EMDR Therapy

You'll learn more about EMDR and what to expect, and build a toolkit of grounding skills — visualizations and physical techniques you can use in session, between sessions, and in overwhelming moments. The goal is confidence, calm, and the ability to regulate your emotions before any trauma work begins.

Resourcing usually unfolds across the assessment appointment plus one or two 55-minute sessions, and can take longer when more time is needed to build stability.

Building on your initial evaluation, your therapist gathers an extensive history — looking for significant life events and drawing connections between your past and the symptoms that brought you in. Together you develop a plan that identifies the situations causing you distress now, the memories that created that distress, and the skills and beliefs you'll need going forward.

These become the targets you'll process throughout treatment. Target planning typically spans two to three 55-minute appointments and is revisited as new information surfaces.

You access the target incident by recalling specific or symbolic images of it, then work with your therapist to name the negative belief about yourself that surfaces. People often find they logically know the belief is untrue but still feel an emotional reaction to it — that gap signals unresolved material.

You'll notice the emotions and body sensations that arise with this memory and rate their intensity from 0 to 10. Then you choose a realistic positive belief to replace the negative one — for example, "I'm not safe" → "I am safe now" — and rate how true that new belief feels.

Target activation typically takes 10–30 minutes and is revisited for each additional memory you target.

The goal of EMDR is to reduce the negative emotional and physical response to 0 and strengthen the positive belief until it feels completely true.

Desensitization is the work of your brain doing exactly that. It's driven by bilateral stimulation (BLS) — following your therapist's hand back and forth with your eyes, holding small tappers that buzz alternately in each hand, or wearing headphones that beep on alternating sides. BLS lets your brain make significant shifts in how you think and feel about a memory in a short amount of time.

The shift can feel like the morning after an argument: nothing new happened, but while you slept your brain integrated what it already had, and a sense of calm or perspective showed up that wasn't there the night before. EMDR produces similar shifts on purpose. Clients working with a single-event trauma often complete phases 4–8 in four to six 55-minute sessions.

Once distress around the memory has eased, you and your therapist continue BLS while holding both the memory and your new positive belief in mind. The aim is to strengthen that belief until it feels fully true — not just understood.

After the new belief is installed, you scan your body for any remaining physical reactions or discomfort connected to the memory. Even when you logically believe the positive truth, lingering somatic responses keep the trauma alive — clearing them is what lets you genuinely move past the event.

Every session ends with a few minutes spent returning your thoughts and body to a calm, regulated state — so you leave session ready to go back to your day. Closure takes roughly 5 to 10 minutes at the end of each appointment.

At the start of every following session, your therapist reassesses your treatment goals, notes any insights or shifts since you last met, and revisits the target memory to see what's changed before deciding where to focus next.