The scope of EMDR’s utility makes it one of the most versatile skills a therapist can add to their practice. In this article we take a look at some of the issues that often come to the therapy room and how EMDR can help our clients. If you’re considering adding EMDR to your therapy toolkit but haven’t yet made that decision we have an introductory workshop just for you where you can learn about EMDR, the AIP model, how EMDR works and take-away an exercise to use with your clients straight away.

Want to learn more about the topic? On Friday 20th March BTP is offering a one-day training event on “EMDR therapy – an introduction“. The training is taking place on Zoom with catch up recording available (if you can’t make it on the day). To find out more about the workshop you can head over to the event page on the Brighton Therapy Partnership website.

Over the past three decades, the evidence base for EMDR has grown considerably, and with it, our understanding of just how wide its reach can be. This isn’t about stretching a model beyond what it was designed for — it’s about understanding why it works and recognising how many of the people already sitting in our consulting rooms could benefit.

It All Comes Back to Memory

The Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, which underpins EMDR, offers a beautifully simple idea: that many of the psychological difficulties our clients struggle with are rooted in memories that haven’t been fully processed. These aren’t always memories of dramatic, identifiable events. Sometimes they’re the quieter ones — the chronic criticism, the childhood shame, the loss that was never properly grieved — that continue to shape how a person feels and functions in the present.

Once you start to see your clients’ presentations through this lens, the possibilities for EMDR open up considerably.

Anxiety

Anxiety is one of the most common reasons people seek therapy, and it’s also one of the areas where EMDR can make a real difference. Whether you’re working with generalised anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorder, or specific phobias, EMDR allows you to go looking for the earlier experiences that first taught a person’s nervous system that the world was dangerous.

For clients with phobias especially, many therapists find that EMDR can move things along more quickly than traditional exposure approaches — and with less distress — because it addresses the memory that’s driving the fear, rather than simply working to manage the fear itself.

Depression

Depression rarely arrives out of nowhere. Behind many cases of chronic or recurrent depression, you’ll find a history of experiences that have shaped deeply held beliefs: that the person is unlovable, not good enough, fundamentally flawed in some way. These beliefs didn’t come from thin air — they came from somewhere.EMDR gives us a way to work with that ‘somewhere’. EMDR can offer a genuinely different way in — working at the level of felt experience and memory rather than thought alone.

Grief and Loss

Grief is a natural process, but for some clients it gets stuck. Perhaps the death was sudden or traumatic. Perhaps the relationship was complicated. Perhaps there simply wasn’t enough support around at the time to allow the person to grieve properly.

EMDR can be a gentle but powerful way to help clients process the most distressing aspects of their loss, freeing them to move forward without feeling as though they are leaving the person behind. Many clinicians and clients find this one of the most meaningful applications of the approach.

Chronic Pain and Physical Symptoms

We know that the mind and body are not separate systems, and EMDR sits well at this intersection. Research has shown that chronic pain can be maintained and amplified by unprocessed memories — whether of the original injury, distressing medical experiences, or earlier traumas that the pain has reactivated.EMDR targeting these memories has been shown to reduce both pain intensity and the emotional distress that so often accompanies it — offering something genuinely new for clients who feel they’ve tried everything.

Eating Disorders and Difficulties with Body Image

When you listen to the histories of clients with eating disorders, certain themes tend to emerge – shame, early experiences of being made to feel wrong or out of control, moments where food or body became a way of coping with something unbearable. EMDR can help to address these root experiences, complementing the specialist work you may already be doing and reaching places that other approaches sometimes can’t.

Addiction and Substance Use

It’s hard to overstate how frequently trauma and addiction go hand in hand. For many people, what began as a way of managing overwhelming feelings — feelings often rooted in unprocessed experience — has become a pattern that is now causing its own harm.

When integrated carefully alongside addiction-specific work, EMDR can help to address the experiential drivers of substance use, supporting clients in building a more stable foundation for recovery.

What Could This Mean for Your Practice?

EMDR is now recognised by NICE (the National Institute for Health & Care Excellence, UK) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), as an evidence-based treatment — not just for PTSD, but across a growing range of presentations.If you haven’t yet trained in EMDR, the breadth of what it can offer makes it one of the most rewarding skills you can bring to your practice. Clients notice the difference — and so do clinicians.

If you want to add a truly transformational skill to your therapy toolbox but are not yet ready to commit to the full 8-day EMDR training, then we have just the CPD workshop for you.

Upcoming Workshop with Dr Ines Santo

Want to explore more? Join us for our upcoming workshop – EMDR Therapy – An Introduction with Dr Ines Santos on Friday 20th March 2026, 10am-4pm on Zoom with catch-up recording available if you can’t make it on the day.

In our one-day EMDR introductory day you will learn about the AIP model, the way EMDR works, and practice a take-away exercise you can use with your clients immediately.

Join our Therapy Community on Facebook

Brighton Therapy Partnership has a private Facebook Group for therapists which might be of interest to you if you are on social media? We currently have over 2,3k members. You will need to answer all 3 Joining Questions and agree to the Group Rules to join the Group!

Click Here to Join *The Therapy Partnership* Facebook Group – Be Part of the Therapy Community!