How EMDR Therapy Works: EMDR and the Brain

This article was updated on September 17, 2026. 

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy works by utilizing bilateral stimulation to unlock maladaptively stored traumatic memories from the subcortical brain, allowing them to be functionally integrated by the prefrontal cortex. 

Originally developed by Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., EMDR is an integrative, evidence-based psychotherapy that synthesizes elements of psychodynamic theory, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and somatic interventions.

Integrating speech and memory: EMDR therapy uses bilateral stimulation to bridge the brain's hemispheres, allowing raw, wordless trauma networks to be processed into a coherent verbal narrative.

As a licensed psychotherapist in New York City specializing in trauma recovery, I completed my foundational EMDR training in 2005 after observing that traditional talk therapies often fell short for clients navigating complex PTSD. Over the past two decades, extensive neuroimaging research has clarified how this profound modality rewires the brain, particularly when enhanced by advanced somatic tracking and clinical visualization techniques.

How Emotional Trauma Hijacks the Brain’s Anatomy

To understand the efficacy of EMDR, one must first look at how acute psychological trauma alters neural architecture. Traumatic experiences disrupt normal memory consolidation, trapping memories in an unintegrated, raw state within the nonverbal, subcortical structures of the brain—specifically the amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, and brainstem.

Neuroimaging and neurobiological research highlight several critical shifts in a traumatized brain:

• Frontal Lobe Deactivation: When a traumatic memory is triggered, advances in brain scanning show that the left prefrontal cortex—specifically Broca’s area, which governs speech and logic—effectively shuts down. This explains why individuals with PTSD struggle to form a coherent verbal narrative of their past; the reasoning brain goes offline.
• Right-Hemisphere Hyper-Activation: While the logical left brain dims, the right hemisphere—associated with emotional states, sensory images, and autonomic nervous system arousal—lights up intensely. The amygdala fires a continuous neuroception of threat.
• The Loss of Temporal Context: Because these memories are isolated from the frontal lobes, they retain a sense of timelessness. Traumatized individuals experience past terror with such visceral immediacy that the central nervous system cannot distinguish "then" from "now" (see my article: Working Through Emotional Trauma: Learning to Separate "Then" From "Now".).
• Corpus Callosum Impairment: The corpus callosum serves as the neural bridge facilitating interhemispheric communication between the emotional right brain and the cognitive left brain. Trauma dysregulates this pathway, trapping distressing memories in isolated, unintegrated neural networks.

The AIP Model and Bilateral Stimulation (BLS)

The foundation of EMDR therapy rests on the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. The AIP framework posits that the human brain naturally processes psychological disruptions through associative memory networks—much like digesting food or healing a physical wound. Under normal conditions, minor stressors are integrated through daily reflection, journaling, or REM sleep dreams.

However, an overwhelming traumatic event floods the body’s chemistry, causing the brain's natural information processing system to freeze. The memory becomes frozen in its original, highly distressing state, containing the exact sights, sounds, and physical sensations of the initial threat.

EMDR systematically restarts this frozen processing system using Bilateral Stimulation (BLS). By introducing alternating, rhythmic stimuli—which can include lateral eye movements, tactile hand-directed tapping, or alternating auditory tones—EMDR facilitates the following clinical shifts:

1. Accessing the Isolated Network: BLS gently stimulates the right hemisphere to bring the subconscious, maladaptively stored memory into conscious awareness.
2. Activating Left-Brain Logic: The rhythmic left-to-right stimulation keeps the left prefrontal cortex online, allowing the analytical brain to observe the trauma safely.
3. Promoting Adaptive Integration: By forcing both hemispheres to communicate across the corpus callosum, EMDR allows the brain to form new, adaptive neural connections. The traumatic memory is finally stripped of its visceral, high-anxiety charge and re-filed as a neutral historical event.

Get Help in EMDR Therapy

Emotional trauma that creates psychological, physical, and interpersonal problems is much more common than most people realize.

Research has shown that EMDR is one of the most effective forms of therapy to overcome emotional trauma.

If you are suffering with emotional trauma, rather than suffering alone, you could benefit from working with a licensed mental health professional who is trained as an EMDR therapist.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, and advanced practitioner specializing in IFS Parts Work, Somatic Experiencing, AEDP, EMDR, EFT Couples Therapy and Certified Sex Therapist, 

I provide depth-oriented experiential counseling to help individual adults and couples move past internal blockages into authentic relational alignment.

To learn more about my clinical background, clinical philosophy, and healing approach, please visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

• Office Location: I see clients in-person at my Greenwich Village office (New York, NY 10011) as well as throughout New York State online via secure telehealth.
• Initial Consultation: I provide a complimentary 15-minute introductory phone call prior to scheduling an initial appointment.
• Contact Information: You can reach me directly at (917) 742-2624 during standard business hours, or you can connect with me via email.

 

Medical Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified mental health professional or physician regarding a medical or psychological condition.

How Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on Your Brain

I've always been a proponent of having children learn to read for pleasure early in their lives. I've always enjoyed reading from the time I was in the first grade.  My interest in reading was encouraged by my mother, who would read to me everyday when I was a young child, and who each week brought me to the library, a place that seemed magical and filled with possibilities to me.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on Your Brain

I was also fortunate to have a first grade teacher who recognized my love of reading and gave me beautifully illustrated books that were a little challenging for me at the time, like "Heidi" and "Pippi Longstockings," to inspire me to continue reading.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

Without the present day distractions of video games and the Internet, my imagination came alive and took flight as I read about characters who lived in places that were so different where I lived.  This also created a curiosity in me about people, customs and places outside of my immediate surroundings.

