So What the Heck Is EMDR Anyway? Part One: The Memory That Kept Chasing Me

There it was again.

My heart pounding as I heard a car slow down behind me on my morning run. My heart rate quickens, panic starts to rise, and I try to talk myself down: it's just someone driving to work, chill out, Anne. The car pulls up beside me at the roundabout, and I glance over. It's a woman about my age, maybe singing along to something on the radio, and she drives past without so much as a look in my direction.

I feel myself come back down. Good grief, I think, it's been years. Literally years I've been reacting like this, even in full daylight, even when nothing is actually wrong.

Over twenty years ago, I was walking home from work at night. I shouldn't have been walking alone, but I was young and stubborn and, looking back, more than a little reckless. I

was on the phone with a friend when a car pulled over fast, four silhouettes inside it, and a man jumped out of the back seat and started chasing me. I quickly told my friend to stay on the line, I was being chased, and I ran. I ran faster than I have ever run in my entire life, adrenaline coursing through me. I remember thinking I wasn't going to be one of those women in movies who keeps looking back over her shoulder to see how close the monster is getting and trips helplessly over her own feet, falling and getting caught. I ran for two full, long blocks, praying someone would drive by or be outside, but the street was empty. I realized that if that car came around the block and cut me off, I was done for; I had to run faster than a car could circle the block. I wasn't only afraid of being chased, I was terrified at the thought of what four men would do to me if they caught me.

All I could hear was my shoes hitting the pavement and my heartbeat, and I thought I'd lost him. I stopped and turned around.

He was right there, standing about five feet away. He angrily yelled, "I'm not going to hurt you!"

I didn't stay to find out if that was true, and I started sprinting again. I saw someone up ahead and started screaming for help, and the next time I turned around, he was gone.

I made it home terrified and shaking. I kept checking the doors and windows, convinced they were going to find me.

But I had gotten away.

A woman just a few weeks later in the same area wasn't as lucky.

I never walked alone at night again, and for years afterward, any car that slowed down near me sent my heart racing. Being aware of your surroundings is smart. Feeling ambushed by that same jolt of fear, over and over, twenty years later, on a sunny morning run past a woman just trying to find her exit off the roundabout, was exhausting.

Introducing EMDR

That's the memory that eventually brought me into an EMDR session, on a couch much like

the ones my clients sit on now.

In this post I want to talk about what actually makes EMDR different from talk therapy, and the sometimes surprising way people realize it worked, including, it turns out, me. Part two of this series is a separate post where I get into why EMDR interested me in the first place, the research behind EMDR, and share a few notes from the EMDR conference I just got back from.

Inside a Session

Most therapy relies on language spoken out loud between client and therapist. That back-and-forth, reframing, and exploring is real, valuable work, and it's often how we build insight into our own thoughts and experiences. There's also the attunement between therapist and client, the experience of feeling truly seen, sometimes for the first time in your life, and there's a piece of that in EMDR's phases of treatment too. But regular talk therapy can be slow, and that's not a knock on it; some things take time to untangle in words. EMDR isn't quite the same kind of talk therapy,: though, and the actual process runs through a few distinct steps.

In the first phase, I take a client's history to get to know them, but that doesn't mean walking through every traumatic event in detail. A headline is enough: my caregiver was physically or emotionally abusive, neglectful, or struggled with substance abuse; I was intensely bullied in school; I was in a car wreck and couldn't get out; I witnessed something terrible that still intrudes on my thoughts when I don't want it to; I was emotionally abused by a partner for years and forgot how to trust myself. If someone wants to share more, they can, but we're careful not to retraumatize anyone by making them narrate the details before we've even started.

From there, we spend time on resourcing, building up ways to regulate yourself and feel steady again after we've touched on something difficult, and creating a real sense of safety before we ever get near the harder material. That groundwork is what makes it safe to go there at all.

Once we have that foundation, we choose a Target together, whatever we're working on; a specific memory, a belief about yourself, a theme that keeps showing up, an issue or experience that hasn't resolved. If a memory feels like too much to process all at once, there are different EMDR protocols I draw from that let us work through it in smaller, more manageable pieces instead.

Then we activate it: I'll ask you to bring the memory to mind along with the belief and body sensation attached to it, right before we start. From there, you hold all of that in mind while your brain and body do the processing, guided by bilateral stimulation: side-to-side eye movements, or a pair of small buzzers, one in each hand, alternating a gentle vibration back and forth like a phone buzzing. After each set, I check in and give you a chance to say what just came up, an image, a thought, a body sensation, a memory, whatever surfaced, before we move on to the next set. You tell me what came up, usually just a sentence or a word, enough to keep us moving without talking your way out of the process; too much talking can actually pull you out of the memory network we're working in.

We follow wherever your brain leads you, until it's fully processed, which we track by watching the distress around it drop and a more accurate, grounded belief take its place. We also do a body scan to make sure the distress isn't lingering anywhere physically, and lock in a positive belief in its place, something like "it wasn't my fault, I did the best I could," before we move toward the future template.

Once a Target is fully processed, we don't just stop there. There's a piece I think is underrated: we work on how you'd handle something similar if it came up again, so the change carries forward instead of just resolving what already happened.

That's a different experience than what most people picture when they think "therapy." You're not narrating the worst day of your life sentence by sentence. You just need to bring the memory into the room; your nervous system handles the rest.

