What EMDR Actually Feels Like

An honest, session-by-session walkthrough — no mysticism, no vague reassurance.

If you have searched for what EMDR feels like, you have probably found a lot of sentences that sound like they were written by a committee. EMDR is a gentle, evidence-based approach that helps the brain heal from trauma the way the body heals from a wound. That sentence is not wrong. It is just not an answer. Nobody reads it and thinks, ah, now I know what will happen when I sit down in that chair.

So here is the version I wish existed when clients ask me — which they do, in some form, almost every intake. What is it going to feel like? What am I supposed to do? Will I have to talk about all of it? Will I fall apart?

Reasonable questions. Here are real answers.

First, what EMDR is not

It is not hypnosis. You are awake, you are oriented, you know where you are, and you can stop at any moment. Nobody puts you under. Nobody plants anything. Most importantly, you have agency throughout the entire process.

It is not a truth serum. You will not blurt out your worst memory against your will. You control what you say out loud and what you keep to yourself, and — this surprises people — you can do a substantial amount of EMDR without ever narrating the details of what happened.

It is not the eye movements doing magic. The eye movements, or the tapping, or the alternating tones in your headphones, are one component of an eight-phase protocol. Most of what makes EMDR work is the structure around them: how the target memory is selected, how your nervous system is prepared, what beliefs get identified, what happens when the memory shifts. The bilateral stimulation is a tool. It is not a spell.

And it is not a shortcut. It can be efficient — often more efficient than years of talk therapy circling the same event — but efficient and easy are different words.

The first sessions: nothing that looks like EMDR

Here is the thing most articles skip. If you book with an EMDR therapist expecting to start moving your eyes back and forth in week one, you will be disappointed. And if your therapist does start reprocessing in week one, be a little suspicious.

The first phase is history and treatment planning. We map what brought you in, what your life has held, what you are carrying, and — critically — what the target list looks like. Not every distressing memory becomes a target. We are looking for the memories that still have charge. The ones propping up a belief about you that runs your life. I am not safe. I am too much. It was my fault. I cannot trust myself.

The second phase is preparation, and it is the part that gets rushed by therapists who should know better. Before we go anywhere near a hard memory, you need to be able to come back from it. That means building what we call resources: a felt sense of a calm place, a container to put things in when time runs out, grounding you can actually access when you are activated — rather than grounding you nodded politely at while calm.

Preparation is also where you find out what bilateral stimulation feels like on neutral material. You will try the eye movements, following my hand or a light bar. You will try the tappers — small pulsing buzzers you hold in each hand, alternating left, right, left, right. You will try the audio tones. Most people have a clear preference within about ninety seconds.

How long does preparation take? For someone with a single distressing event, discrete and recent, sometimes one session. For someone with developmental trauma, chronic invalidation, dissociation, or a nervous system that has learned that feeling anything is dangerous — it can take many sessions. That is not a delay. That is the treatment.

The setup: what happens right before reprocessing

When it is time, we pick one target. We are getting very specific here. Not "my childhood." Not "the accident." A single frozen frame: the worst moment of the memory, the image that is still there when you close your eyes.

Then a series of questions that feel a little strange the first time.

What is the worst part of that image? What negative belief about yourself goes with it? What would you rather believe about yourself instead? On a scale of one to seven, how true does that preferred belief feel right now — not intellectually, but in your gut? What emotion comes up? On a scale of zero to ten, how disturbing does it feel? And where do you feel it in your body?

That last one is not a throwaway. It is the anchor. Most of what happens next happens there.

People often want to argue with these questions. I know logically it wasn't my fault. Right. Logic is not the level we are working on. If logic were enough, you would have been done years ago.

Reprocessing: what it actually feels like

This is the part you came here for.

I ask you to hold the image, the belief, and the body sensation together. Then the bilateral stimulation starts — twenty-four or thirty passes, roughly thirty seconds. Then I say something like: take a breath. What do you notice?

You say whatever came up. It might be one word. It might be a whole scene. It might be nothing, which is also information. I say go with that — and we run another set, starting from whatever you just noticed rather than from where we began.

That is the loop. Set, notice, go with that. Set, notice, go with that. Sometimes for forty minutes.

What comes up during those sets is what people are unprepared for. It is not orderly. Your mind does not walk politely through the memory from beginning to end. It jumps. A smell. A completely unrelated memory from a different decade that suddenly, obviously, belongs in the same file. A physical sensation — heat in the chest, a lump in the throat, a strange heaviness in one arm. An urge to move that you did not get to complete at the time: to push, to run, to speak.

Some people cry. Some people do not cry at all and feel vaguely defective about it. Some people yawn uncontrollably, which is a nervous system doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Some people feel almost bored, then look up and forty minutes have passed.

The most common description I hear is that it feels like watching the memory from a moving train. It is right there, it is vivid, and it is also going by. You are not stuck inside it. That distance is the point. You have one foot in the memory and one foot in this room, in this chair, in a body that is not sixteen anymore. That dual attention is doing the work.

And here is what surprises people most: the distress usually goes up before it goes down. Around the middle of a set, it can get worse. Sharper. More real. Then something gives. The image loses its color, or moves further away, or a detail you had never noticed shows up and changes the whole meaning of the thing. Clients say huh a lot. That huh is the sound of something reorganizing.

