There’s a particular quality to EMDR work that drew me in and has kept me here. So much of trauma is carried wordlessly — a memory that sits like a stone in the chest, something the body still braces against years later. What I value about EMDR is that it doesn’t try to argue or reason that weight away. It’s designed to work with the brain’s own capacity to process, making room for something to shift at the level where trauma is actually held, rather than only in conversation about it.
That’s why EMDR has become central to how I work with trauma. After years of practice, I keep returning to it not because it’s fashionable, but because it respects something true about how trauma lives in the body and mind — and because it’s built to support the brain’s own processing rather than override it.
Trauma isn’t a thinking problem
When I trained as a psychologist, much of what I learned framed psychological distress as a problem of thoughts and beliefs to be corrected. Cognitive approaches have real value. But trauma rarely behaves like a thinking problem. People living with post-traumatic distress usually know, intellectually, that the event is over. They know they’re safe now. They know, on a logical level, that they weren’t to blame. And yet the nervous system hasn’t received the memo. The body still braces. The image still intrudes. The shame still sits heavily.
EMDR makes sense of this through the Adaptive Information Processing model — the idea that trauma can be stored in a kind of unintegrated state, disconnected from the brain’s natural capacity to process memories. The memory sits there raw, still carrying the original emotions, sensations, and beliefs, as though no time has passed. The model proposes something I find compelling: that the brain has its own drive toward healing, and therapy is then about supporting creating space for the brain to do what it naturally wants to do… move forward.
This understanding of trauma is incredibly powerful. A defining corrective message that there is nothing wrong with you. You aren’t weak or broken. Rather, you are a story of survival. Your brain did what it was designed to do under impossible circumstances — protection. Fundamentally, trauma treatment is about gently supporting a process that couldn’t be completed at the time.
What I love about the approach
A few things about EMDR keep me committed to it.
It doesn’t require endless retelling. One of the quiet difficulties of some trauma work is asking people to narrate their worst experiences over and over in granular detail, which for many people is distressing in itself. EMDR is designed so that people can process without having to give a full verbal account of everything. They can keep material private and still work with it. For people carrying experiences of abuse, deep shame, or things they’ve never spoken aloud. As a psychologist, this is the most valuable gift we can offer. Allowing people to hold on to their dignity is understated compassion and kindness. Especially when so much dignity has been stolen from them.
It works at the level where trauma is held. Insight is valuable, but on its own it rarely shifts a trauma response. What draws me to EMDR is that its protocol is built to engage the body and the emotional brain directly — the level at which traumatic material tends to be stored — rather than working only through conversation about it.
It honours the client’s own process. In EMDR, I’m not positioned as the expert dispensing the correct interpretation. I’m a facilitator creating a safe, structured space that allows your own system to do what it naturally wants to do, process information. Whatever emerges arrives in your own language (images, words, thoughts, body sensations), fitted to your own life.
It builds resources, not only resolves wounds. The protocol isn’t only about reprocessing difficult memories. The preparation and resourcing phases — building calm and stability, strengthening an internal sense of safety, developing the capacity to self-regulate — are designed to support resilience regardless of what is later reprocessed.
EMDR keeps me humble and curious. The associations the mind makes, the material that surfaces, the way the work unfolds — it reminds me that the people are extraordinary and capable of so much.
When EMDR alone isn’t enough ~ relational and developmental trauma
Here’s the honest limitation. Standard EMDR was developed and researched largely around single-incident trauma — the accident, the assault, the disaster. A great deal of the trauma clients encounter isn’t a single event. It’s relational. It’s developmental. It’s the trauma of growing up unseen, frightened, criticised, or unsafe in the very relationships that were meant to provide refuge.
This kind of trauma doesn’t tend to sit in one neat memory you can target and reprocess. It’s woven into your identity, your attachment patterns, your sense of whether you’re fundamentally safe or worthy of care. Early in my career, working with these presentations showed me that a richer map of the internal world than reprocessing alone could provide. That’s where parts work ~ schema therapy comes in.
Schema Therapy
There are many approaches to parts work, but at Mood & Mind Psychology, we generally draw on schema therapy. It offers a map of one’s internal system, a map of how relational trauma can become a worldview. Children who grow up with unmet core emotional needs develop maladaptive beliefs — deep-seated and unshaken beliefs that abandonment and mistrust/abuse are inevitable. That they are unworthy of love as they are. That there is something wrong with them. These aren’t passing thoughts. They’re the lenses through which one comes to experience relationships, including the therapeutic one.
Schema therapy helps psychologists to understand the different parts inside the person, which parts hold pain, which parts defend and fight, which parts withdraw and avoid. These defences often have been the only thing that has kept people safe. Paradoxically, the very thing that has kept people safe, can be the thing that stands in the way of healing. These defences are staunch and do not stand down easily. They maintain the belief that you are not safe, you can not trust and that no one cares. These beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies. Schema therapy aims to build safety and internal cooperation, and fosters trust, leading to relational repair.
What keeps me here
Trauma therapy at its best is profoundly hopeful. It rests on the belief that people aren’t broken — and that healing is possible, often through a person’s own capacities, given the right conditions and support. As psychologists, we are privileged to walk in partnership as they do this work — meeting them on some of the hardest material of their lives, and offering a steady, respectful space in which something can shift. There is no work I would rather do.
This article reflects my own clinical perspective and experience as a clinical psychologist and is intended as general, educational information about therapeutic approaches. It is not a description of guaranteed outcomes and is not a substitute for individualised professional advice or care. EMDR and schema therapy are established modalities best delivered within appropriate training, supervision, and professional boundaries. Outcomes vary between individuals.
Mood & Mind Psychology ~ EMDR Hawthorn psychologists
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