How does EMDR work? If you've ever tried to explain EMDR to someone who hasn't experienced it, you know how strange it sounds. You follow your therapist's fingers with your eyes, or you hold small buzzers that alternate between your hands, and somehow — sometimes within a handful of sessions — something shifts that years of talking about a problem couldn't touch. It seems almost too simple. And yet the results, for many people, are anything but. EMDR therapy has been called “sneaky powerful,” and it is. That’s my personal experience as an EMDR therapist in NYC. I’ve been using EMDR for at least 15 years with great success.

So what actually happens during EMDR?

The answer requires a brief trip into neuroscience — not the oversimplified version, but the real, still-evolving science of how the brain stores experience, why some memories refuse to stay in the past, and what bilateral stimulation appears to do that makes EMDR work the way it does.

How the brain normally processes experiences

You've had the conversation before. Maybe dozens of times. You know how it starts, you know how it ends, and somewhere in the middle, you can hear yourself saying things you swore you wouldn't say again. Afterward, there's the familiar mix of frustration, exhaustion, and something that might be shame — not just about the argument, but about the fact that it happened again.

If you're a reasonably self-aware person, which most people who end up in therapy are, this is particularly maddening. You understand the dynamic. You've probably named it. You may have read the books, done the work, and still find yourself back in the same place, saying the same things, feeling the same feelings.

You should know a thing or two about this; however, it's neuroscience at play, and that changes everything. As a NYC Couples Therapist with a private practice for nearly 20 years, this is one of the most common reasons people reach out for relationship counseling. “Why do we have the same fights over and over, without resolution?”