So What the Heck Is EMDR Anyway? Part Two: The Research, and a Room Full of EMDR Nerds

Long before I became a therapist, someone dear to me was struggling. This was family of origin stuff, the dynamics you grow up with in childhood, the kind that gets triggered by very specific, very ordinary moments, and it was happening multiple times a week. A handful of things from their past kept surfacing almost daily, and watching someone I loved live like that, pulled back into old pain over and over, was hard to witness.

They started therapy, and their therapist ended up using EMDR. I remember the shift. After

about a month of sessions, I noticed something change; the emotional flashbacks, that feeling of being hijacked straight back into the past, didn't hit with the same intensity anymore. The charge that had kept it so alive day after day had dulled. It was still hard to think about at times, but it had become something that happened, past tense, instead of something still living in them.

I was floored. I wasn't even a therapist yet, and I was telling anyone who would listen about this thing called EMDR that had done in a month what years of trying to let it go, push it down, or think positive about it hadn't touched.

Watching my loved one go through that is what made me pay attention to EMDR in the first place. Right out of my master's program, it became the first training I paid for. Once I was doing this work myself, I got to watch the same pattern hold true again and again. Clients don't slide back into who they used to be. The change isn't a temporary lift. It sticks.

That's where this all started for me. In part one of this series, I walked through what a session actually looks like and the sometimes sneaky way people realize it worked. Here, I want to back that up with some of the research behind it, and tell you about the few days I just spent at the EMDRIA conference, surrounded by a lot of other people just as obsessed with this modality as I am.

What the EMDR Research Actually Shows

EMDR is one of the more heavily studied trauma treatments out there, and the numbers get more interesting the closer you look. EMDRIA, the professional association for EMDR clinicians, points to more than 40 randomized controlled trials on PTSD alone, and the VA's own

PTSD research repository lists 38 of them; randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of research, comparing one group that gets the treatment against one that doesn't, so we can actually see what's causing the change. But that number only covers PTSD, and only the most rigorous study type. Add in trials on other conditions EMDR treats, like depression, anxiety, and chronic pain, plus meta-analyses that pool multiple studies together and case studies that add more texture, and the total body of research on EMDR climbs into the hundreds. That volume matters, because it means we're not relying on a handful of small studies; we're looking at a large, growing body of evidence collected across decades and continents.

A few studies stand out to me, especially because they cover the range of what I see in the room: recent, single event trauma, trauma that built up over years, and trauma that's still ongoing.

The biggest one is a 2014 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE that pooled 26 randomized

controlled trials of EMDR for PTSD, covering combat veterans, survivors of sexual assault, natural disaster survivors, motor vehicle accident survivors, and children. Across that huge

range of experiences, EMDR produced moderate to large improvements in PTSD symptoms, depression, anxiety, and overall distress compared to control conditions. When a finding holds up across that many different kinds of trauma, it tells you something real is happening, not just something specific to one population.

Complex trauma is trauma that builds up over repeated experiences rather than a single incident. It's most often relational, and it usually starts in childhood, though it can happen in adulthood too. A 2018 systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology looked at six randomized controlled trials and 251 participants who had experienced abuse, maltreatment, or violence as children. Every single study in that review found EMDR outperformed the comparison treatment, whether that was CBT, medication, or standard care, both right after treatment and at follow-up months later. That last part matters most to me; it's one thing to feel better the week you finish treatment, and another to still feel better months down the line.

And for ongoing trauma, the kind that doesn't resolve into a single memory because the stress hasn't stopped, there's a body of research on EMDR's group protocol, often used after natural disasters. A 2018 field study in Frontiers in Psychology followed 332 children after the 2016 Italy earthquakes through this group protocol and found meaningful drops in post-traumatic symptoms, especially the sooner children received treatment after the earthquake. What I love about this particular protocol is that it doesn't ask participants to describe their trauma out loud to the group at all; instead they're guided to think about the hardest part of what happened and draw or write a representation of it, which keeps the processing private even in a room full of other survivors. It's a real world demonstration of the same thing I talked about in part one: you don't have to narrate your pain for your brain to do the work of healing it.

