The Enlighten Blog · September 2026

What EMDR Therapy Is Actually Like

What a session involves, what it feels like, and what it does and doesn’t change.

If someone has suggested EMDR to you, you’ve probably already looked it up. And what you found was either a research abstract or a short video of a person’s eyes tracking a therapist’s fingers. Neither one tells you what the experience is actually like.

Here is what it looks like in my office.

I don’t wave my fingers at you

Almost every description of EMDR online shows eye movement. I use tappers instead — two small buzzers you hold in your hands that pulse back and forth. Left, right, left, right. You can close your eyes if you want to, and a lot of people find it easier to stay with something hard when they don’t feel like they’re being looked at.

The left-right rhythm isn’t there to distract you. It mimics the back-and-forth your eyes make during REM sleep — the phase where your brain does a lot of its sorting and filing. There’s real science to it, and it has held up well enough in research to be a standard treatment for trauma. I’ve watched it work on things that years of talking had only made smoother to describe.

You don’t have to tell me the whole story

This is the part people are most relieved to hear.

In ordinary talk therapy, you narrate. In EMDR you don’t have to. I need enough to know where we’re headed — an image, a moment, what you came to believe about yourself because of it. You can keep the details. A great deal of what surfaces during a session never gets said out loud, and it still moves.

If the reason you’ve been putting this off is that you don’t want to describe what happened, that reason doesn’t apply here.

We don’t start with the worst thing

If your first session ended with me pointing you at the hardest memory you have, that would be careless. Before we go anywhere near it, we spend time — sometimes two sessions, sometimes longer — making sure you can settle yourself when something stirs up. That means finding out what actually calms you, not what’s supposed to. We practice it while nothing is happening, so it’s there when something is.

I don’t move on from that part until you can do it. You get to say when.

What the processing itself is like

Short rounds, about a minute at a time. Then I ask what you notice. You tell me — a picture, a feeling in your chest, a sentence, sometimes nothing at all. Then we go again.

It wanders. You might start with something from when you were nine and end up somewhere from last Tuesday, and the connection between them won’t be obvious until it suddenly is. People apologize for this constantly. It isn’t a detour. That’s the work doing what it does.

There is no right answer to “what came up.” Whatever came up is the answer.

Afterward

Most people are tired, and some are emotionally worn out — not to the point of exhaustion, but enough that it’s worth planning for. Don’t schedule the session right before something demanding. Give yourself a little room afterward.

Some feel lighter the same day. Others feel stirred up for a day or two, and then notice the memory has lost some of its grip. I’ll ask you to pay attention to the week in between, because that’s often where you find out something changed — you drive past the place, or hear the name, and your body doesn’t do what it always did.

What it doesn’t do

It doesn’t erase anything. You’ll still remember what happened, and you’ll still know it mattered. What changes is the charge. The memory no longer carries the same emotional weight when it comes up — you can think about it without it taking over.

It also isn’t the only thing I do, and it isn’t right for everyone or for every week. If you’re in the middle of something actively unsafe, or barely sleeping, or drinking to get through the day, we take care of that first. EMDR asks something of your system, and I’d rather you have the footing for it.

If you’ve been circling this for a while

Wondering whether what happened to you counts. Whether it’s been too long. Whether you’d have to relive it to get past it.

Those are good questions and they’re the ones I’d want to start with — before any decision about EMDR or anything else. You’re not committing to a method by making a phone call.

I’m licensed in Kansas and Missouri and I see clients in Overland Park. If any of this sounded like your situation, reach out and we’ll talk about where to begin.