Melchior Bocksberger, A Nightmare (after 1573) — a dark hallucinatory scene of a figure assailed by presences from sleep, representing intrusive traumatic memory

26 August 2026 · 5 min read

Why Trauma Feels Like It's Still Happening — And What EMDR Does About It

"Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort." — Bessel van der Kolk

If you've been through trauma, you may have noticed that some memories don't behave like memories. A smell, a sound, the way the light falls in a room, and you're not remembering something — you're back in it. Your heart speeds up, your body braces as though the danger is here, and it becomes very hard to think clearly.

This isn't a sign that you're too sensitive or haven't tried hard enough to move on. It comes down to how the brain stored that memory in the first place, which is also why a therapy built around that storage problem can help when talking about it hasn't.

When the Past Won't Stay in the Past

The usual assumption is that trauma is about the event: something terrible happened, and now you have to come to terms with remembering it.

That's part of it. For a lot of people, though, the harder part is that the memory keeps arriving as if it's happening now — flashbacks, intrusive images, a racing heart with no obvious trigger, being pulled without warning back to something that happened fifteen years ago.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) was developed for exactly this problem. It makes more sense once you know how ordinary memories are meant to work.

How Ordinary Memories Work

Take an ordinary day — a good dinner, a tense conversation with your manager, a long drive. While it's happening and afterwards, the brain processes it. The hippocampus attaches context: who was there, where you were, when it happened. The memory is then stored with those details attached, which is why it feels like something you look back on rather than something you're inside.

Some editing happens too, and it's useful rather than distorting. Over days and weeks, through sleep and ordinary reflection, the emotional charge of most experiences drops. Something that had you rattled on Tuesday usually feels smaller by the following month.

What Goes Wrong With Traumatic Memories

When an experience is overwhelming — because of what happened, when it happened, or because nobody was there to help you through it — that processing can break down. The memory gets stored raw, without the context that would mark it as over.

So when it's triggered, it comes back with the sights, sounds, body sensations and fear of the original event. The brain hasn't filed it as history. As far as your threat-detection system is concerned, remembering the event and living through it again are close to the same thing, and your body reacts accordingly.

What EMDR Does

EMDR was developed by the psychologist Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s. While you bring a traumatic memory to mind, the therapist guides you through bilateral stimulation — usually following their hand with your eyes from side to side, sometimes tapping or listening to tones that alternate between ears.

The leading theory is that this kind of stimulation sets off something similar to what the brain does during REM sleep, when it normally processes the day. Paired with the memory, it seems to let the brain finish the processing that didn't happen at the time: the emotional charge drops, and the memory gets tagged as something in the past.

For most people the memory doesn't disappear. What changes is that they can think about what happened without being flooded by it.

What Happens in a Session

EMDR is more structured than most therapy. It starts with a full history and a preparation phase, where you build skills for staying steady while the harder work happens. Only then do you and your therapist choose the specific memories to work on.

In the processing sessions, you hold a memory in mind while following the therapist's hand, tapping, or listening to alternating tones through headphones. The therapist works in short sets and checks in after each one about what you're noticing. You aren't asked to tell the whole story in detail, which surprises a lot of people — there's much less talking than they expect.

Processing often keeps going between sessions. Dreams can change, and other memories may come up. Each session usually picks up where the last one left off.

Who It Helps

EMDR has its strongest evidence for PTSD, and the World Health Organization recommends it as a treatment for post-traumatic stress. Research has broadened a lot since Shapiro's early work, and it's now used for:

Single-incident trauma, such as an accident, an assault or a frightening medical event
Complex or developmental trauma — childhood abuse or neglect, or long periods of ongoing hardship
Phobias and anxiety that started with a specific event
Grief and loss
Performance anxiety that can be traced back to a particular experience

It often suits people who've found talk therapy helpful but not enough: they understand what happened and can explain it, but the emotional charge of certain memories hasn't shifted. It can also suit people who find it very hard to talk about what happened, because it relies less on putting things into words.

It isn't right for everyone. Good EMDR practice starts with a careful assessment and proper preparation, and a competent EMDR therapist won't rush you into the memory work before you're ready.

Key Points to Keep in Mind

Traumatic memories feel present because of how they were stored. It isn't a sign that you're weak or failing to move on.
You don't have to describe your trauma in detail. Much of the processing happens internally, with the therapist guiding it.
Preparation matters. If a therapist wants to skip straight to processing, ask why — the stabilisation phase isn't optional.
It isn't a quick fix, but it's often faster than people expect. For a single traumatic event, meaningful change can happen in a small number of sessions.
EMDR is one of the best-researched treatments for trauma. It's a mainstream therapy, not an alternative one.

Malan van der Walt, one of our psychologists, uses EMDR alongside ACT for trauma, anxiety and grief, and is currently taking new clients. His sessions attract a Medicare rebate if you have a Mental Health Care Plan. If you'd like to find out whether EMDR might suit you, book a free 15-minute fit call and he can talk it through with you.