There are various theories describing how EMDR works and relating to the AIP (Adaptive Information Processing) model that Francine Shapiro, who cultivated EMDR, developed. The main of these involves thinking about how the EMDR process relates to what are usually sleep-time activities occurring during slow-wave or REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep; that it might promote ‘inter-hemispheric communication’; or that it might ‘overload’ the executive function of the brain and its capacity to repress or dissociate material considered by it to be better off ‘unthought about’. This tracks a psychoanalytic understanding of unconscious processes. (as outlined by Solms and Panksepp, The Id knows More than the Ego Admits, 2012). The most compelling material was recently presented at the EMDR Europe 2023 conference by Enrico Zaccagnini, and by Marco Pagani.

Each of these seems credible, or incredible if you want them to be. In nearly all areas of medicine, there seems to be doubt about how a process ‘works’. Maybe things just don’t ‘work’ like that. Science revises its findings, often after understanding that the original or previous findings had something about them that either failed to take into account new information or that distortion occurred because of the researcher’s aims, intentions, or affiliations. Philosophy, the arts, and politics function and malfunction in similar ways. Freud repeatedly stated that psychoanalysis was a provisional project – the best he could come up when he had such limited ways of following brain and other bodily activity.

I am convinced that EMDR does no harm and that, when administered in the ways that have been trialed for many years now, it can affect people positively. I have received a lot of EMDR treatment myself, and have found it to be extremely helpful in ways that other forms of psychotherapy were not.

That’s why I do it.