EMDR Therapy: A Pathway for Healing Childhood Trauma
EMDR therapy is a therapeutic technique that uses eye movement to help reprocess trauma. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
What is Trauma?
One definition I often use to describe trauma is any event, circumstance, or series of events that made you feel unsafe and exceeded your capacity to cope. This is often followed by a lack of support or resources to regain a sense of security or stability. Trauma can be a single event or a combination of distressing experiences over your lifetime.
When people think of trauma, they often picture war, violence, natural disasters, or life-threatening situations. These can absolutely be traumatic and may lead to PTSD and other long-term effects. But trauma isn’t something you just “get over” with time—it needs to be meaningfully worked through.
There are many other experiences that can cause trauma that aren’t as immediately obvious:
Growing up in a home where your physical needs were met, but your emotional needs were not.
Betrayal trauma—being deceived, lied to, or experiencing a major violation of trust in a significant relationship.
Losing a loved one who was a main support.
Losing someone and not feeling a sense of closure or peace.
Growing up with a narcissistic parent or in a toxic family dynamic.
Needing extensive medical intervention.
Experiencing emotional and psychological abuse in a romantic relationship.
Having to mask and hide your true self because you learned early on that it wasn’t safe to be authentic.
Religious or spiritual trauma.
Bullying or being targeted for your identity.
Feeling unsafe in your community and experiencing a lack of protection or support.
These kinds of trauma are often complex and layered. If you experienced childhood trauma, it’s even more likely to be difficult to recognize. When trauma happens over time or is normalized in your family, you might not even register it as trauma. It may feel like it wasn’t that big of a deal. But the truth is, trauma does have an impact—whether you realize it or not. It shapes your relationships with others, your relationship with yourself, your mental and physical health, and how you show up in your own life.
How Childhood Trauma Can Impact You
Childhood trauma can manifest in many ways, including:
Struggling to fully feel or process emotions
Hypervigilance (always feeling on edge or easily startled)
Anxiety and depression
Difficulty allowing yourself to be vulnerable with people you trust
Not trusting yourself
Feeling like you’re secretly bad inside or that something is inherently wrong with you
Believing you’re incompetent or incapable, even when evidence suggests otherwise
High perfectionism and fear of making mistakes
How EMDR Therapy Can Help
Trauma changes how your brain processes information and emotion. When you experience something extremely stressful, your body’s stress response gets activated—this is the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. Your brain prioritizes keeping you safe, activating specific survival mechanisms while slowing down other processes like digestion or rational decision-making.
Ideally, you wouldn’t stay in this state for long. But trauma has a way of keeping your nervous system stuck in survival mode, even when there’s no immediate threat. This is why hypervigilance is so common after trauma—it keeps you in a constant state of high alert. On the other end of the spectrum, trauma can also lead to numbness or dissociation, where you feel emotionally flat or disconnected. It can also show up suddenly through triggers—one moment you’re fine, and the next, your heart is racing and your body is reacting like something dangerous is happening, even when it’s not.
EMDR helps your brain release these stress states and process trauma in a way that allows you to move forward. It helps you work through stuck memories and emotions that haven’t been fully processed.
How EMDR Therapy Works
For something that has such a significant impact on the brain, EMDR is surprisingly simple to do. In EMDR therapy, we identify a memory, situation, or belief that feels distressing. It could be something current that’s difficult to manage or something from the past that’s still affecting you. Then, I hold up my fingers and move them side to side across the screen while you follow with your eyes. This is called bilateral stimulation—meaning both sides of your brain are engaged as your eyes move back and forth.
This process helps your brain reprocess distressing events, allowing new neural pathways to form. We tend to carry painful emotions and beliefs from past experiences, like guilt, shame, or feelings of failure. EMDR helps shift these beliefs. Instead of feeling stuck in thoughts like “I always mess up” or “I’m not lovable,” you might begin to realize, “I was just a kid, and what happened to me wasn’t okay” or “I know I’m doing the best I can, and I can give myself a break.” Clients are often surprised by how deeply they believe these new, more compassionate perspectives—it’s the difference between just telling yourself something positive and actually feeling it to be true.
Preparing for EMDR Therapy
We all develop defenses that protect us from re-experiencing trauma. This is a survival mechanism, and it helps you keep functioning. But EMDR tends to bypass these defenses quickly, which is why preparation is important. As an EMDR therapist, I guide you through stabilization and grounding techniques before starting EMDR so that you can manage emotional activation without feeling overwhelmed.
I’ve written an article on body-based coping skills that can help regulate your nervous system, which can be helpful before and after EMDR sessions. Many people also experience a sense of peace or lightness after EMDR. As a trauma therapist, I always make sure you’re grounded and supported at the end of each session so that you can move through your day feeling settled rather than overwhelmed.
What You Might Experience After EMDR Therapy
Tiredness: EMDR is like a workout for your brain—it processes a lot of emotional material, which can leave you feeling drained.
Strange dreams: Intense or unusual dreams are common after EMDR. My personal theory is that dreams help process and store memory, so it makes sense that EMDR would influence them.
Feeling emotionally raw: Since EMDR works by unlocking and moving stuck emotions, you might feel more in touch with your feelings for a few hours or days afterward.
Breakthrough realizations: You might suddenly gain clarity on things that trauma has kept hidden, like recognizing that something wasn’t your fault, realizing that you can trust yourself now, or feeling strong enough to set a boundary you were once afraid to enforce.
EMDR and Trauma Therapy
EMDR, when combined with trauma therapy, can create meaningful shifts. It can help you go from trying to believe in yourself to actually feeling your worth and value. Working with a trauma therapist can help you navigate anxiety, process childhood trauma, and develop a deeper sense of self-trust.
About Working with Me
As a trauma therapist, I use somatic and body-based techniques alongside EMDR therapy because trauma is stored in the body. This approach helps release trauma while increasing your capacity to regulate and soothe your nervous system.
Take the Next Step Toward Relief and Self-Trust
EMDR therapy, combined with trauma therapy or anxiety therapy, can help you stop carrying the weight of old wounds and start healing from childhood trauma. If you’re ready to feel more grounded, trust yourself, and move forward with confidence, I’d love to support you in that. I offer online trauma therapy, anxiety therapy, and EMDR therapy to clients across North Carolina. Schedule a free 20-minute consultation today to see if we’re a good fit. Let’s talk about how therapy, including EMDR for complex trauma and online anxiety therapy, can support your growth and help you create the life you truly want.
Interested in working together but not quite ready to schedule? Click here to learn more about trauma therapy and how I help clients navigate breaking cycles of generational trauma and create lasting change.
