EMDR

Healing Space Therapy offers EMDR in person at our Downtown, Eglinton and St. Clair offices in Toronto and at our Port Hope office, and by secure video anywhere in Ontario. Our EMDR therapists are Registered Psychotherapists and Registered Social Workers, and their EMDR training ranges from full basic training to certification and advanced certification. Each card above says which.

EMDR is one of several approaches we use for trauma, alongside IFS, AEDP, Brainspotting and body-oriented and somatic work. You do not need to have settled on EMDR before you reach out. Working out whether it fits is what the free 15-minute consultation is for. You can also read about our wider trauma therapy approach.

Early sessions don’t have to be about the memory at all. They are about building enough steadiness to go near it — history-taking, and what EMDR calls resourcing: practising ways to settle yourself that you can reach for in the room and outside it. Some people spend several sessions here. That is not a delay before the work; it is the work.

When reprocessing begins, you hold a memory in mind while following a repeating left-right rhythm — your therapist's hand, a light bar, alternating taps or tones. Then you stop and share what came up. You are not narrating the event in detail, and you are not required to describe it at all. Most of it happens in short sets with pauses between, and you can stop at any time.

People are often surprised by how ordinary EMDR feels from the inside. You are awake and in control the whole time, and you talk with your therapist between short sets. You are not hypnotised, and you are not reliving the event as if it were happening again.

During a set, thoughts, images, feelings or body sensations may come and go, and sometimes they connect in ways you did not expect. In other sets, very little seems to happen. Both are normal, and your therapist checks in with you after every set.

Every session ends with time to settle, whether or not a memory has been fully worked through, so that you leave steady enough to go on with your day. Processing can carry on quietly afterwards. Some people notice more vivid dreams, other memories surfacing, or tiredness. You will have ways to settle yourself between sessions, and you can bring whatever came up to the next one.

If something feels like too much, you can stop. Pausing, slowing down, or going back to resourcing is part of the method. It does not mean the method has failed.

EMDR is best known for single-incident trauma — an accident, an assault, a loss — where the memory stays vivid and close. It also works with the quieter kind: childhood and developmental trauma, where there is no single event to point at but the same feelings keep coming up.

It is often a good fit if talking has helped you understand something but not shift it in an embodied way. Many people arrive able to explain exactly why they react the way they do, and yet still react similarly. EMDR works on the part that did not get the message.

EMDR is an evidence-based trauma therapy approach and is recommended for PTSD in treatment guidelines internationally, including by the World Health Organization.

Evidence is about averages, though, and you are not one. It is a reason to take the approach seriously, not a promise about how your own course will go — which is a thing your therapist will talk to you about honestly rather than over-claim.

Our EMDR-trained clinicians move at your nervous system's pace, spending real time on safety and resourcing before any reprocessing begins. We hold the work gently and collaboratively — you stay in control throughout, and we adapt the protocol to complex and developmental trauma.

Several of our therapists hold EMDR certification and advanced training, and every one of them is trauma-informed. If persistent memories, flashbacks, or triggers are shaping your days, EMDR may help — we spend real time on safety and resourcing before any reprocessing begins, and you stay in control throughout.