What Is EMDR Therapy? How It Works, and What the Research Shows

If you've been researching therapy options — especially for trauma, anxiety, or experiences that feel "stuck" — you've probably come across EMDR. Maybe a friend mentioned it, or you saw something online that made you curious but also a little skeptical. I get it. The idea that tapping or other forms of bilateral stimulation could help resolve deep emotional pain sounds unusual at first.

As a therapist trained in EMDR, I want to give you an honest, grounded look at what this therapy actually involves, what we understand about how it works, and what the research tells us. You deserve to make informed decisions about your care.

What Is EMDR?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It was developed in the late 1980s by psychologist Francine Shapiro, who observed that certain eye movements seemed to reduce the emotional intensity of distressing thoughts (Shapiro, 1989). Since then, it has been refined into a structured, eight-phase therapeutic approach used around the world.

What surprises many people is that EMDR is not just about the eyes. The bilateral stimulation — which can include tapping, auditory tones, or eye movements — is one component within a comprehensive framework. In my practice, I use tapping as the primary form of bilateral stimulation. Research has shown that various forms of bilateral stimulation, including tapping, are effective within the EMDR protocol (Andrade et al., 1997).

We begin with a thorough history, build coping resources together, identify the specific memories and beliefs that are driving your current distress, and then work through them in a structured way. The bilateral stimulation gets the headlines, but the therapeutic relationship and the full protocol are what make it effective.

How Does EMDR Work?

When something overwhelming happens — whether it's a single traumatic event or a pattern of painful experiences over time — our brains don't always process it the way they normally would. Instead of being filed away as a memory that happened in the past, the experience can get stored with its original emotional charge, physical sensations, and distressing beliefs still attached. That's why a sound, a smell, or a situation can suddenly bring everything flooding back as if it's happening right now.

EMDR is designed to help your brain do what it was trying to do all along: fully process and integrate those experiences so they lose their grip on your present life. During the active processing phases, I'll guide you through sets of bilateral stimulation — in my practice, this takes the form of tapping — while you hold a distressing memory in mind. Over the course of a session, most people notice the memory becoming less vivid, less emotionally charged, and easier to think about without being pulled into it.

What Do We Understand About Bilateral Stimulation?

This is a question I appreciate when clients ask it, because it shows you're thinking critically about your care — and I think that's a good thing.

The honest answer is that researchers are still working to fully understand why bilateral stimulation helps, even as the evidence that it does help continues to grow. The leading explanation, and the one with the most experimental support, involves something called working memory (Andrade et al., 1997).

Here's the idea: your working memory — the part of your mind that holds things in conscious awareness — has limited capacity. When you hold a traumatic memory in mind while also engaging in a task that requires attention, like following a tapping pattern, the memory has to "compete" for mental resources. This competition appears to reduce the vividness and emotional intensity of the memory. When your brain then re-stores that memory, it seems to file it away with less distress attached.

A meta-analysis examining these effects found that bilateral stimulation produced a moderate and significant effect in clinical settings, with even larger effects observed in laboratory studies measuring reductions in memory vividness (Lee & Cuijpers, 2013). There are other hypotheses as well — some researchers have explored whether bilateral stimulation triggers a relaxation response, and earlier theories proposed that it enhanced communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. These ideas are interesting but have less research support at this time (de Jongh et al., 2024).

What I want you to take away from this is that not having a complete mechanistic explanation does not mean the therapy doesn't work. Medicine is full of treatments where we understood effectiveness before we fully understood mechanism. What matters is that the outcomes are well-studied — and they are.

What Does the Research Say?

EMDR is one of the most extensively researched psychotherapies for trauma, and it has earned recognition from major health organizations around the world. The World Health Organization (WHO, 2013), the American Psychological Association (APA, 2017), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense (VA/DoD, 2023), and the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE, 2018) all recognize EMDR as an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. That level of consensus across independent organizations is significant.

A recent comprehensive review found that EMDR is supported by more than 30 published randomized controlled trials demonstrating its effectiveness in both adults and children, and most international clinical practice guidelines now recommend it as a first-line treatment for PTSD (de Jongh et al., 2024). EMDR performs comparably to other leading trauma therapies, including trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (Shapiro, 2017).

There is also a growing body of research exploring EMDR for concerns beyond PTSD, including anxiety, depression, and grief. This research is still developing, but early results are promising, particularly when these conditions are rooted in unresolved traumatic experiences.

Is EMDR Right for You?

EMDR can be a powerful fit for people who feel stuck — who have tried to think or talk their way through something painful but still find it showing up in their body, their reactions, or their relationships. It can also be helpful if you find that certain situations trigger responses that feel out of proportion to what's happening, or if you carry beliefs about yourself (like "I'm not safe" or "I'm not good enough") that you know intellectually aren't true but that feel true on a deeper level.

That said, therapy is personal, and EMDR isn't the right approach for everyone. Part of my role is to help you figure out what will be most effective for your specific situation. That's something we can explore together.

If you're curious about whether EMDR might be a good fit for you, I'm happy to talk it through. You can reach out to schedule a free 15-minute consultation — no pressure, just a conversation to see if we'd be a good match and whether this approach makes sense for what you're going through.

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Clinical practice guideline for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults. https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/ptsd.pdf

Andrade, J., Kavanagh, D., & Baddeley, A. (1997). Eye-movements and visual imagery: A working memory approach to the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 36(2), 209–223. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8260.1997.tb01408.x

de Jongh, A., de Roos, C., & El-Leithy, S. (2024). State of the science: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 37(2), 205–216. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.23012

Jarero, I., & Artigas, L. (2021). The EMDR therapy butterfly hug method for self-administered bilateral stimulation. Iberoamerican Journal of Psychotraumatology and Dissociation, 10(1). https://www.revibapst.com/volumen-11

Lee, C. W., & Cuijpers, P. (2013). A meta-analysis of the contribution of eye movements in processing emotional memories. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 44(2), 231–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2012.11.001

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2018). Post-traumatic stress disorder (NICE guideline NG116). https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng116

Shapiro, F. (1989). Efficacy of the eye movement desensitization procedure in the treatment of traumatic memories. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2(2), 199–223. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490020207

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing: Basic principles, protocols, and procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs & Department of Defense. (2023). VA/DoD clinical practice guideline for the management of posttraumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder (Version 4.0). https://www.healthquality.va.gov/guidelines/mh/ptsd/

World Health Organization. (2013). Guidelines for the management of conditions specifically related to stress. WHO. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241505406