EMDR therapy is a mental health treatment technique that involves moving your eyes a specific way while you process traumatic memories. The goal is to help you heal from trauma or other distressing life experiences. EMDR can help people with a wide range of mental health conditions. Adolescents, teenagers and adults of all ages can benefit from this treatment. Some healthcare providers also specialize in EMDR for children.

EMDR therapy focuses on changing the emotions, thoughts or behaviors that result from a distressing experience (trauma). This allows your brain to resume a natural healing process.

The way your mind works relies on the structure of your brain. That structure involves networks of communicating brain cells across many different areas. That’s especially the case with sections that involve your memories and senses. That networking makes it faster and easier for those areas to work together. That’s why your senses — sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feels — can bring back strong memories.

When you undergo EMDR, you access memories of a trauma event in very specific ways. Combined with eye movements and guided instructions, accessing those memories helps you reprocess what you remember from the negative event. That reprocessing helps “repair” the mental injury from that memory. Remembering what happened to you will no longer feel like reliving it, and the related feelings will be much more manageable.