Just Notice That
On EMDR
Not long after graduating from college, I became convinced I was evil. I was gripped by and stuck on the idea that I was a bad person, that I was fundamentally unlovable and irredeemable. Arguing with the thoughts only made them multiply and my friends had no idea how to help. They looked me in the eyes earnestly and told me I was a good person, but I avoided their gaze. At the time it felt like the world was ending even if it seems like just another clear manifestation of OCD. People were not making little memes about having a mental breakdown. We were encouraged to tough it out. But my anxiety cascaded, sinking and cresting, only to return again stronger than before.
I went to therapy in a vague attempt to “get better” but mostly talked about my dismal romantic entanglements – inscrutable boys who would not text me back and whose rejection I believed was the primary cause of my emotional spiral. My therapist, a sweet, bald gay man perhaps ten years my senior, tried to get me to open up about my past, but I wanted to talk about everything but.
By the time my therapist suggested we try EMDR, I was having nearly daily panic attacks. I had diagnoses – a lethal cocktail of never-ending monikers like OCD, anxiety and depression – whose many treatments I had already tried: Internal Family Systems, Somatic Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, yoga, and even a little bit of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Why not add another acronym? My therapist had been gently pushing Buddhist worksheets and mantras on me every other session, “But I think we have to address your larger issues,” he finally pressed. “It’s time.”
Before we could officially start the EMDR we had to “take a history.” This meant I had to divulge the ten most painful moments of my life as my therapist furiously scrawled this list on a little notepad. He asked if I associated each memory with any sights, sounds, or smells, and how painful it was to recall each memory on a scale of one to ten. I finally moved beyond the boys who wouldn’t text me back and told my therapist about my conversion therapy and the sexual violence I’d experienced. Digging these memories back up, however, proved painful. I frequently struggled to stay present during our meetings. At the end of every session he meticulously locked his little notepad away in a separate room.
The week after we’d completed my “history,” my therapist pulled out the machine and delicately explained how the process would work. It looked bizarre: a light bounced back and forth on a thin black, horizontal electronic bar and I would have to follow the light with my eyes. Eye movement desensitization and processing meant almost nothing to me before this moment. I just knew EMDR was primarily recommended for those with severe post-traumatic stress disorder – war vets and rape survivors. The goal of the therapy was to work through my core memories, moving beyond the recollection to see what associations my brain was making. By activating my body through the eye movement, my thoughts would find room to breathe, move around, and make new connections. Perhaps eventually my depression and OCD symptoms would lessen.
We began. I followed the moving light with my eyes as I gently tapped two buttons. Left, right, left right. After a few moments my therapist told me to stop and asked me what I had noticed, or, “What came up?” I talked about my fears, memories, stray observations, and associations. I made connections I’d never made between current anxieties and past traumas. Between my religious upbringing and the belief that I was fundamentally bad or capable of causing great harm, often without any factual basis. It seemed so simple in retrospect. Of course the things I’d gone through had wormed their way into my body, warping my ability to move forward. It was not an entirely pleasant revelation, but my therapist warned me things would get worse before they got better.
Throughout the following weeks I took the elevator up to the tiny office and waited in a gray room filled with filing cabinets, ferns, and other patients. My therapist would eventually appear at the doorway, smile, and summon me back in. He would comment on the book I was reading. We would go past the white noise machine into the treatment room and I would sit down, terrified of revealing something painful. I did not want recovered memories spilling out, to experience the feelings that inevitably bubbled up with them. It was exhausting. I left each session bone-tired. I walked down to Columbus Circle and got on the train, drowning the world out with my headphones and ordering chana masala before collapsing in bed to watch Grey’s Anatomy. I wasn’t sure what to think anymore, so I tried very hard not to think at all.
