I began with this thought while thinking about anxiety:

An experience of Freud’s Repression: the presence of affect in the absence of a representation that might lead to the expression of a drive.

Put more simply: Freud’s theory of repression concerns the relation between affect and representation. Repression bars the mental representative of a drive from consciousness, but the affect attached to it does not disappear. It persists—displaced, transformed, or experienced as anxiety, bodily disturbance, or symptom.

Perhaps EMDR helps because it allows affect that has survived without an accessible representation to become linked: in memory, in language, to an image, and towards an object. What had been felt but could not be thought, located, or spoken can begin to acquire form.

Anger is often present in anxiety - unsurprisingly, if a person has lost the ability to protest. What persists may be what we call resentment: anger with nowhere to go; a feeling that returns because the injury, need, or situation behind it has not found a way to be acknowledged, understood, or changed.

Resentment often persists in rumination. Rumination keeps a person caught in the disturbance generated by repression. It also provides a painful kind of continuity: a way of holding on to an experience when there has been no safe person, place, or relationship in which it might be shared.

The effects of distress take us towards its causes.

EMDR is not simply about changing a memory inside an individual mind. As part of a social psychotherapy, it may help create enough safety and room for a person to connect what they feel with what happened, what they need, whom they can turn to, and what might make life more bearable now.