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