Closing a target

When the disturbance rating comes down toward zero and stays there across a set, we do not just stop. We install the positive belief — the one you named at the beginning, the one that felt like a lie when you rated it a two. We hold it alongside the memory and run more sets, and often it rises on its own. You do not talk yourself into it. It just becomes more true.

Then a body scan. Eyes closed, memory and belief in mind, we go from head to feet looking for anything still holding. If something is there, we process it. Bodies are honest in a way that self-report is not.

Then closure. If we are out of time and the target is not finished — which happens — we do not just open the door and let you drive home flooded. We use the container. We ground. We slow down.

What the rest of the week feels like

Processing continues after you leave. This is a feature, not a malfunction, but nobody warns you.

Vivid dreams are common in the first few nights. So is unusual fatigue — the good kind, the kind that follows hard physical work. Some people notice new memories surfacing, or old ones showing up with less charge than expected. Some people feel activated for a day or two. Some feel unexpectedly light, and then suspicious of the lightness.

I ask clients to keep a brief log. Not an essay. A note on the phone: what came up, what triggered it, what the body did. It becomes the target list for next time.

If you feel destabilized for more than a couple of days, that is not a personal failure and it is not a sign EMDR does not work for you. It is a sign the pacing needs adjusting, and it is information your therapist needs.

Where parts work comes in

Not everyone can go straight at a target. Something objects. A part of you slams the door — floods you, numbs you, changes the subject, gets suddenly and inconveniently sleepy. Standard EMDR calls this blocking, and it is often treated as an obstacle to get around.

I do not treat it as an obstacle. That protector is doing a job it took on a long time ago, usually at real cost. When I combine EMDR with parts work, we go find out what the objection actually is before we override it. Almost always the objection is reasonable. Almost always it needs to be met, not muscled past.

This is why some people bounce off EMDR at one practice and find it life-altering at another. The protocol was fine. The relationship to the resistance was not.

Does it work over telehealth?

Yes. Bilateral stimulation adapts — you can follow a moving dot on your screen, use alternating tones through headphones, or self-tap with a butterfly hug across your chest. The research on remote EMDR is encouraging, and my clinical experience matches it.

There are real trade-offs. I am watching your face on a screen, which means I am watching a smaller, laggier version of the nervous system I am tracking. Your home has to be a place you can actually be activated in — not a car, not a closet, not a room where someone might walk in. That last one disqualifies more setups than you would think.

For a lot of people — particularly those in parts of California, New Jersey, Maryland, Wyoming, or Idaho without a trained EMDR clinician within an hour's drive — remote EMDR is not a compromise. It is the only version available, and it is a good one.

How many sessions

Anyone who gives you a number without knowing you is guessing.

A single-incident trauma in an otherwise resourced adult — a car accident, an assault, a medical event — can resolve in a handful of reprocessing sessions after preparation. The studies showing six to twelve sessions are largely studying that population.

Complex trauma is a different animal. Years of it, layered, starting before you had language for any of it. There the preparation phase is longer, the target list is longer, and progress looks less like a clean arc and more like a series of doors opening in a house you have lived in your whole life without ever seeing the full floor plan.

That is not a sales pitch for endless therapy. It is the truth, and I would rather tell you now.

Am I ready?

Some honest markers.

You are probably ready if you can feel a feeling and come back from it, if you have some stability outside the therapy room, if you have a life you want to be more present in.

You may need more preparation if you are in an acute crisis, actively unsafe, in an ongoing dangerous situation, or if dissociation takes you out of the room regularly and you cannot yet tell when it is happening. None of these disqualify you. All of them change the sequence.

And if you have been told your trauma does not count — because nothing dramatic happened, because other people had it worse, because it was just how families were then — I want to be direct with you. EMDR does not require a catastrophe. It requires a memory that is still doing something to you. Chronic invalidation qualifies. Medical trauma qualifies. Being the child who had to be fine qualifies.

The nervous system does not check whether your suffering was impressive enough.

What to ask before you book

Ask whether they are trained through an EMDRIA-approved program. Ask how they handle preparation — if the answer is short, keep looking. Ask what they do when reprocessing gets blocked. Ask how they work with the body. Ask how they will know when to slow down.

A good answer will sound specific. A bad answer will sound like the sentence at the top of this page.

Therapy in Pasadena and Across California

I'm Thomas Blake, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (CA # 136903). I offer EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and somatic therapy for trauma — in person in Pasadena and online across California, New Jersey, Maryland, Wyoming, and Idaho.

My office sits just off the Arroyo at 210 S Orange Grove Blvd, minutes from South Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, La Cañada Flintridge, Glendale, and Northeast Los Angeles. I work with complex trauma, attachment-focused issues, LGBTQ+ affirming care, and psychedelic integration. Private pay.

If you're looking for a trauma therapist in Pasadena or Los Angeles, reach out for a free consultation. Ask me hard questions — I'd rather you choose carefully.

Thomas Blake, MA, LMFT
thomasblaketherapy.com
210 S Orange Grove Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91105

Telehealth: CA · NJ · MD · WY · ID