EMDR Therapy
The story you can recite in full detail and still wake up to it at 4am. The car you can't sit in. The smell that turns the room sideways. You've already done the work of understanding what happened. The understanding hasn't moved it from your body. EMDR is for that — for the trauma that talk therapy mapped and couldn't dislodge. We're Brooklyn North, an art therapy practice in Brooklyn where every EMDR clinician is also trauma-trained and art-trained, so the work can move between modes when it needs to. World Health Organization–recommended. Brooklyn-based. A real room, with real art on the walls.
What Is EMDR Therapy?
EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — is a focused, evidence-based therapy for trauma and trauma-related conditions. Where talk therapy explores meaning across a wide field, EMDR goes straight to the source: the way a specific memory was stored in the nervous system. The closest analogy is something like surgery — targeted, structured, working on one specific thing at a time rather than the whole landscape at once.
The protocol moves through eight phases. The reprocessing phases use bilateral stimulation — alternating eye movements, taps, or audio tones — to help the brain finish integrating what got stuck. A session usually runs 60–90 minutes. The first phases aren't reprocessing at all; they're history-taking and resourcing, building the internal stability you'll lean on before any difficult memory is touched.
When You've Done the Talk Therapy Round
You've talked it out. You understand the origin. You can explain it to a friend without crying. And the panic still arrives on its own schedule. This is one of the most common reasons people come to EMDR — they've made cognitive sense of something the body hasn't yet caught up to.
Trauma doesn't store the way ordinary memory stores. It tends to lodge in the nervous system without timestamp, without context, without the bookmark that says this is over. The alarm system keeps firing on a 2014 schedule while you're trying to live in 2026. EMDR works directly on that. Rather than rebuilding the story, it helps the brain finally file the memory in the past, where it belongs — so the smell, the song, the date on the calendar stop sending you back. Many people describe it as the memory becoming a thing that happened, rather than a thing that's still happening. Not erased. Just no longer running the present.
The World Health Organization recommends only two treatments for PTSD in its 2013 guidelines on conditions related to stress — trauma-focused CBT and EMDR. The APA's 2017 Clinical Practice Guideline for PTSD likewise lists EMDR as a recommended treatment, based on multiple randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses.
What We Treat with EMDR
PTSD and complex PTSD (C-PTSD)
single-incident trauma — accident, assault, medical event
childhood trauma and developmental wounds
panic attacks and acute anxiety
phobias and avoidance loops
grief and loss that won't move
performance trauma — auditions, public failure, harmful collaborators
the trauma you can't quite name yet
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EMDR + Art Therapy Together
EMDR. Focused, structured reprocessing of a specific memory or pattern. The mechanism works at the level the trauma was stored — somatic, pre-verbal, below the cognitive map. Surgical in scope; tightly held in protocol. It can feel grueling at times, in the way that targeted, effective work often does.
Art therapy. A non-verbal channel for what doesn't have words yet, and warmth for what can otherwise feel like a clinical process. Materials hold what the mouth won't say. The room itself softens what EMDR sometimes makes raw — and gives you somewhere to land in the weeks between heavier reprocessing sessions. Read more about trauma-focused art therapy.
You don't have to choose. Several clinicians here are trained in both, and many people braid the two — a stretch of EMDR for a specific reprocessing target, art therapy in the weeks around it for steadiness and integration.
Frequently Asked Questions about
EMDR Therapy
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An 8-phase protocol with bilateral stimulation — alternating eye movements, taps, or tones — used during the reprocessing phase to help the brain finish integrating a memory it never got to file. Sessions usually run 60–90 minutes. Honest note: the precise neurobiological mechanism is still being studied. What is well established is the outcome — multiple randomized trials show significant reduction in PTSD symptoms.
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Range. A single-incident trauma (one accident, one assault) often resolves in 6–12 reprocessing sessions. Complex or developmental trauma takes longer, and the work is paced more carefully. No one will give you a hard number on intake — anyone promising a fixed timeline is overpromising.
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Yes, when paced carefully. The first phases of the protocol are explicitly about resourcing — building internal stability and grounding skills before any difficult memory is approached. For complex trauma, that preparation often takes longer than the reprocessing itself, and that's the point.
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No. EMDR reprocesses; it doesn't make you re-experience. You stay present and in dual awareness — one foot in the memory, one foot in the room. Your clinician paces the work to keep you inside your window of tolerance the entire way through.
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Yes. Several of our clinicians are trained in both, and the two pair naturally. More on the combination on our trauma-focused art therapy page.
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Yes — and most of our work is out-of-network. We accept some in-network plans (which ones depends on the clinician), and for everyone else we provide monthly superbills you submit to your insurer for reimbursement. If your plan includes out-of-network mental health benefits (most PPO plans do), a portion of each session typically comes back to you. Coverage varies plan to plan — reach out via the consultation link below and we'll match you with a clinician and walk you through what to ask your insurer before you start.
Let’s Work Together
