EMDR Felt Like I Was Holding A Magic Wand:

When I first started using EMDR with my clients, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t convinced.

I knew the theory, I had done the training, and I understood the process, but there was a part of me that kept thinking, “How can moving someone’s eyes from side to side possibly change something that has lived in their nervous system for years?” It sounded almost too simple, almost too good to be true. And then I met a client who had been a child soldier. He carried those memories with him into adulthood, not simply as stories he could remember, but as something his body seemed to remember too. He could tell me what had happened, but telling the story wasn’t the same as being free from it.

There were moments when I could see that the past was still very much in the room with him. So we began EMDR. I remember watching him closely, partly because I was his therapist and partly because, if I’m completely honest, I was still wondering whether this would really make a difference.

We started slowly: one memory, one moment, one piece at a time. And then, somewhere in the process, I saw something change. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no movie moment, no instant transformation. It was a small shift. His breathing changed. His body softened. The memory was still there, but it no longer seemed to have quite the same grip. I remember thinking, “What just happened?” And then, perhaps even more quietly, “Maybe this really does work.” That experience changed the way I understood EMDR. Because I had thought the power was in the technique.

What I came to understand was that the technique was creating the conditions for something much deeper to happen. The brain could begin to process what had once felt impossible to process. A memory could remain a memory, rather than feeling like something that was happening all over again. And for someone who had spent years carrying the experiences of a childhood stolen by war, that distinction was enormous. I saw it happen again with other clients: different stories, different wounds, different lives, but the same extraordinary possibility the past could become the past. That’s when I started calling EMDR my magic wand. Not because it was magic, and certainly not because trauma disappears with a wave of a wand. It doesn’t.

Healing can be complicated, and it can take time. But as a therapist, there is something profoundly humbling about sitting across from someone who has carried unimaginable experiences and watching them slowly discover that those experiences don’t have to dictate every moment of their future. That was the moment my scepticism changed. I stopped wondering, “How can this possibly work?” and started wondering, “How much more is possible when we give the brain the opportunity to heal?”

I still think about that client, the child he once was, the adult sitting in front of me, and the space between those two versions of him. I walked into that room as a therapist who wasn’t 100% sure. I walked out as a therapist who had witnessed something I couldn’t unsee. And perhaps that’s the real reason EMDR felt like a magic wand. It didn’t erase his story. It helped create a little more space between what happened to him and who he could become. And sometimes, that space is where healing begins..