.
One hypothesis is that challenging working memory by recalling a target memory while attending to bilateral stimulation overtaxes the brain, causing the memory’s rigid recall patterns to be temporarily loosened. This makes the memory available to be reconsolidated and experienced differently.
Another theory explaining why EMDR is effective is the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. The AIP model holds that, just like physical healing, emotional healing takes place organically provided that there are no complicating factors or obstacles. If something interferes with emotional healing, the distressing experience isn’t able to be connected to other adaptive learning experiences and instead becomes encoded in a fragmented, maladaptive form. EMDR helps by processing the distorted cognitions and physiological activation so that the memory can be integrated as a non-charged memory.
There’s abundant evidence supporting EMDR as a durable treatment for PTSD even though there isn’t complete scientific consensus about every mechanism responsible for its effects. Researchers continue to investigate the relative contributions of bilateral stimulation, memory recall, exposure, and other elements of the process.
And while EMDR is also used to address other concerns or conditions, the strength of the research varies depending on what is being treated.It’s definitely important to understand both what the research tells us and where questions remain, and not having all the answers doesn’t preclude a meaningful conversation about whether an approach might be helpful.
EMDR Involves More Than Revisiting Difficult Memories
One misconception about EMDR is that you come into therapy, identify a traumatic memory, move your eyes back and forth for a while, and emerge on the other side feeling better. But there’s more to it than that.EMDR is generally described as an eight-phase treatment approach, and memory reprocessing is only one part of the work. When I incorporate EMDR, I want to make sure that enough time is spent preparing the client and building the map we’ll use to guide the work.
Before we get anywhere near the desensitization phase,, I’ll want to understand your history, the patterns you’re experiencing, the ways you’ve learned to cope, and what you’re hoping will change.We’ll look at the experiences that may be contributing to the problems you’re having so we can identify which memories to target and in what order. Sometimes there’s a particular experience that clearly stands out. Sometimes there are chains of experiences that seem to be linked together by common people, places, or themes. Other times, the difficulties someone is experiencing developed through a series of interactions or circumstances that may not seem especially significant when considered individually but taken together add up to a larger issue.
We’ll spend time preparing for reprocessing, which can involve developing strategies to manage distress, strengthening existing resources, and making sure you have enough stability to approach difficult material.The amount of preparation needed varies from person to person. Someone who already has effective ways of managing emotional distress may need less time in this phase than someone who frequently becomes overwhelmed or disconnected when difficult feelings arise. This part of EMDR is important for avoiding emotional flooding and is critical to successful processing.
Approaching EMDR in an effective and safe way means taking our time. Your history, current circumstances, and responses to treatment all help inform how we proceed.
Why EMDR Can Be Particularly Interesting for Overthinkers
If you’re accustomed to approaching problems through analysis, the idea of using a technique whose efficacy isn’t easily explained may feel a little unfamiliar. Having explanations for things has served you well in your life, and to be clear, ethical therapy always means answering questions and only proceeding when things feel comfortable and consent has been granted.
But part of what makes experiential approaches like EMDR so interesting is that they invite us to engage with something other than our explanations.Instead of focusing exclusively on why you developed a particular response to your triggers, we can also practice what it’s like to observe and witness what happens emotionally and physically when that response is activated.
What do you notice in your body? What feelings or beliefs emerge? Does the reaction remind you of something else? What happens when you allow things to emerge inside rather than trying to control them with explanations?
EMDR provides a structured way of working with these experiences differently. It doesn’t require you to abandon your curiosity or mental capacity, but it can help to dislodge you from the exhausting, repetitive responses to triggers that explanations and intellectual understanding haven’t been able to neutralize. Often, new connections are made spontaneously during reprocessing and in between sessions. One of the first things I’ll ask at the session following EMDR is whether you noticed anything new in your thoughts, feelings, or sensations, so your capacity to notice patterns and see the whole as a sum of its parts is a valuable to integration.
Could EMDR Be Helpful for You?
EMDR may be worth exploring if you notice that disproportionate emotional reactions or persistent problematic habits continue to show up despite having a good understanding of where they come from. Or you may not be totally clear on what these issues stem from, but your efforts to change your mindset or your behaviors or your situation haven’t done the trick.
Whether EMDR is a good fit depends on several factors, including your history, your current emotional stability, what kind of concerns you’re hoping to address, and how you respond to the therapeutic process.These are all things that can be explored while determining what treatment options make sense for you, as no one therapeutic approach has all the answers.
EMDR has a specific treatment protocol and requires deep understanding of how the body holds and processes trauma, so if you’re considering EMDR, you’ll want to work with someone who has received formal training in it.
I offer online psychotherapy to adults throughout California, including EMDR when it’s clinically appropriate. If you’re curious about whether this approach might be useful for you, we can start with a conversation about what you’re going through , what you’d like to be different, and whether we’d be a good fit
Reading List
- Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) Model – EMDRIA, EMDR International Association
- The AIP Model of EMDR Therapy and Pathogenic Memories – National Library of Medicine
- What is EMDR Therapy – EMDR Institute, Inc founded by Fancine Shapiro, PhD
- A FLASH OF HOPE: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy – National Library of Medicine