How does EMDR work? It’s all about memory...
EMDR therapy is weird. If you’ve never heard of it, the description alone is enough to raise an eyebrow: a therapist guides your eyes from side to side while you think about something painful. And somehow this helps people heal from trauma, anxiety, depression, or years of painful life patterns that nothing else seemed to touch.
How does something this strange work so well? The answer, it turns out, is that it’s all about memory.
I should be “over it by now”... But I’m not.
Many of us carry unspoken expectations that we should be able to just move on from the past. That with enough time, enough distance, enough willpower, the hard things that happened to us would stop mattering so much. And yet, for so many people, that’s not how it works. Something that happened five, ten, or thirty years ago can still hijack a relationship, derail a day, or shape every decision we make, and we’re left wondering why we can’t just get over it.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s memory.
The painful experiences we go through don’t just fade politely into the background. They get filed away in our memory, and the way they get stored has an enormous influence over how we think, feel, and behave in the present. This is the crux of most mental health struggles: we’re not just dealing with what happened to us. We’re dealing with what our minds made of what happened to us.
All psychotherapy is about memory.
Virtually every approach to mental health treatment is, in some way, about memory.
At its core, every approach attempts to change something that experience has etched into your brain—the beliefs, patterns, and emotional responses that formed in response to everything you’ve been through. The methods differ, but the target is the same.
And when it comes to changing memory, there are essentially two paths.
The first is to create new memories. You build new patterns, new associations, new ways of thinking and responding, and you reinforce them, again and again, until they’re strong enough to outcompete the old ones. This is what cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, does. Think of it like cutting a new trail through the woods. At first, it’s slow going, but with enough repetition, the new path becomes the natural one, and the old one starts to fade.
The second path is different. Rather than building something new alongside the old memory, you go back to the memory itself, and you update it. This doesn’t mean changing the details of what happened, but rather, changing what meaning and emotional charge the memory holds for us. This is what EMDR does—it’s less like building a new trail, and more like doing surgery.
It’s worth noting that these two paths aren’t always mutually exclusive. Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS, for example, primarily works by updating old memories—much like EMDR—but also creates new ones in the process.
EMDR and bilateral stimulation do... something to memory.
If CBT is like cutting a new trail, EMDR is more like going back to the source. Rather than building new patterns around a painful memory, EMDR works directly on the memory itself—reprocessing it, updating it, and ultimately defusing it.
Here’s where it gets weird again.
The way EMDR does this is through bilateral stimulation—like back-and-forth eye movements, tapping, or alternating sounds. A therapist guides you to hold a painful memory in mind while simultaneously following this back-and-forth stimulus. And something happens. The memory, which may have felt overwhelming, frozen, or inescapable, begins to shift.
What exactly is happening in the brain during this process? Honestly, we’re not entirely sure. This is one of the more fascinating aspects of EMDR. The research is robust: we know it works, and we know it works well. But why it works is still hotly debated. The leading theory is that it mimics something the brain already does naturally during REM sleep—the deep-dreaming state in which the brain processes and consolidates the events of the day. Another theory suggests it works by taxing working memory, making the painful memory feel less vivid and intense while it’s being recalled and processed. Others point to the orienting response, which is the way the brain naturally calms and refocuses attention when tracking a moving stimulus.
What we can say with confidence is this: bilateral stimulation does something that allows stuck memory networks to connect with other, more adaptive memories within the brain. In other words, EMDR helps the brain find a path to the insight, the perspective, the sense of safety that already exists somewhere within you. The brain knows how to heal, and EMDR seems to activate this capacity. We just don’t fully understand how.
And, that’s okay. We don’t fully understand why many things work, but we do have decades of research, and clinicians and clients around the world who keep seeing the same thing: people get better with EMDR.
What changes after EMDR?
So what does it actually feel like when EMDR works?
People often struggle to describe it at first. The memory is still there—EMDR doesn’t erase anything. But something about it is different. Many people describe it as if the memory stops feeling like something that’s happening in the present and starts feeling like something that happened in the past.
The image that was once vivid and intrusive becomes flat. The emotion that once flooded the body becomes quiet. The belief that formed around the experience—I’m not safe, I’m not worthy, I can’t trust anyone—loosens its grip. What’s left is the memory, intact, but defused. It’s part of your story without being the lens through which you see the world.
For many people, this shift is disorienting at first. They’ll come back to session and say something like “I tried to think about it and I just... couldn’t get worked up about it anymore,” as if the memory lost its charge overnight. In a sense, it did, in that the brain finally finished processing something it had been holding in an unfinished state, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades.
This is what makes EMDR feel different from other therapeutic experiences. You’re not learning to cope with the memory or building enough new experiences to outweigh it. The memory itself has changed. The past, finally, stays in the past.
Who is EMDR for?
EMDR was originally developed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and it remains one of the most well-researched and widely recommended treatments for PTSD. But its application has grown considerably since then, and today it’s used effectively for a broad range of issues.
Anxiety and panic. Phobias. Grief and loss. Depression rooted in painful past experiences. Low self-esteem. Difficult relationship patterns—like anxious or avoidant attachment—that seem to repeat no matter how much you try to change them. In many cases, the through-line is the same: somewhere underneath the presenting problem is a memory—or a set of memories—that shaped how a person learned to see themselves and the world. And where that’s true, EMDR often has something to offer.
It’s worth saying that EMDR isn’t the right fit for everyone, and a good therapist will always work with you to figure out whether it makes sense for your particular situation and history. But if you’ve ever found yourself thinking I know this shouldn’t still bother me, but it does, EMDR might be worth exploring.
Weird? Yes. But it works.
So, is EMDR weird? Yes, for sure a little weird. Following a finger with your eyes while thinking about the hardest thing that ever happened to you is not what most people picture when they imagine therapy. And the fact that we can’t fully explain why it works the way it does doesn’t exactly help with the strangeness.
But here’s what we do know. The brain is not a passive record-keeper. It’s an active, living system that will always move toward health and well-being when given the right conditions. Painful memories don’t have to stay frozen. Patterns that formed in difficult moments don’t have to run the rest of your life. The past doesn’t have to keep showing up in the present.
EMDR is weird because it works with the brain’s own natural processes rather than around them. It’s strange in the way that being a human is strange. And for a lot of people, that strangeness turns out to be exactly what they needed.
If you’re curious whether EMDR might be right for you, I offer free introductory calls to see if it could be a good fit. Reach out to schedule a consultation.