The Sneaky Way Some People Realize They're Better

I know what it's like to walk away from an EMDR session not realizing yet that something has already changed, and I've watched that same thing happen for clients who almost didn't stick with EMDR long enough to notice it. It's a pattern I've seen play out multiple times. A client has a memory that keeps resurfacing; they've talked about it with me many times, and it still has teeth. We start EMDR on it. After one to three sessions, they tell me they want to stop; it feels too different from what they're used to, and they're not sure it's working.

That's a completely reasonable reaction, and in EMDR the client is always in control; if you say stop, we stop. EMDR doesn't always give you the same kind of feedback talk therapy does. You don't get to talk your way to a feeling of progress in the room, so it's easy to leave a session unsure whether anything happened at all.

Then a week or a month later, I'll bring up that memory, expecting to hear the same charge

in their voice. Instead, I hear something like, "yeah, I guess it's just something that happened, I haven't really been thinking about it," or "it just isn't bothering me like it used to." Sometimes they haven't even noticed the shift until I point it out; it can be that subtle. The memory stopped visiting them daily and quietly became something that happened, past tense, instead of something still happening to them.

I've also seen the more dramatic version of this: a memory that plagued someone every day, that used to seize their thoughts without warning, simply stops overtaking them. They're not managing it anymore. It's not there to manage. It's been properly processed by the brain and body, filed into the part of you that holds things that happened in the past instead of things still happening now. If they want to revisit it, they can choose to; it doesn't force its way back in on its own anymore.

I want to be honest that EMDR, like any modality, doesn't work this way for everyone, and it isn't the right fit for every person or every memory. But when it works, and it works often enough that I've built a career around it, it's some of the most striking change I've witnessed as a therapist.

One Foot in the Past, One Foot in the Room

EMDR is, in a lot of ways, a form of exposure; you're revisiting something difficult while staying anchored in the safety of the present moment. One foot dips into the memory, one foot stays planted in the room with me, in your body, in the now. That combination, past

and present held at the same time, seems to be part of what lets the brain finally file the memory away properly instead of treating it like an ongoing threat.

It's also why the work continues after the session ends. It's a little like bench pressing for your brain. The muscle does work during the set, but it keeps working long after you've racked the bar, repairing and strengthening itself over the days that follow. The brain does something similar with a processed memory, working in the background in sleep and stray thoughts, which is often when clients notice a new insight or a shift in how it feels, days after the session ended.

We Don't Fully Know Why, and I'm at Peace With That

I can't tell you with total certainty why EMDR works, and even the researchers who've spent decades studying it don't fully know either. One theory getting a lot of attention right now suggests the eye movements or buzzers might mimic the brain wave patterns of deep sleep, the same state where your brain naturally sorts and files memories away (Pagani et al., 2017). It's not settled science, but it's a compelling guess, and it's part of why I don't mind that we don't have this fully figured out yet. There are strong theories, and I'll get into some of the research in part two, but the honest answer is that we know it works for a lot of people better than we know exactly why.

I think of EMDR a little like how a cut on your skin heals; it scabs, it closes, it falls away, and you don't have to consciously direct any of that. Your body already knows how. EMDR gives the brain that same room to do what it already knows how to do. And because a lot of the work happens without hours of talking, in my experience it often gives people meaningful relief in fewer sessions than years of talk therapy alone; more relief for the time and money you're putting in, which in this day and age is no small thing.

The Morning I Stopped Bracing

When I finally sat down to do EMDR on that memory of being chased, I didn't think it would work. Not for me, not after that many years of carrying it. I went in skeptical, half convinced I'd just leave with the same tight chest I'd walked in with.

It took me one long EMDR session and one night of sleep for meaningful change. That's not a universal response, but it's common enough; a lot of people move through a memory very quickly. Other things I've worked on since haven't always resolved that fast for me, but they've all moved. I actually left my first EMDR session feeling like not much had changed, sure that somehow I had "done it wrong," and feeling a little bad for my therapist since I had not given her much information about the event to go on. I went home exhausted, ate dinner, and fell into bed, sure it hadn't worked. I'm a vivid dreamer, and even though I couldn't tell you what I dreamed that night, my brain was clearly busy. By my next session, I realized something had shifted. What happened to me was still real, and it was still frightening, but it was finally in my past instead of riding along on every run.

I'm still aware when I'm out on a trail or on a morning walk. I still notice a car slowing down. But I don't brace for it the way I used to; a slowing car gets to just be a slowing car again, not a monster. I couldn't believe how well it worked for me, and as soon as I could, I got trained so I could offer other people the same healing. It's one of my favorite modalities in this practice, and a big part of why I'm so passionate about this work.

If this resonates, if you've been reluctantly carrying past traumatic experiences of your own, I'd love to talk with you about whether EMDR could help.

I offer a free 20 minute consultation, no pressure, just a conversation.

Schedule yours here.

Part two of this series digs into the actual research behind EMDR, including studies on complex childhood trauma and group protocols used after natural disasters, plus a very nerdy recap of the EMDRIA conference I just attended with 1,700 other EMDR nerds.

My name is Anne James, LMFT, and I'm the founder of Myriad Therapy in San Marcos, California. I specialize in EMDR, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, and Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and I see clients in North County San Diego in person and across California via telehealth.

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References

Pagani, M., Amann, B.L., Landin-Romero, R., & Carletto, S. (2017). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and Slow Wave Sleep: A Putative Mechanism of Action. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1935. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01935/full