EMDR was developed by Francine Shapiro in 1987 while she was on a walk in a park. She noticed that if she looked in different directions while recalling a painful memory, the thoughts became less intense and negative self-beliefs receded. She’d recently undergone treatment for breast cancer and had begun studying psychoimmunology which taught her that the body’s natural defense systems had a kind of personal memory bank. Suffering, Shapiro argued, was stored in the body. Just like physical pain had a long afterlife and doctors could tell where past physical trauma had left a mark, so too did mental anguish. Somatic defense mechanisms kicked in that metabolized emotional pain. But this defence could be harmful in itself, a kind of maladaptive coping mechanism. The body keeps the score, yes, as Bessel van der Kolk would say, and sometimes the nervous system can be triggered even if there was no immediate threat to safety.
Shapiro’s hope was that EMDR would force the body to expel its negative fixations. The brain cannot hold two different ideas simultaneously, one idea will lose out to the other. The process of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, as its name suggests, is to divert the mind from its usual routine rumination by introducing new patterns and pathways through physical stimulation. When the eye moves, new ideas may come up. New associations that may allow the brain to “move” through trauma.
Recalling the memories while experiencing bilateral stimulation doesn’t just de-intensify the negative feelings one has about their past, but allows them to establish new connections and hopefully rewire the way they contextualize their experiences. Perhaps, EMDR suggests, by going deeper in, one can get free of their past. Or at least one can not let it dictate their future.
The brain cannot hold two different ideas simultaneously, though. One will lose out to the other. Pain is blunted. Shapiro began volunteering at a veterans center and working with Vietnam war veterans before publishing her findings. In early interviews she argued that she began working at a particularly fertile time for trauma studies – PTSD had just begun being studied and the feminist movement had “forced a reevaluation… so that rape is listed second only to combat in the DSM III categorization of PTSD.” Just as talk therapy and psychoanalysis started to decline, the idea of trauma and somatics started to enter public consciousness. By the time EMDR rolled around, dissociated and shell-shocked individuals wanted something more than to just talk it out. Neuroses weren’t going away fast enough and talk therapy took too long. EMDR promised a more mechanical roadmap—not exactly a quick fix, but something closer to it than spending many years working through issues bit by bit. It was a crash course that promised a solution to a “fixable” problem.
Bilateral stimulation is Shapiro’s key ingredient that differentiates EMDR from traditional talk therapy. “What comes up?” They may prod, trying to inch their client out of a trance-like state. After the patient responds, the therapist may simply say: ‘Just notice that.’ Instead of asking “why” or “say more about that,” the clinician encourages their ward to simply make associations and see “what comes up.” This goes on for most of the session. Ideally, the painful memories began to ‘move’ in the body.
Shapiro passed away in 2019, just as EMDR began making national news. Celebrities like Prince Harry, Sandra Bullock, Jameela Jamil, Demi Lovato, and Miley Cyrus have all expressed their allegiance. While originally used to treat war vets and rape victims, its promise of a fast way to alleviate symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety mean it’s become trendy for practitioners on BetterHelp and Alternative Manhattan Therapy networks to list EMDR as a specialty – or at least an interest. Dabbling in multiple modalities is common.
Some, however, believe EMDR is a pseudoscience that the benefits of the therapy have no correlation with the bilateral eye movements, which is under-researched, and are instead the result of discussing the trauma and memory as a form of exposure therapy. That EMDR offers an unstructured approach to traumatic memories has also raised concerns about the possibility of encouraging false memories. Perhaps while so studiously focused on the murky web of memory, we can create patterns that aren’t there—or even fabricate events that we think may “explain” our neuroses. EMDR often brings up fragmentary memories in addition to the more fleshed-out lightbulb memories. By focusing so much on the past, on painful events, we can sometimes feel like we remember more than we actually do. Usually, however, this occurs due to suggestive proddings by therapists can enrich misconceptions of the past. Research on memory is highly fraught for this reason. There have been multiple high profile cases where defendants sued therapists for supposedly implanting false memories of abuse in children. Gary Ramona’s daughter Holly was apparently swayed by her therapist to believe her father had raped her. A variety of popular trauma-informed therapies, like Internal Family Systems, have suffered similar scrutiny over the past few years for their dubious roots and the possibility they too could induce false memories even if some researchers claim these allegations are without merit. For those who suffer from OCD, like I do, the idea that there’s a secret memory that could unlock everything is both alluring and terrifying.
