EMDR therapy in NY and CA — Illustration by Rob Vargas for GQ

So sorry, but I’m going to start this blog post in the most therapist-y way I can think of:

How are you? How are you feeling?

I know you can't answer out loud in a way where I’ll hear it, but I'm genuinely asking you to check in and answer the question:

How are you? How are you feeling right now?

“How do you feel in your thoughts and in your body?” - I often ask clients. What are your thoughts like — excited, anxious, curious, doom-spiral-y? And what about your body — does it match your head, or are they sending totally different signals? Quiet mind, tense shoulders? Tired brain, weirdly wired body? Maybe it’s hard to identify anything at all?

I ask my clients this all the time, because most of us are just pushing through life without actually checking in. Sometimes we don’t even realize that our emotions exist in our physical sensations. I know I didn’t before I started going to therapy. Before I got myself into therapy I thought my feelings only existed in my mind and with my thoughts, and boy, when you have an overthinking brain like I do, you can get really caught up in your thoughts. Which means the feelings continues. Which means you keep thinking about what you are feeling. Which means you keep thinking about bad things. Which means…

See how that happens? One of the most powerful therapeutic tools I was ever given (and which I like giving to others) is the tool of noticing how my feelings live in my body. It can help us interrupt the thought-logs we keep throwing on the anxiety fire. It can help distract us. It can actually help us process the feelings.

This is especially true in EMDR therapy — which uses body cues to measure how much healing is actually happening. Here's how.

WHY TALK THERAPY ISN'T ALWAYS ENOUGH

Traditional therapy is great at helping you understand why you feel the way you do. Maybe you trace your fear of public speaking all the way back to a fourth-grade teacher (Mrs. Henry, that jerk!) who mocked your stutter. And sometimes that's genuinely enough and the case is closed! The next time your boss asks you to give a presentation and you start to think “There’s no way, I’m the worst” you remember that this thought is from the past and doesn’t reflect the present and you easily and gracefully move on.

Wouldn’t that be so lovely?

But a lot of times the insight is just the start. You get it intellectually as in you understand it. But even though you tell yourself Mrs. Henry is probably retired and not hurting anyone else’s feelings and certainly cannot hurt yours, your palms still sweat, or your heart beats faster, or no matter what you try to tell yourself it just doesn’t feel true. This is because as mentioned earlier, our experiences and emotions don't just live in our brains. They live in our bodies too.

Our nervous system was designed to keep us alive, not comfortable. Back in caveman times, pausing to think "hm, is that rustling actually a tiger?" was how you became tiger lunch. So our bodies learned to react fast — fight, flight, freeze, fawn — before our brain even weighs in.

The problem? That same system fires when we're not in danger at all. And when trauma, anxiety, or depression gets stuck in the body, talking it through might not fully release it.

That's where EMDR comes in.

SO WHAT IS EMDR, EXACTLY?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Yes, it's a terrible name. Even the woman who invented it — Dr. Francine Shapiro — said she wished she'd just called it Reprocessing Therapy. But here we are. It’s worth noting that Francine Shapiro was obsessed with empirically testing this new therapy and seeing how effective it actually was. So EMDR has been extensively studied and is now recommended by the World Health Organization, the American Psychiatric Association, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a top treatment for PTSD.

EMDR uses something called bilateral stimulation (or BLS), which is alternating left-right brain activation. Basically anytime you move a part of your left body you are using the right side of your brain and vice versa. Walking is a type of BLS. So is riding a bike, or swimming. The original BLS was moving one’s eyes back and forth (hence the Eye Movement in EMDR)

BLS is part of what helps your brain reprocess stuck memories — the ones that still trigger you, make you anxious, or show up as chronic pain or shutdown. The other parts of EMDR therapy involve your brain and your thoughts, but that’s going to be a different blog post for a different day.

Right now, let’s look at how EMDR connects you to your body.

First — you literally have to move at least some parts of your body. The whole thing that sets EMDR apart is the BLS happening while you're recalling the traumatic memory. So in more traditional talk therapy you talk while recalling the traumatic memory, and in EMDR therapy you are moving one side or part of your body and then the other. When your brain gets that back-and-forth input while you're moving through a memory, it helps it reprocess what got stuck. Why this work? Honestly, that’s a part of EMDR that people don’t quite understand yet. Some theories are - it mimics REM sleep, or it resets your nervous system, or it somehow moves a memory from one part of the brain to another that allows the brain to integrate it. All of these theories could be potentially correct, but what matters most to me is that it does work. The why will have to fully confirmed later.

Second — your body is how we measure progress. When I'm working with a client, I'm constantly checking in:

"What emotion do you feel right now, thinking about that experience? Where in your body do you feel it? What does it actually feel like — a pit in your stomach, a tightness in your chest? And how strong is it, 0 to 10?"

We might start at a dark, heavy feeling of dread sitting in the chest at an 8 out of 10. And then we do the work — and we keep checking back in. Maybe that dread shifts into anger. Maybe the heavy cloud starts to break up. Maybe by the end of the session we're at a 3 out of 10. Maybe by the end of the next session we are at a 0 out of 10! When a client can sit with the memory and feel no disturbance at all, we know we're done (for now). Your body is the barometer of how much a traumatic memory has been integrated (or not).

Being an EMDR client myself didn't just bring me a lot of healing — it taught me how much my emotions actually live in my body, and how hard my body is always working to communicate with me. That awareness changed how I move through hard feelings in everyday life too, whether that's using BLS on myself, lifting heavy weights or dancing it out, or doing a deep breathing meditation.

Here's the annoying truth: our bodies are supposed to feel things — pleasant ones and deeply uncomfortable ones. The feeling isn't the problem. Spending your life trying to outrun it is. EMDR can help you actually face, feel, and heal the hard stuff.

If you're ready to take your healing somewhere new, check out our EMDR Therapy or schedule a consultation to find out if it's the right fit for you.

WHAT IS EMDR? How the “Eye Movement” therapy helps your whole body reprocess trauma