EMDR Therapy · The EMDR Therapy Journey
The EMDR Therapy
Journey
EMDR therapy is structured to help you feel safe while gradually processing distressing memories. Each session builds on the last, using bilateral stimulation and reprocessing to reduce emotional intensity and strengthen adaptive beliefs.
What happens during
EMDR therapy sessions?
EMDR therapy is structured to help you feel safe while gradually processing distressing memories. Each session builds on the last, following a clear sequence from history-taking through to reprocessing and consolidation.
The first session involves history-taking and preparation. We explore your background, clarify therapy goals, identify target memories or experiences for reprocessing, and introduce grounding and stabilisation techniques. This phase ensures you have the internal resources to engage safely with processing.
From the second session, we begin the reprocessing phase. Through bilateral stimulation, we focus on specific memories and experiences, helping your brain naturally reduce distress and develop more balanced, adaptive perspectives. Sessions follow the structured eight-phase EMDR therapy protocol.
In follow-up sessions we review how previously processed memories feel, strengthen positive beliefs, and if needed, return to further processing of additional material. The three-pronged approach ensures we address past events, current triggers, and future readiness systematically.
As EMDR therapy comes to a close, we focus on consolidating your progress and reinforcing positive coping strategies. This ensures you feel confident and equipped to maintain your wellbeing moving forward, with lasting adaptive change, not just symptom relief.
The Role of
Resource Development
Before starting trauma reprocessing, EMDR therapy focuses on resource development, building the skills and inner strengths that help you feel safe and supported throughout the process. This is not a delay or detour; it is the foundation that makes safe, effective processing possible.
Specific techniques to help you stay connected to the present moment when distressing material arises, both in session and between sessions. Grounding ensures you always have access to a stable, regulated state.
A well-developed imaginal resource, a place or state of complete safety and calm, that can be accessed rapidly when distress arises. This resource is strengthened and made reliably available before reprocessing begins.
Identifying and strengthening positive memories and experiences, building the neural networks of adaptive, positive experience that counterbalance the negative. These become internal resources throughout treatment.
Ensuring your nervous system has sufficient capacity to process distress without becoming overwhelmed. Resource development builds this window, ensuring that processing can proceed safely and effectively.
Becoming aware —
opening the door to change
By noticing triggers, memories, thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, EMDR therapy opens the door to change. Awareness is the starting point, and EMDR therapy provides the mechanism to resolve what you become aware of.
Identify situations or cues that provoke distressing memories, thoughts, or emotional responses.
Mental images, flashbacks, or memories linked to distressing experiences.
Beliefs or thoughts about yourself, others, or the world when recalling distressing events.
Feelings experienced in response to triggers that help understand emotional reactions.
Physical sensations in the body associated with recalling distressing experiences.
Begin your
EMDR Therapy journey
Dr JC Coetzee · PhD · Clinical Psychologist · Advanced EMDR Therapy Specialist