I'll say again what I said in part one: we don't fully understand the exact mechanism behind why EMDR works, and researchers are still actively studying that question. What we do have is decades of outcome data showing that it does, consistently, across trauma types, ages, and countries, which is more than most treatments in mental health can claim with this much confidence. The VA/DoD's clinical practice guideline gives EMDR its strongest recommendation category for treating PTSD, on par with the top trauma focused therapies available.

A Room Full of EMDR Nerds

Okay, now I'm going to therapy nerd it up. I just got back from the EMDRIA conference, where over 1,700 therapists gathered, all trying to gain a deeper understanding of how to help people using EMDR. It was a whirlwind of enlightening lectures and conversations, the kind of few days where you're constantly meeting caring people who ask each other a lot of warm, curious questions and actually mean it. If you know me at all, you know I'm a massive therapy nerd, and this conference, held right next door to the actual Disneyland, was basically my version of an amusement park. I was completely in my element, and I would talk shop with anyone wearing a badge. I went with a colleague, and I remember thinking the hotel staff must have been getting more thank yous than usual that week. A room full of therapists trained to notice effort means everyone who works there gets seen and thanked.

I met a woman who, like me, changed careers later in life; she used to be a botanist, and she

told me she had decided that she was ready to work with living things that talked back. It turned into a bit of a gushing session, two people reveling in how much better our lives had

gotten since we started this work. We talked about how wild it is to get to ask real questions, learn how someone's mind works and what shaped them, and then watch them heal, set better boundaries, and build healthier relationships with the people they love and with themselves. We kept circling back to some version of can you believe this is our job, because we both love it that much. You meet a lot of therapists who started young and burned out along the way, so it was good to meet someone else who's as excited about this work as I am.

Over lunch one day, I met a university professor from France who teaches undergraduate, master's, and PhD students psychology and research methods. We talked about the differences we're each seeing in the next generation of clinicians and clients, and how we'd like to support them.

I sat in on sessions about working with people leaving high demand and coercive groups and relationships, recent research on EMDR and chronic pain, addiction, and motivation, and I watched some well deserved award presentations. My colleague and I spent three days nerding out between sessions and over meals in the evening, and by the end my brain felt like it was ready to burst from too much good information; my nerd jar was completely full.

What struck me most, across every session and every hallway conversation, was how much everyone in that building cared about the same basic question: how do we ease suffering for the people who trust us with their pain. We also traded stories, keeping any identifying details vague to protect confidentiality, of course, about cases that once felt impossible and turned into some of the most meaningful progress we'd ever witnessed using EMDR therapy. That's the community behind this work, and it's part of why I keep training and keep believing in it.

Where That Leaves Me

Between the research and the room full of people dedicating their careers to this, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: I love this work. My goal with every client I see with EMDR is to work myself out of a job with them; to help them get to a place where they don't need me anymore for what brought them in. That's no bad thing. It's really what I'm aiming for.

If you're curious whether EMDR could help with what you're carrying, I offer a free 20-minute consultation to talk it through together. Schedule yours here.

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

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References

Chen, Y-R., Hung, K-W., Tsai, J-C., Chu, H., Chung, M-H., Chen, S-R., Liao, Y-M., Ou, K-L., Chang, Y-C., & Chou, K-R. (2014). Efficacy of eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing for patients with posttraumatic-stress disorder: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. PLOS ONE, 9(8), e103676. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103676

Chen, R., Gillespie, A., Zhao, Y., Xi, Y., Ren, Y., & McLean, L. (2018). The efficacy of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing in children and adults who have experienced complex childhood trauma: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 534. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00534/full

Trentini, C., Lauriola, M., Giuliani, R., Maslovaric, G., Tambelli, R., Fernandez, I., & Pagani, M. (2018). Dealing with the aftermath of mass disasters: A field study on the application of EMDR integrative group treatment protocol with child survivors of the 2016 Italy earthquakes. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 862. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00862/full

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/txessentials/emdr_pro.asp

EMDR International Association. A Clinician's Guide to the Efficacy of EMDR Therapy. https://www.emdria.org/blog/a-clinicians-guide-to-the-efficacy-of-emdr-therapy/