A new tool in the room

"I don't even know why I reacted like that. It didn't match what was actually happening."

I hear some version of this often. A feeling arrives that's bigger than the moment calls for — a flash of panic over something small, tears that don't seem to belong to the conversation at hand, a wave of dread with no clear source. Most people don't have a name for it. They just know the size of what they felt didn't match the size of what was in front of them.

Talking, understanding, making sense of things out loud — this is the heart of what I do, and it shifts how people see things, feel things, gives them a clearer view of their own life. But some reactions seem to live somewhere below the reach of words, in a place insight alone doesn't always get to. This year, wanting a new way to meet that place, I began training in EMDR — and it's what I want to write about today.

Why some reactions stay, even after the work

Therapy is real work. It's not just understanding something intellectually — it's the relationship, the consistency, the courage it takes to look closely at your own life over time. That work changes people, genuinely.

And still, some reactions stay. Not because the work wasn't real, but because of what that reaction actually is.

There's a reason the body holds on this way. In the moment of something overwhelming, the mind and body do something intelligent — they go into a kind of protective mode, narrowing everything down to survival. Feelings get set aside. Reactions sharpen. The whole system organizss itself around getting through what's happening. That response is not a flaw. It's exactly what's supposed to happen in a moment like that.

The difficulty is that this protective state doesn't always know when to switch off. Long after the situation itself has ended, some part of the body can still be behaving as though it hasn't. Still braced. Still scanning.

This is often what I'm actually looking at, underneath what a client brings into the room — not a story that needs to be understood better, but a survival response that never got the message it could stand down.

What I've come to understand through this training is that our minds actually store experience in two very different ways. Ordinary memories — the ones we can talk through, put into a timeline, learn from — sit in what's sometimes called our explicit memory. But an experience that overwhelmed us often gets filed somewhere else — in a kind of raw, unprocessed form, not connected to words at all. It can resurface just as vividly whenever something reminds the body of it — not as something you remember, but as something you relive.

That's the gap I kept running into with certain clients. Not a gap in the work they'd done. A part of their story that had never actually been processed — only survived.

Where EMDR came from

EMDR was discovered almost by accident. In the late 1980s, an American psychologist named Francine Shapiro was walking through a park, working through some difficult thoughts of her own, when she noticed something odd — as her eyes moved rapidly from side to side, the emotional weight of those thoughts seemed to soften. Curious, she began testing it more deliberately, then with others, and over time it grew into a structured approach used specifically to help the brain finish processing experiences that had gotten "stuck."

What EMDR does, in plain terms, is help the brain do something it usually does naturally on its own — take an overwhelming experience and settle it into ordinary memory, the way most of our experiences eventually settle. Sometimes, though, an experience is too much, too fast, or arrives with too strong a sense of threat, and the mind can't complete that process alone. It stays raw. EMDR — through a structured approach involving bilateral stimulation, most often guided eye movements — seems to help reopen and complete that process, in a way that feels safe and paced rather than overwhelming.

What it's not

It isn't hypnosis, and it isn't about erasing a memory. Nothing is forgotten. What tends to shift is the charge the memory carries — the same event can still be remembered clearly, but without the body reacting as if it's happening again.

It isn't only for the far past, either. EMDR can be just as relevant close to an event — after an accident, a difficult birth, a loss, or something frightening from only weeks ago — as it is for something carried for years.

And it isn't a stand-alone quick fix, either. It has its place within a fuller course of therapy — after safety and stability have already been established between client and therapist, not instead of that groundwork.

Why I chose this

I wanted to go deeper into trauma work. So much of what we do as therapists happens through language, through narrating and making sense of things out loud, and I wanted to bring something different into that mix as well. I already work with Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) in my practice, and I'd done trauma training with Redemann, a trauma specialist. In some ways, EMDR felt like the natural next step — the cherry on top of a path I was already on, even if it works quite differently from what came before it.

What struck me most in the training itself wasn't the theory — it was the room. A group of experienced therapists, all of us already deep in our own practices, sitting together and opening up to something genuinely new. There's a particular kind of humility in that. People who spend their working lives holding space for others, willing to not know, willing to be beginners again.

What moved me even more was that we didn't just learn the method from the therapist's chair. We took turns sitting in the client's chair too — being on the receiving end of it ourselves. And that's where I really understood what EMDR can do. It doesn't ask you to talk your way through it — it reaches the feeling directly. Watching that happen — in myself, and in colleagues who know exactly what "processing an emotion" is supposed to look like from years of professional experience — was something I didn't expect.

A closing thought

I'm still early in this training, and I don't think that's something to hide. There's something fitting about sitting in the student's chair again while learning a method built entirely around helping something old finally settle.

If any of this speaks to something you've been carrying — a feeling that shows up bigger than the moment calls for — I'm here.