How memory works
Say you go to the supermarket, and ordinary things happen: you pick your five apples, you smile at the check-out lady, you struggle with your heavy shopping bags. These ordinary memories get processed automatically without any effort, and five years later, you might not even remember them.
Say instead you run into an old school friend, stand in the bread aisle and catch up on life, laughing and remembering. You might go to bed that night thinking that was nice, and five years later, after it’s been integrated and reinterpreted, you remember it as a pleasant memory.
But say something out of the ordinary happens: you trip and hurt yourself badly, or you’re a kid and can’t find your mother, or a stranger verbally abuses you. You become so overwhelmed that your brain’s memory system can’t process the event in the same way it does non-traumatic, everyday experiences.
Five years later, the memories are still stuck.
The ‘too hard basket’
Natasha Kasselis, a therapist at Indigo who specialises in EMDR, describes this process to me, as it was taught in her training: “If at any given moment something was too much for us for too long, or not enough for us, or too much too soon, and especially if there was an absence of care, safety, and attunement with another person throughout that, then essentially we don’t get to process the experience in real time – it goes in the ‘too hard basket’.”
“We’re so busy surviving it that part of our brain goes offline, part of our brain is over-activated, usually going into survival – fight, flight, freeze, fawn, collapse.”
When memories go undigested
If your system hasn’t processed a traumatic memory, then when the memory is triggered, it can feel as if the traumatic event happened yesterday – just as vivid, recent, and threatening. So you’re put on edge: “There’s this expectation that because this terrible experience, this too-hard-to-digest experience happened, it’s going to happen again,” Nat says.
You might live in fear and anxiety, and not be able to do ordinary activities or visit ordinary places.
Where EMDR steps in
EMDR offers a profound way to process traumatic memories and integrate them into our tapestry of life memories. The acronym stands for “eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing” and was discovered in 1987 by psychologist Francine Shapiro.
One day, Shapiro was walking through a park, her mind absorbed by painful memories, when she noticed that rapid eye movements gave her great relief from distress. This led to years of experimentation and research, and now EMDR is a proven method for handling complex and chronic trauma.
How does the process begin?
The basic EMDR instruction, “hold that image in your mind and watch my fingers moving back and forth,” encourages a client to think of a traumatic memory while engaging both sides of the brain (bilateral stimulation). This is more an act of time-travel rather than intellectualising, which tends to happen in regular talk therapy.
The bilateral (left-right) stimulation can be achieved not only through eye movements, but also tapping gently on your knees or chest from left to right, or listening to sounds bilaterally.
What happens after is a bit mysterious.
As this video by The School of Life explains: “Our ordinary, practical, day-to-day mentality often cedes to a more trance-like, speculative state of consciousness”. In this state, Nat says, “we take the traumatic memory out of the ‘too hard basket’ and we start to sit with it, and be with it”.
What happens next: Free association
While the eye movements (or bilateral stimulation) are happening, which some theorists have suggested mirrors the process in REM sleep, other images will bubble up to the surface in a similar fashion to what Sigmund Freud called ‘free association’. These images might be different memories related to the trauma, or images with profound healing properties.
Nat gives an example: “It might be an accident, a traumatic car crash, and my client will do another set of eye movements, and I’ll check in – what are you noticing now? – and all of a sudden: ‘Oh, there was that one paramedic who was really kind, and I just remember him holding my hand’”.
“This is the magic”, Nat says. When a client sits with remembering how hard an experience was and discovers positive experiences of feeling safe or held or calm, either real or imaginary (what’s called ‘adaptive information’) – like a paramedic holding one’s hand, or feeling safe in the present-day therapy room – then by connecting with both dualities, “a kind of natural alchemy takes place”.
“I think that’s why so many EMDR therapists love it,” Nat says, “because it’s quite a privilege to witness people’s natural integration of traumatic memories”.
Similarly, as Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps The Score and key researcher on the effectiveness of EMDR, observes: “To my mind the most remarkable feature of EMDR is its apparent capacity to activate a series of unsought and seemingly unrelated sensations, emotions, images, and thoughts in conjunction with the original memory.”
One client of van der Kolk’s imagined a friend joining her at the scene of her childhood abuse and telling her it’s okay, that he was sent there to take care of her. Then the client saw images of a bulldozer flattening the house she grew up in – “it’s over,” she said.
A magic wand?
Some people think EMDR is too good to be true.
Even Bessel van der Kolk’s colleagues, after dozens of successful studies on EMDR’s ability to resolve PTSD, continue to be sceptical: “perhaps because it seems … too simple to be so powerful”.
It is indeed very powerful – Nat wonders sometimes if she’s waving a magic wand: “I’ve had people coming in with really intense sexual assault, and as part of EMDR, we’re always checking subjective units. How distressed are you when you connect with that memory now, if 10 is maximum disturbance and 0 is neutral or calm? And I’ll have people who are like ‘I’m at 100’.”
“And within one session, they’re down to 0 or 1.”
Sometimes, to get unstuck, we do need a little sprinkling of magic.
