How Do You Know EMDR Is Working?
I’m Mary Jo Kraus, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and therapist at The Banyan Tree Center in Athens, Georgia. I’ve been doing this work for over 25 years, and I want to be upfront about something: I was trained early on to keep things strictly professional. No self-disclosure, period. That never really felt like me.
So I’ll tell you honestly — I’ve been through some hard stuff of my own. That’s part of what brought me to this work. And it’s part of why I care so much about helping people understand what healing actually looks like from the inside, not just the clinical description.
This post is about the moments I’ve witnessed in EMDR therapy that have stayed with me. The quiet shifts. The things that change when the nervous system finally gets to finish what it couldn’t before.
What is the difference between “Big T” and “little t” trauma?
This is one of the biggest misconceptions I run into before starting EMDR with someone.
A lot of people come in thinking trauma has to look a certain way — like surviving a war or a natural disaster. But that’s really just part of the story.
Trauma can also be things like being bullied, or growing up in a home where emotions weren’t welcomed, where you weren’t allowed to feel what you felt or say what you thought. In EMDR, we call these “little t” traumas. They may not look dramatic from the outside, but they leave a mark.
Honestly, so much of what people come to therapy struggling with — depression, anxiety, addiction — these aren’t random. They’re often symptoms of those earlier wounds, those little t traumas that never really got tended to.
So if your relationships aren’t working right now, it’s worth asking yourself: what did the people who raised me actually teach me about relationships? Because the way we connect with others as adults so often traces back to what we learned, or didn’t learn, as kids.
Why do some people understand their trauma but still feel the same?
This is one of the most common presentations I see. Clients who don’t identify as traumatized — they identify as anxious, depressed, difficult, or just themselves.
They’ve done the journaling. They’ve read the books. They’ve talked about it in therapy before and they understand their patterns intellectually. But they still feel the same. The gap between knowing and feeling is one of the hallmarks of trauma that hasn’t been fully processed.
The reframe that changes everything is this: their symptoms are adaptations. Their nervous system did exactly what it needed to do to survive. That’s not weakness, that’s survival.
The beauty of EMDR is that it doesn’t require clients to talk their way through everything. For clients who have spent years in talk therapy intellectually understanding their patterns but still feeling the same, EMDR reaches the level where the material is actually stored. The day-to-day experience of carrying trauma is often invisible to outsiders but exhausting to live inside.
(If you’re still wondering what EMDR actually is and how the eight-phase process works, my colleague Angela wrote a thorough introduction to what EMDR therapy is and who it helps.)
What does a real moment of healing in EMDR look like?
One of my most memorable clients was carrying a secret she’d never told anyone — not her parents, not her husband, not her children. As a young woman she’d had an abortion, and she had lived with that silence for decades.
What she carried wasn’t guilt. It had long since hardened into shame. And there’s an important distinction there.
Guilt says “I did something bad.” Shame says “I am bad.”
She had been living inside that second sentence for decades. Through EMDR she was able to shift. Not to erasure, not to “it was fine” — but to something honest and human: “I did the best I could at the time.”
That’s not shame. That’s a person reflecting on a hard choice rather than using it as evidence of their own unworthiness. She didn’t need to be talked out of her feelings. She needed her nervous system to finally process something it had been holding, frozen, for fifty years.
That is what EMDR can do.
Does EMDR work for trauma that happened a long time ago?
Yes. And in some ways, the nervous system doesn’t experience time the way the conscious mind does.
For my older clients, memories are still raw as if it had happened yesterday. That’s not unusual. Unprocessed trauma doesn’t fade the way ordinary memories do. It stays vivid, emotionally charged, and present — until the brain gets the chance to reprocess it.
Most clients start noticing a real shift within one to two months. For more recent traumas or phobias, sometimes just a few sessions can make a significant difference. For complex or longstanding trauma, the timeline is longer. But the nervous system’s capacity to heal doesn’t have an expiration date.
What changes after EMDR therapy?
What I see most often is that clients stop being defined by what happened to them.
The memory doesn’t disappear. The event still happened. But the charge around it changes. It becomes something they lived through rather than something they’re still living in. They stop bracing for it to ambush them in daily life.
I also bring in a lot of education about how trauma works, because understanding why you respond the way you do can take a huge weight off the self-blame. Most people are enormously relieved to learn that their reactions make complete sense given what they experienced. They’re not broken. Their nervous system adapted. And adaptation can change.
What should I know before starting EMDR?
A few things I want every client to know before we begin:
You don’t have to retell your trauma in detail. A brief overview is all that’s necessary. EMDR works with the memory without requiring you to narrate every detail out loud.
Nothing happens without your readiness. The early phases of EMDR are about preparation and building trust before any processing begins. I will never take you into a difficult memory before you have the tools to come back out. (My colleague Star walks through this in more detail in her post on what happens during an EMDR session.)
You can tell me if something doesn’t feel right. Including if you feel like we’re not a good fit. At The Banyan Tree we have so many talented providers that if we don’t click, we’ll find someone who is right for you.
And finally — going to therapy is one of the most self-aware, proactive things a person can do. A lot of people wait because they worry that needing support means something is wrong with them. It doesn’t. It means you’re paying attention.
If you’re ready to show up for yourself, I’ll show up for you.
I’m Mary Jo Kraus, PhD, LCSW, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and EMDRIA Certified Therapist at The Banyan Tree Center in Athens, Georgia, with over 25 years of clinical experience. I practice IFS-informed EMDR, hold a doctorate in social work, am licensed in Georgia and Florida, and have served as an adjunct professor and clinical supervisor for over a decade. I work with adults navigating trauma, attachment wounds, grief, anxiety, depression, and life transitions, in person in Athens and via telehealth across Georgia. To learn more, visit my therapist profile.