Shapiro ardently defended EMDR against detractors who called it ‘the snake oil of the 90s’ and many clinicians maintain that EMDR is an ‘effective treatment for trauma’. The World Health Organization, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the International Society for Trauma Studies, U.S. Veteran Affairs, and the American Psychological Association have all endorsed the practice. “The feeling was that if it worked me,” Shapiro said, “then reasonably it should work for everyone else.”
I only saw my therapist outside of our sessions once, at the subterranean Whole Foods on Columbus Circle just a block away from his office. He was going up the escalator holding a salad and I was going down, an hour or so before our regular appointment. He smiled. I said nothing.
We were still in the early stages of EMDR, but we had developed a solid treatment plan. This included ‘resourcing’, which was the process of building an imaginary safe space that I could retreat to when I was feeling overwhelmed, and crafting supportive figures to invite into difficult memories. It was a bit more touchy-feely than I was used to, but I was devoted to the process. At the end of each session, I was asked to put what came up in my “container.” My safe space, constructed from sense memories, involved visualizing a house in the woods with a cat. Scents had strong associative effects, so I added in cinnamon-spiced coffee. Predictable, but reliable cliches. I don’t remember what my container was – perhaps a clam? I’m not sure how good I was at putting things away in it – the boundaries between life and therapy were blurring.
“Don’t be surprised if you start dreaming again,” my therapist told me.
I did. Disturbing, visceral nightmares. My OCD flared up instead of calming down. My eating disorder was in full swing and I started obsessively exercising. Some of my friends were alarmed by the amount of weight I was losing.
“Yoga thins you out,” my therapist said, seemingly unbothered.
EMDR’s structure is meant to help the participant feel like they have a roadmap, even when the therapist plays such a silent role. When I went to psychoanalysis I often felt I was in free fall, whereas EMDR offered clear goal posts. However,for someone with OCD, which requires a puritanical devotion to purity, to order, to truth, recovering memories is a landmine. The idea that something is buried deep inside can only exacerbate compulsive behavior to uncover such an origin myth. My therapist’s goal was to guide me, though, not lecture or force me into a reckoning, which also meant that it could be lonely.
I tipped my therapist’s hands one day after a particularly distressing thought came up during our session.
“I need to know, in order to continue, if you think I’m a bad person.”
“I do not think you are a bad person,” he told me.
But we both knew that reply would only help me so much. Eventually I would have to believe it myself. Like the runny yolk of an egg, all my religious trauma was spilling out; memories bubbled up that I hadn’t thought about in years. Sometimes this led to epiphanies – linking my romantic patterns to the way I internalized spiritual guilt – sometimes I could not put the pain back into a container or a safe place and I rode the train home in tears. Locating the source of the pain, I discovered, did not automatically make me feel better. Instead, things had gotten worse. I felt like we’d taken a bulldozer to my life, upending and releasing a geyser of painful memories. There was no easy way to contain the flood.
In Season 16 of Grey’s Anatomy, Camilla Luddington’s character Jo undergoes EMDR. The episode was written by Elisabeth Finch, “Finchie,” who wrote on the show for years and often claimed to transmute her own intense, personal trauma into storylines for it. EMDR, her cancer, rape and holding her friend’s remains after the Tree of Life shooting had all been represented by Jo, the character who was so often Finch’s avatar. I first watched the episode on EMDR in 2019, as I was undergoing treatment myself. It felt kismet. No one else besides me seemed to be watching the show – it was not prestige anymore – and no one else I knew had gone through EMDR, so I found comfort in Jo when she went through the same messy steps I did with volcanic emotions, cresting and erupting out of nowhere.
It later came out that Finch had lied about a significant portion of her personal experiences. While she did attend a trauma center and claimed to have undergone EMDR while there, many of her ‘autobiographically’ informed episodes were later proven to be based on half-truths, other people’s experiences, and outright lies. Finch never had cancer. She was most likely not present at the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting. She had drawn from other people’s stories, like a “trauma vampire.” The details of the EMDR episode had been taken from her wife’s experiences, and the two have since been embroiled in an embittered divorce.
