Before people start EMDR, they usually have one of two fears. Either they imagine being made to vividly relive the worst thing that happened to them, over and over, until something breaks. Or they've seen a clip online of someone following a therapist's fingers back and forth while crying, and they're not sure what they're watching or whether it could possibly work.
Neither picture is quite right. What EMDR actually feels like is harder to describe, stranger, and in most cases a lot less dramatic than people expect.
Before any processing begins
The first thing EMDR requires is preparation. Not procedural box-checking. It genuinely matters.
Before we approach any difficult material, we spend time building what trauma therapists call resourcing: helping your nervous system find a reliable place to go when things get intense. This might look like guided imagery (imagining a place that feels genuinely safe, and anchoring the felt sense of that in your body), or learning the container exercise, a way of setting something aside rather than letting it run. Some people take to these quickly. Others find them strange or hard to access, which is itself useful to know.
We also spend time learning your window of tolerance — how much activation you can handle before your system shuts down or floods. Good EMDR doesn't push you outside that window. It works at its edge and slowly expands it. The preparation phase isn't a delay before the real work. It's the foundation the real work depends on.
This phase can take multiple sessions, sometimes many. If a therapist rushes it, that's worth paying attention to.
Identifying a target
EMDR doesn't process emotions in the abstract. It works with specific memories: particular moments still carrying charge they should have discharged a long time ago.
We identify a target memory together. It doesn't have to be the worst thing that ever happened to you. It might be a specific moment of humiliation, a single incident you can still picture clearly, a scene that keeps coming back. What we're looking for is a memory that's still live, where thinking about it produces a physical sensation, a tightening, a dread, a familiar closing-down.
We also identify the belief the memory generated about you. Not the story of what happened, but the conclusion your nervous system drew. I'm not safe. I'm not enough. I should have stopped it. I'm disgusting. These beliefs often feel obviously false in the abstract. "Of course I'm not disgusting, I know that." And yet they run in the background, shaping how you move through the world.
We pair that belief with what you'd rather believe. Not a forced affirmation, but something true that your system currently can't quite access. I'm safe now. I was doing my best. What happened wasn't my fault. At the start of processing, this usually feels hollow or too far away. That's accurate. Your system doesn't believe it yet. That's what we're working toward.
What the bilateral stimulation feels like
This is the part people have the most questions about.
Bilateral stimulation — the back-and-forth element that distinguishes EMDR from other trauma therapies — can be eye movements, alternating taps, or sounds. In my office we typically use hand-held tappers or eye movements depending on what you prefer. Neither hurts. Neither asks anything of you except that you let your attention move with it.
The experience during a set is hard to describe because it's not quite like anything else. You hold the target memory loosely in mind, not narrating it or analyzing it, just noticing it, while the stimulation runs. Then we pause, I ask what came up, you tell me, and we run another set.
What comes up isn't predictable. Sometimes it's images from the original memory. Sometimes it's completely unrelated scenes from childhood. Sometimes it's physical: a pressure in the chest that gradually lifts, or a tightening in the throat that softens. Sometimes the mind goes quiet and almost nothing happens. Sometimes you laugh unexpectedly. Sometimes you cry, not in an overwhelming way but in the way of something finally releasing.
People often describe it as: It felt like my brain was sorting itself out. Or: I kept expecting it to get worse, and instead things kept shifting. Or just: It was strange, but I was still in the room the whole time.
Notice what's not there: narrating. EMDR doesn't ask you to walk your therapist through what happened in detail. You don't have to put the memory into words. This is part of what makes it possible for people who've spent years in talk therapy and hit a wall. The wall is often the verbalization — the retelling where the body still doesn't believe what the mouth is saying. EMDR goes somewhere else.
When it's hard
Sometimes processing stalls. The memory stops moving and the emotional charge doesn't shift. This usually means your system has hit a boundary, or that what we're processing is connected to something deeper that hasn't come up yet. A good EMDR therapist works with this rather than pushing through: changing the angle, introducing more resourcing, slowing down.
Some sessions are just harder than others. You might leave feeling wrung out, carrying something that surfaced and didn't fully resolve. That's normal. Processing often continues between sessions, during sleep and quiet moments. People sometimes notice a memory they've been working on feels different by the following week, without having consciously touched it.
On the harder days, the preparation work earns its keep. Knowing how to resource, how to contain, how to get back to ground — those aren't just coping strategies. They're what makes it possible to do the work without being undone by it.
What happens to the memory
When processing completes on a target, something changes in how the memory is stored. It doesn't disappear. You still know what happened. But it loses its charge.
This is the part clients find hardest to believe beforehand and most significant afterward. A memory that used to flood you, that you'd been carefully avoiding for years, that could knock you sideways in the middle of a normal day, becomes after processing just a memory. Something that happened. Still true, still yours, but no longer live. You can think about it without your chest tightening. You can talk about it without your voice changing. It sits in the past where it belongs.
The belief shifts too. I'm not safe, it was my fault, I'm broken softens, and the thing you wanted to believe becomes something you actually believe. Not because you talked yourself into it. Because your system integrated the experience and updated.
It's not always this clean. Some targets take more sessions; some require working through associated memories first. But this is the direction it moves, and for people who've spent years understanding what happened without being able to get their bodies to agree, that shift can feel like something they'd stopped believing was possible.
After a session
Don't schedule anything demanding right after. Not a work meeting, not a difficult conversation, not anything requiring you to be fully assembled. You'll likely be functional, but you may feel tired in a specific way: not unwell, but used. Like you did something real.
Some people feel lighter. Some feel tender. Some feel oddly calm in a way that's different from their usual calm. Some feel nothing and wonder if it worked. All of that is within normal range.
Drink water. Go gently. Notice what surfaces over the following days without grabbing at it. If something feels significant, write it down. We'll work with it next time.
This resource is for educational purposes. If you're considering EMDR and want to know whether it might be right for you, reach out — or read more about how I work with EMDR.