EYE MOVEMENT DESENSITIZATION AND REPROCESSING
EMDR
EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a therapeutic approach for working with traumatic memories and the ways they continue to live in the body, the nervous system, and current life. It is one of the most well-researched approaches for trauma and is used in our practice as part of a larger relational and anti-oppressive framework.
What EMDR is: traumatic experiences often get stored differently than ordinary memory. They can stay in a kind of unprocessed state, where the body, the emotions, and the meanings made at the time of the event remain stuck in the original moment. This is why a traumatic memory can feel, even years later, as immediate as when it happened, while ordinary memories from the same period have faded into their proper place in the past.
EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, typically through eye movements but sometimes through tapping or sounds, while the client holds the memory in a particular kind of attention. The bilateral input appears to help the brain reprocess the stuck material, integrating it more fully so it can move from the unprocessed state into ordinary memory. The body relaxes, the emotional charge reduces, and the story stays, but the immediacy fades.
EMDR can be helpful for many forms of traumatic and difficult material, including:
- Single-incident trauma. Accidents, assaults, medical traumas, sudden losses, witnessed harm.
- Complex trauma. The cumulative impact of ongoing harm, often beginning in childhood, often involving close relationships. This work requires careful pacing and a longer preparation phase than single-incident work.
- Racial trauma, gender-based harm, immigration-related trauma, religious trauma, and other forms of harm shaped by systemic conditions
- Birth trauma, medical trauma, and the specific traumas that happen inside institutions meant to help
- Performance anxiety, phobias, and other patterns where present-day reactions are shaped by earlier experiences that have not been fully integrated
- Grief, when grief has become stuck or layered with traumatic elements
- Persistent shame, self-criticism, or negative beliefs about the self that trace back to specific origins
EMDR was developed inside a research framework that, like much of mainstream clinical research, did not center the populations our clients come from. It works with many people across many backgrounds. It also requires real adaptation to be adequate to clients whose trauma is structural and ongoing, not only individual and historical.
What this work can look like at MLC:
- A real preparation phase, however long that takes, including relationship-building, resourcing, and stabilization
- Careful identification of what is ready to be worked with and what is not
- Sessions that include EMDR processing interwoven with other approaches as the work calls for them, including parts work, somatic work, attachment-based work, and more conventional talk
- Attention to the structural and historical context. If your trauma is shaped by racism, transphobia, immigration violence, religious harm, or other systems, we hold those in the work rather than treating them as background.
- Going at your pace. We will not push through what your nervous system is asking us to slow down for.
- Integration time between sessions. EMDR can keep working in the days and weeks after a session, and the integration deserves attention.
The therapists at MLC who use EMDR have received training and ongoing consultation in the approach. We hold it as a powerful tool when it is the right fit, and we are honest when other approaches will serve better, or when EMDR can be helpful alongside other modalities.
For many clients, EMDR has been one of the things that has finally shifted what years of talk therapy could not. For others, it is one tool among several. We will figure out together what fits your particular situation, and we will move at the pace your healing actually requires.
