What EMDR Changed For Me

After a year of EMDR, the biggest change was no longer feeling like I was living inside a crisis every moment of the day.

About a year and a half ago, I made a video saying that I was planning to start EMDR (brief explanation of what this is at the bottom of the post). I wanted to come back now because I did about a year of it, and the experience changed more than I know how to fully explain.

I still see the same therapist, though we are no longer doing EMDR specifically. That has been so helpful because she knows what came up in those sessions, and there’s something meaningful about having someone beside you who understands exactly what happened moment-by-moment in the room.

For me, EMDR was only possible once I was able to acknowledge what I had avoided for a long time. There were things that happened earlier in my life that I had always known about, but I had treated them as standard or manageable or somehow smaller than they were. All the while, deep down, I knew that was untrue, and eventually I had to admit that those things had left a much bigger mark on me than I had allowed myself to admit.

The best way I can describe it is that I had been living as though those events were still happening. My body, my mind, my choices, and my reactions were shaped by the feeling that I was still inside each crisis. It was as though the events had never ended, and I was moving through ordinary life with a survival response running all the time.

Mercifully, that has changed. I no longer feel as though I am in the middle of a real, life-threatening crisis every moment of the day. I no longer feel as though the horrible things that happened to me say something fundamental about who I am. Those two changes have altered my entire world.

There have been other changes, too. For the time being, the insomnia I’ve experienced since childhood is gone. I see more gray in situations that once felt only black and white, and when I don’t see the gray right away, I’m more open to seeing it. I also notice old reflexes more clearly, especially the reflex to over-accommodate or avoid standing up for myself, because those reflexes no longer feel true.

The part I didn’t expect is that feeling safer can bring new things to the surface. Anger, fear, mistrust, anxiety, and other feelings can seemingly become more available once the old barriers come down. That can be strange and uncomfortable, because a person then has to learn what to do with feelings that were once buried for survival.

I don’t know how EMDR works for everyone; I only know what it did for me. The most honest thing I can say is that it helped heal my relationship with myself, and that has been enough to make life feel deeply different.

If you have questions or comments, leave them below or privately message me if you’re more comfortable with that.

Much love,
Dan

Note: EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is a structured form of psychotherapy often used to help people process traumatic or distressing memories, sometimes using guided eye movements or other forms of bilateral stimulation. The goal is to reduce the intensity of those memories so they feel less present and disruptive in daily life.

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P.S. If you’ve not participated in our Letters From The Future yet (or you have no idea what I’m talking about), have a look at this short post and consider joining us: