EMDR Therapy for Trauma

Do you keep circling back to something that happened, even though part of you knows it’s over? Nightmares, flashbacks that arrive without warning, a temper that flares faster than you’d like, or a watchfulness that never quite switches off. These can all be signs that something difficult hasn’t been fully processed.

Trauma can come from a single, identifiable event like a car accident, an assault, a frightening medical procedure, a natural disaster. It can also build up over years, through childhood experiences, long-term relational difficulties, or grief that never had space to move. Sometimes it’s something that happened directly to you. Sometimes it’s something you witnessed, or something you learned about that struck close to home.

Why Traumatic Memories Get Stuck

Most difficult memories settle over time. Your mind links them to what you already know about yourself and the world, and the intensity fades on its own. When an experience is too much to take in or if you did not feel supported at the time, though, that natural processing can stall. The memory stays lodged much as it was on the day it happened: vivid, present-tense, disconnected from the rest of your story. That’s what gives it the power to hijack your mood, your body and your reactions, long after the danger has passed.

Signs You Might Be Carrying Unprocessed Trauma

You might notice:

• Intrusive images or flashbacks
• Nightmares
• Feeling constantly on edge, or easily startled
• Avoiding people, places or situations that remind you of what happened
• Anger that surfaces faster than it used to
• Feeling flat, numb or disconnected from people around you

If these have lasted more than a month, they may meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD tends to spill into other areas of life too: sleep, concentration, relationships, and how safe you feel in your own body.

Anxiety, Low Mood and Shame After Trauma

Trauma rarely arrives on its own. Anxiety and hypervigilance are your nervous system doing what it learned to do to stay safe. Low mood can follow when holding that state becomes exhausting to sustain. Shame is common too, especially when the trauma involved something you feel you should have prevented, or brings up a version of yourself you’d rather forget. None of this needs treating as a separate problem – it tends to ease as the underlying memory is processed.

How EMDR Works

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is a structured way of helping your brain finish processing a memory that got stuck. While you bring the memory to mind in a contained, paced way, you’re guided through bilateral stimulation involving eye movements, taps, or audio tones. This appears to engage a similar kind of processing to what happens naturally during REM sleep, allowing the memory to be filed away as something that happened, rather than something that’s still happening.

Working With the Body, Not Just the Story

EMDR isn’t purely a talking or thinking process. The bilateral stimulation works with how experience is held in the body, not only how it’s remembered or narrated, and that’s part of why it can reach places that talking alone sometimes can’t. It can bring up sensations, images or connections you weren’t consciously aware of, things you didn’t have words for, or hadn’t linked together before.

Not everything that surfaces this way is trauma in the strict sense. Sometimes it’s a long-held pattern, a physical tension, or an unease that’s been there so long it feels like part of you rather than something that happened to you. Processing this kind of material can be genuinely useful too, even without a single event behind it.

You don’t need to describe the event in detail for EMDR to work, which is part of why people often find it more bearable than they expect. The memory doesn’t disappear, so you’ll still remember it, but it stops carrying the same charge. EMDR is recognised by the World Health Organization as an effective treatment for PTSD, and it’s one of the most researched trauma therapies available.

I use EMDR within a broader frame of therapy, not as a stand-alone technique, so the reprocessing work sits alongside making sense of what happened and how it fits into your life now. Some sessions might run longer than the standard fifty minutes, since this kind of work might need more dedicated time at one go. We’ll agree what’s needed as we go.

My Experience Working With Trauma

Following the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017, I worked as Senior Counsellor and Deputy Head of Service in the London Fire Brigade’s Counselling & Trauma Service. That work meant treating trauma directly, and building trauma-prevention training for firefighters and control staff on the front line of the response.

I now work as an EMDR therapist online, with people from a wide range of backgrounds: single-incident trauma, complex and childhood trauma, and trauma connected to identity, relationships or community. I bring EMDR together with an integrative, mind-body approach, so the work addresses not just the memory itself, but how it’s shaped your nervous system, your sense of self, and your relationships since. You can read more about my background and qualifications.

Ready to talk?

If you’re looking for an online EMDR therapist, get in touch for a free introductory call. We’ll talk through what’s brought you here and whether this way of working is a good fit.
No obligation either way.

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