Reading and Brain Research
We now have research from neuroscience which reveals that brain scans taken while people read a detailed description, a metaphor or an emotional conversation between two characters in a story stimulate the brain.

The Broca's area and the Wernicke's area, among other areas of the brain, are parts of the brain that are involved in interpreting narratives.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

According to Annie Murphy Paul, a journalist who writes for the NY Times, the brain doesn't make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and actually living the experience.  She says that the same parts of the brain are stimulated.

This is similar to hypnotherapy, where the unconscious mind, including imagination, are engaged in a hypnotic state and the brain doesn't distinguish between the imagined images or metaphors and actual lived experience.  This is one of the reasons why clinical hypnosis is effective.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

As most people who love literature know, reading also gives us an opportunity to enter into the experience  of the protagonist, especially if it contains rich metaphors and descriptions and lively conversations between characters.

Entering into the protagonist's world, we can have an intimate emotional experience of his or her relationships, insights, doubts, fears, joys and sorrows.

By having this intimate emotional experience, we can't help to compare the protagonist's experience with our own.

It's often easier to develop psychological insights when the experiences are outside of ourselves, like, for instance, when we see a protagonist struggle and overcome a particular emotional dilemma, than it is when we're going through it ourselves.

In doing so, we can also develop insight into our own personal experiences, notice something that we've never thought of before or see an experience in a completely new light.

Good literature has a way of transporting us into new psychological states as well as new places in a way that reading nonfiction usually doesn't.

I'll continue this theme with specific examples in a future article.

About Me
I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Emotional Trauma Often Creates Negative Expectations About the Future

People who suffer with a history of emotional trauma often have negative expectations for the future because of their trauma.  This is a common experience that many psychotherapists see in their clients, especially among adults with early childhood trauma.

 Emotional Trauma Often Creates Negative Expectations About the Future

Negative Expectations About the Future Are Often Unconscious
These negative expectations are often unconscious so people, who experience them, often don't question them because these thoughts are outside of their conscious awareness.

However a skilled therapist, who is attuned to clients, can recognize these negative expectations, especially when these clients talk about their future in an overly pessimistic way.

If a traumatized client is in therapy where only cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is used, the therapist usually will point out the distortions in the way that the client is thinking and the problematic behavior that s/he is engaging in.

This is a useful first step because it makes clients' unconscious feelings conscious and they can learn to become aware of these feelings in order to change them.

By becoming aware of their pessimism, they can begin to challenge their thoughts and feelings by asking themselves if these thoughts and feelings are objectively true.  This assumes that clients can take a step back for self reflection.

If they're able to challenge their thoughts and feelings, they might be able to entertain an alternate scenario where the possibility of the future could be more realistic.

If they're not at the point where they can actually imagine a positive future for themselves, they might, at least, be able to see that there is the potential for a future that is better than their past or present experiences.

Counteractive Therapy vs Experiential Therapy
As I mentioned in a prior article, Experiential Therapy, Like EMDR, Helps to Achieve Transformational Breakthroughs, CBT works as a counteractive therapy that provides clients in therapy with an alternate scenario to their usual way of thinking and feeling.

But, for many traumatized clients, this form of counteractive therapy isn't enough.  They can see the distortions in their thinking, but they're unable to feel it in an authentic way or to change it.

Emotional Trauma Often Creates Negative Expectations About the Future

This can be very frustrating and, for some clients, it makes them feel ashamed.  They feel like they're "not doing therapy right."  For some clients, the contradiction between how they feel and what they can  see can make them feel that there's something seriously wrong with them.

These clients often leave therapy because they continue to have negative expectations for their future.  At that point, they leave therapy with the idea that "I tried therapy--it doesn't work for me."

But the problem isn't with the client.  The problem is with the type of therapy, CBT.

Experiential Therapy and Brain Research
When it works, CBT affects the logical part of the brain, but it often has no impact on the emotional part of the brain, which is the part of the brain that needs to be changed when emotional trauma is involved.

We're fortunate now to have the brain research to prove this, as cited in Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation by Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic, Laurel Hulley and Robert A. Neimeyer, and in other recent books and articles about brain research as it applies to emotional trauma.

Experiential Therapy and Brain Research

In their book, the authors discuss research that demonstrates that experiential therapies, like EMDR and other similar types of therapy, help these clients to have a transformational experience, as I mentioned in my prior article about experiential therapy.

Rather than just being a counteractive therapy that only provides an alternative on a logical level, experiential therapy affects the limbic system so that the client not only recognizes the distortion on a cognitive level--they also feel it.

With experiential therapies, like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing and clinical hypnosis, clients remember the narrative of their traumatic memories, but they experience the memories differently on an emotional level from how they did before they came to therapy.

Experiential Therapies Can Provide Transformative Experiences

Often, clients, who participate in experiential therapy, will make comments like:

• "When I think about the memories, I remember everything that happened, but I no longer feel traumatized."
• "I never thought I would be able to think about these memories without feeling upset about them."
• "I used to feel so upset by these memories, but now when I think about them, my feelings about them are neutral."

Experiential therapies also help clients to overcome feelings of foreboding (based on their trauma past) about the future.

Getting Help in Therapy

If you have a history of trauma that causes you to feel pessimistic about your future, you could benefit from getting help in therapy with a licensed psychotherapist who provides experiential therapy.

Getting Help in Therapy

Rather than feeling trapped by your emotional history, you could be free to live a fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

One of my specialties is helping clients to overcome emotional trauma.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.