Understanding EMDR: The Therapy That Sounds Woo Woo But Actually Works
By Christine Rafe
There's a particular look I've come to recognise.
It happens in the first or second session, usually right after I've made a suggestion about EMDR therapy, and attempted to explain what it involves. A furrowing of the brow and a silent questioning of whether they’re in a reputable clinic or in a room with some back-alley witch. And honestly, it’s the same look I had on my face on my first EMDR clinical training day. If I hadn’t read the vast studies that showed its significant effectiveness before booking the training, I would have walked out the door.
In explanation, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) sounds like something your slightly unhinged aunt raves about when she’s off her rocker. And yet, in my clinical practice, EMDR is one of the most powerful tools I have. Because of that, I want to explain what it actually is, why so many clients love it, and why it’s my go-to for trauma treatment.
So what actually is EMDR?
EMDR was developed in the late 1980s by psychologist Francine Shapiro, who noticed that moving her eyes back and forth seemed to reduce the emotional intensity of distressing thoughts.
She turned that observation and hypothesis into a structured therapeutic protocol, and after decades of peer-reviewed research later, it's now endorsed by the World Health Organisation as a first-line treatment for trauma.
The core idea is this: traumatic memories can become both psychologically and neurologically stuck.
This means that instead of being processed and stored as ordinary memories, they remain raw and activating, meaning the brain responds to them as though the event is still happening. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation like guided eye movements, hand buzzers, butterfly taps, alternating knee taps etc, while a client holds the distressing memory in awareness, to help the brain do what it couldn't do on its own: process and integrate the experience so it loses its grip.
In my practice, I work collaboratively with clients to find which type of bilateral stimulation feels most comfortable for them, including making it workable for online/remote sessions.
EMDR has a traditional eight-phase protocol. But personally, I also integrate its tools more fluidly into our broader therapeutic work, meaning it can be woven into your existing therapy in a way that fits you, rather than applied as a rigid procedure. I find that introducing EMDR into non-standard protocol reduces the confusion on clients' faces when I try to explain it from the get-go.
One of my clients had been in talk therapy before and found it genuinely helpful, but only to a point. She could tell the story of what had happened to her clearly and without visible distress. But the memory still flooded her body the same way it always had. Nothing had shifted at the somatic level she needed it to. By our third EMDR session, she described something I hear often: "It feels further away. Like I'm standing on a hill watching it, rather than being in it." And that's the shift EMDR creates, a distancing from the memory which in turn desensitises the emotional and physical reaction in the body, and can shift the core belief that might be associated with the memory or experience.
I know it sounds weird, so why does it work?
Before I say what I’m about to say, I want to emphasise that I am a science-backed girlie and I regularly uses EMDR and trust it deeply.
In saying that, the honest truth is that the full mechanism of how it works isn't completely understood.
But not knowing exactly why something works doesn't undermine the evidence that it does. The same can be said true about Yoga and meditative breath that existed for millenia before scientific research connected movement and breath to nervous system regulation. If you’re interested, the leading theories are worth knowing about. If you just want to know why EMDR might be your new fave therapy treatment, skip on to the next heading.
Okay so if you’re still here, the first theory is the REM sleep hypothesis, being that bilateral stimulation mimics the eye movements that occur naturally during REM sleep, where the brain consolidates and processes emotional memories.
The second is the working memory theory. This hypothesises that holding a distressing memory in mind while simultaneously tracking an external stimulus in a safe context (i.e. the present day in your therapy room) taxes the brain's working memory, making the memory less vivid and emotionally charged in the process because you see that you can access the memory but be safe overall.
The third theory relates to parasympathetic engagement, meaning that the bilateral stimulation activates the body's rest-and-digest system, creating a window of nervous system safety wide enough for the brain to finally process what it's been holding. In practice, what I observe consistently is clients describing that through bilateral stimulation (after appropriate set-up of course), the memory loses its intensity, the image softens, the body sensations shift and maybe even fully dissipate.
EMDR is supported by over 30 randomised controlled trials and is endorsed by the World Health Organisation, the American Psychological Association, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. A 2013 WHO meta-analysis found it equivalent in effectiveness to trauma-focused CBT which is one of the most well-researched and utilised therapies we have. It typically produces significant PTSD symptom reduction within 8–16 sessions, and often achieves meaningful results faster than traditional talk therapy, which is something clients consistently find surprising.
Why it's my go-to for trauma, and why my clients love it
In short, it requires barely any story-telling or recounting the experience(s).
In fact, there is very little that I (or any EMDR therapist) needs to know about the content of the memory or experience. This is, I think, the thing that matters most to people who are considering trauma therapy and haven't been able to bring themselves to start.
While historically, narrative therapy and prolonged exposure had been the go to for treating trauma and PTSD (with the idea that the more you expose yourself to the story and sensation, the more you build a tolerance to it), the drop-out rates were high, and it required weekly sessions sometimes for years, which is not very accessible or helpful for people who are trying to hold down jobs, families and some sense of stability in their lives.
