EMDR Therapy for Anxiety: What It Is and How It Works
If you've been researching EMDR therapy for anxiety, you probably have questions.
EMDR, short for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a therapy approach that helps your brain process the stuck memories and experiences driving your anxiety.
One of its main benefits is that it goes beyond just teaching you to manage symptoms, as traditional therapy often does.
If you're considering EMDR, it can sound unfamiliar and even a little strange at first! Here's everything you need to know about how it works and who's a good fit for it.
At Thrive Holistic Therapy, I offer EMDR intensives for high-functioning, deeply feeling women to help them work through anxiety at a deeper level and move forward.
What is EMDR therapy?
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.
It was developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s, originally as a treatment for PTSD. Since then, research has shown it to be clinically effective for generalized anxiety, panic disorders, and phobias as well, and it's now widely used for anxiety across the board.
The core of how EMDR works is something called bilateral stimulation.
This means your brain is being engaged on both sides simultaneously, through guided eye movements, tapping, or alternating sounds. While that's happening, you hold a specific memory or experience in mind.
How does EMDR therapy work?
When something painful or frightening happens, your brain is supposed to process it and move on, but sometimes it doesn't. The memory stays stuck and still carries the full emotional charge of the moment it happened.
As a result, an ordinary stressful situation can set off an anxiety response that feels completely out of proportion, because your brain is treating an old experience as if it's happening right now.
Bilateral stimulation activates your brain's natural processing system while you hold that stuck memory in mind, helping it finally work through it.
What makes EMDR different from traditional talk therapy is that it doesn't stop at just understanding. It helps you get to the root of where your anxiety is stemming from and shift the emotional intensity around it instead of just explaining it logically.
What are the benefits of EMDR treatment?
EMDR is a type of reprocessing therapy, so its main benefit is that it helps your brain update the emotional charge stored in painful memories and stop responding to them as if they're still happening now.
This means that:
You get relief from anxiety symptoms and not just tools to manage them
EMDR works faster than traditional therapy approaches
You don't have to talk through every detail of what happened for EMDR to work
The World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), and the US Department of Veterans Affairs all recommend EMDR.
In a famous study involving 67 participants with PTSD, those who received EMDR treatment showed significant decreases in symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and depression after just three sessions.
Learn more about intensive trauma therapy.
Does EMDR work for anxiety disorders?
It does!
Most people who come to EMDR for anxiety have tried different approaches in the past, such as coping skills, breathing techniques, and maybe even years of therapy. They understand their anxiety, but it still keeps coming back.
That frustration of knowing all the right things and still feeling out of control is one of the most exhausting parts of living with anxiety.
That happens because you're not dealing with a thinking problem. You're dealing with a stored experience that your brain never fully processed. EMDR works by going back to those experiences and helping your brain complete the processing.
Learn more about anxiety therapy.
What are the different phases of EMDR for anxiety?
EMDR therapy sessions are structured into eight phases that target past, present, and future experiences:
History and treatment planning: Your EMDR therapist takes a detailed history and develops a treatment plan based on your experiences and triggers
Preparation: You learn what to expect from the process and build the stabilization skills you'll need to move through it
Assessment: You and your therapist identify the memory or experience to target, including the beliefs and body sensations connected to it
Desensitization: You focus on a target memory while following your therapist's finger with your eyes (or doing another type of bilateral stimulation) and work through the emotions and physical sensations attached to it
Installation: A positive, more accurate belief gets strengthened to replace the negative one that was tied to the memory
Body scan: You check if anything still feels uncomfortable in your body after the processing work
Closure: Each session ends with grounding to make sure you leave feeling stable
Reevaluation: At the start of the next session, your therapist checks in on how you're feeling and what has been integrated since the last session
It's important to work with a qualified EMDR therapist who's a licensed mental health professional and properly takes you through all the stages.
EMDR therapy vs CBT for anxiety disorders: Which one is better?
CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy, is one of the most widely used approaches for anxiety. It helps you identify thought patterns that aren't serving you and replace them with more balanced ones. For many people, it's a useful place to start!
But there's a ceiling to it because CBT works at the level of conscious thought.
You become more self-aware of how your anxiety works, but the problem is that it often lives in your body and your nervous system. You can know, intellectually, that you're safe, and still have a panic attack.
Research shows EMDR can be just as effective as CBT for reducing anxiety symptoms, and it also shows strong results for phobias and worry. That's because EMDR works at the level of the stored memory itself, and not just the thoughts that grew out of it.
For people who have done the cognitive work and are still struggling, EMDR tends to be the best next step.
How long does it take for EMDR to work for anxiety?
It largely depends on your symptoms, trauma history, and goals for therapy. You may notice measurable relief within three to six sessions, but it can also take longer.
If you want faster results, it can be helpful to do an EMDR intensive instead of spreading EMDR sessions out week by week.
An intensive condenses the work into longer blocks of time over a few consecutive days, usually two or three. The sessions are longer, but you may only need one intensive session or a couple to work through anxiety and traumatic memories.
EMDR intensives for anxiety with Thrive Holistic Therapy
Hi, I’m Haley Tolman, LICSW. I help high-functioning, deeply feeling women heal with EMDR therapy for anxiety.
At Thrive Holistic Therapy, I offer virtual EMDR intensives for anxiety for women in Massachusetts and Utah.
The intensive includes 11 hours of therapy total:
A 90-minute intake session to map out your history and treatment goals
Two four-hour processing sessions held on consecutive days, and
A 90-minute integration session
The women I work with tend to look like they have it together from the outside. They're high-functioning, but they also feel things very deeply.
Many of them spent years trying to manage their anxiety, and they're tired of just managing it. They want to do deeper work and not just learn another coping skill.
If that sounds like you, I'd love to tell you more about how the intensive works and whether it might be a good fit! Learn more about EMDR intensives or get in touch.