I was on a podcast recently (Airdrie Inside, if you want to track it down) and the host asked me to explain EMDR. I reached for the metaphor I always reach for, because it works: think of the way your mind processes experience like a paper shredder quietly running in the background.
Most of the time, it runs fine. Something happens, even something hard, and your mind processes it, files it, and moves on. The paper goes through. But every so often, an experience comes in like a sheet of construction paper with a staple in it. Too thick, too jammed up. The shredder catches. And after that, getting near the memory can make the whole machine seize.
What “stuck” actually feels like
A jam doesn’t always look like a dramatic flashback. Sometimes it’s the traffic light where the accident happened, and your shoulders climb up to your ears before you’ve even registered why. Sometimes it’s a belief that quietly attached itself to the event and never left, something like “I’m not safe” or “I should have done something different.” The original moment is over, but your nervous system keeps responding as though it isn’t.
EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is a way of getting the paper unstuck. It uses bilateral stimulation, gentle left-right input through eye movements, tapping, or small handheld buzzers, while you hold the memory in mind. Think of it as swapping the home-office shredder for an industrial one. Same paper. Different capacity. The material finally moves through, and it tends to land somewhere more useful, like “I made it through” or “that was then.”
Why it isn’t just talking about it
People are sometimes surprised that EMDR doesn’t require narrating every detail of what happened. The processing does a lot of the work the talking usually has to. It’s one of the most well-researched trauma treatments available, sitting alongside cognitive behavioural therapy in the evidence base, which is a long way from where it started in the 1980s when a researcher named Francine Shapiro first noticed her own distress easing as she walked and moved her eyes across a path.
That walking detail is not a coincidence, by the way. Moving through the world left, right, left, right is naturally bilateral. Some of us put the two together.
How do you know if it’s worth looking into?
The host also asked me how someone knows it’s time to reach out. Here’s what I told him: if you’re asking the question, part of you already suspects the answer. You don’t have to be in crisis to be curious, and curiosity is a perfectly good reason to book one session and see how it sits.
At Off the Beaten Path, our team offers EMDR for adults across Airdrie, Calgary, and Cochrane, in office or outside on the trail. You can read more about how we approach trauma and EMDR therapy here.
If your processing system has been catching lately, that’s worth paying attention to. It usually means the machine is working exactly as designed, just on a piece of paper it wasn’t built for.