With EMDR, you do not have to narrate what happened in detail.
You hold the memory in awareness, a body sensation, an image, a belief, and you allow yourself to go wherever your body/brain goes while bilateral stimulation does the processing work. Your nervous system is held steady enough to tolerate what it couldn't tolerate alone, without you having to re-live and retell it out loud.
This is genuinely different from many other approaches, and for people who have tried talking about their trauma and found the retelling traumatising rather than resolving, it can be life-changing.
I also want to be clear that developing regulation skills and stabilisation always comes first with any trauma processing work.
In my practice, we would never encourage you to share traumatic material until you have the internal resources to sit with it and move through it without complete overwhelm. Building those resources, grounding tools, self-regulation skills and a sense of internal safety, is the foundation everything else is built on, and it is non-negotiable.
I had a client tell me in our first session: "I can't talk about it." He hadn't disclosed the full details of what had happened to him to anyone, not even to previous therapists because it had felt too overwhelming to speak it out loud. With EMDR, I was able to tell him honestly that he didn't have to. We spent several sessions building his internal resources before we approached the traumatic material at all. When we did, it wasn't through words. He identified a still frame image of the experience, and we sat with with the physical sensations connected to the event, then the processing allowed him to move through the experience without needing to verbalise at all. Afterwards, he described it as the first time he’d ever felt like he could actually put it down.
It works for far more than "serious" trauma
EMDR was developed for PTSD, but the clinical applications extend well beyond.
In my practice I use it for anxiety, depression, phobias, grief, chronic pain, intrusive thoughts, and specific stressors that feel disproportionately activating. And some of the most significant work I do with EMDR isn't with people who identify as trauma survivors at all.
There's an important distinction between what we call “big T Trauma”: a single, identifiable catastrophic event, and “little t trauma”: the accumulated experiences of shame, dismissal, relational wounding, or harmful messaging that build up over time and operate exactly like trauma in the nervous system, even when there's no single event to point to.
This is particularly relevant in my clinical context, where so much of the trauma I work with sits at the intersection of sexuality, shame, and the body. Shame-based religious or cultural messaging about sex, painful sex with a significant psychological component, avoidance of intimacy, dissociation during sexual experiences; all are presentations where unprocessed material is living in the nervous system and driving present-day responses, often without the person fully realising it.
A client came to me presenting with low libido. She was clear to let me know there was no event or experience that was traumatic, but described feeling disconnected from desire for no obvious reason. Through our history-taking it became clear that she had grown up in an environment where sex was consistently framed as shameful and dangerous. There was no single event, just decades of accumulated messaging that her body had absorbed as truth. Her core negative belief was "pleasure is bad" and therefore “I am bad.” EMDR didn't argue with that belief cognitively (although we also incorporated healthy sex education in our sessions), the processing targeted the belief at the level of the nervous system, where it actually lived, and helped her replace it with something that felt true in her body, not just her head. Not only relating to sex, but we were able to process a network of memories connected to her “I am bad” belief, and it shifted her entire perspective of herself in the world.
It goes where talking often can't
I want to be clear that I value talk therapy enormously and it remains an important element of my work as a Sex and Relationship Therapist. Thinking and talking is how most of us know how to experience and make sense of things.
But I have found particularly with stuck memories and beliefs that some are held at a level that language or cognition doesn't easily reach. The body stores what the mind can't fully process, and insight alone doesn't always change the physiological response when the nervous system fires.
Bessel Van der Kolk's foundational work on trauma established this clearly stating that the body keeps the score.
EMDR is one of the few therapeutic approaches specifically designed to address trauma at that level, not just the story we build around what happened, but the automatic, embodied response that persists long after we think we should have moved on. In my practice, EMDR sits within an integrative approach. It works alongside the relational and reflective dimensions of therapy, not instead of them.
Is EMDR right for you?
If anything in this post has resonated, whether or not you'd use the word "trauma" to describe what you're carrying, it might be worth exploring. At Good Vibes Clinic, I work collaboratively with clients to decide whether EMDR is the right fit and how to integrate it in a way that suits them. We don't rush into processing. The early work of history-taking, stabilisation, and resourcing is where the safety gets built, and that's where we always start regardless of what ‘treatment’ looks like.
When I reconnect with clients I have previously done EMDR with, they often describe that there’s a moment, sometimes long after a processing session, where they suddenly notice they haven’t thought about the memory, or they hadn’t become activated and overwhelmed by something in the present day that had some link to the experience or belief that we processed. And that’s the whole point of EMDR, to lessen the impact and intensity of the previous experience(s) in your present-day life. I can’t Men in Black erase the past from your memory, but I will make damn sure to get as close to that as possible!
If you're looking for an EMDR therapist, look for someone who is trained and ideally accredited through EMDRAA (EMDR Association of Australia). In the clinic, myself, Emily and Ally are EMDR trained.
Interested in exploring EMDR at Good Vibes Clinic? Book a session here