How does EMDR work?

If you and your therapist decide to utilize EMDR, your therapist will explain EMDR more fully, but to give you an idea of how it works, imagine a linen closet. Optimally, our brain would look like a perfectly organized linen closet. All our memories would be neatly stored in a part of our brain called the neocortex (long-term memory storage). You could think back on your memories and remember events without having strong emotions or thoughts coming up and put them back when you were done. However, we all have trauma. Therefore, our brains look more like the linen closet that things fall out of when you open. Those memories that fall out are the traumatic ones that our brain never stored correctly. In order to store them correctly, we can use something called bilateral stimulation that alternates activating the two hemispheres of the brain. This encourages your brain to process the traumatic memories by promoting the connections for healing and shifts how memories are stored. This can be done through eye movement, tactile stimulation, and audio stimulation.