Reality, dreams, and fiction blurred. One woman’s healing journey became another woman’s profitable business venture. The episode had been a comfort at the time, but then became a personification of false memories and EMDR as fraud. Finch’s experience claiming others’ memories as her own is like a cracked mirror, a refraction of the very way Shapiro developed EMDR. The difference is that Shapiro actually had cancer and turned her trauma into a discipline. Finch only wished she did and from this creative wish turned into a vampire. But both women used their pain to create something. It’s simply not clear if Finch ever had a core traumatic memory, or merely enjoyed the performance. Therapy is like this. A two-handed play. It’s not uncommon on social media to hear from someone who talks about their sessions like a stand-up comedy special or a never-ending drama. In Finch’s world, this performance became a soap opera she could use both in her scripts and in her personal life.
“The past is present,” Francine Shapiro wrote in one of her many books on EMDR. While I could logically understand my symptoms as echoes of my past experiences with my conversion therapy, my body was in fight or flight. “Reactions that seem irrational are often exactly that. But irrational doesn’t mean that there is no reason for them. It means that the responses come from a part of our brain that is not governed by the rational mind,” Shapiro went on.
The goal is to help patients make new psychological connections. The result is not a coping strategy or the elimination of anxiety. Instead of remaining stuck, emotions, memories, and senses are remixed, allowing new latitude for their movement, but the anxiety can remain. Doubt is a part of all therapy. Wanting to quit, the breakdown, hitting the wall: all of this comes before the breakthrough, at least according to therapists. I wanted to put my OCD away in a clam, to stop believing I was evil, and to start over. I knew this play. I kept reenacting the same trauma. I tried to exorcise it through writing, but like Finch, it wasn’t enough for me to merely recreate the site of pain through storytelling.
Unfortunately, there is no cure for mental illness. EMDR is palliative, not a magic bullet, and OCD is not something I could “overcome.” After six months or so, I had only “cleared” one or two memories. But my emotions were moving around. Slowly, I found intrusive thoughts less debilitating. I would go weeks and eventually months without a panic attack.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, my therapist decided we should take a break from EMDR. I stared at the power lines outside my window and tried to make sense of the quiet expanse of warehouses in Red Hook just outside my door. I took a lot of walks, ambling around in the summer breeze of the Atlantic.
We started just talking instead of working on memories. We had not, in the end, finished more than a handful of the ten or so we had planned on attacking. Eventually, he went private and having no job or real health insurance at the time, we had to break up. “This is going to be painful,” he warned me.
I took a break for a few years before finding a new therapist. Problems continued to arise and I still faced the occasional crisis of faith. Eventually, I saw somatic therapists, psychoanalysts, eating disorder specialists and Internal Family Systems practitioners. Each solution felt like only a small part of the puzzle. Like any good therapy junkie, I kept hoping I would find the exact right modality—the one that would fix me. But the ghosts still haunt me sometimes. My nervous system remembers even if I’m not consciously thinking about the memories. But knowing the past informs the present doesn’t stop the anxiety. Nothing is linear, not even pain. The neat story of trauma being overcome and forgotten, fading into the mist, is just that. A story.
My current therapist works in a few different modes, sometimes EMDR. When we do utilize EMDR, it’s a choice. Feelings continue to bloom and wither. Sometimes I struggle to put them in my container.
“Justice notice that,” my therapist says.
Art by Setsuko Migishi.
Missouri Williams for Bookforum.
On Emma Cline and contemporary fiction for House House.
Thanks for sharing, Grace! I've been doing EMDR for 3 years now, and it is a very tumultuous experience, but thankfully so far the process has had more beneficial results for me than destructive overall. But, it can be a gruesome, brutal process... I really appreciate hearing your meditations on it.
Diva, this is so close to home. Therapy does feel palliative to those of us with all the acronyms (lgbt, ocd, ptsd). Thank you for this.