“Why am I still stuck?”

It’s a question I hear often at the beginning of therapy. A client sits down, sometimes exhausted, sometimes frustrated, and says: “I’ve already talked this through so many times. I understand what happened. I know why I feel this way. So why hasn’t it changed?” And it’s a valid question. One that points to something deeper than insight alone can reach.

The truth is, trauma doesn’t just live in the stories we tell. It’s not just a memory or a narrative we can talk our way through. Trauma lives in the nervous system.

Sometimes it shows up as anxiety that doesn’t go away, sudden waves of shame, or a sense of being “stuck” that no amount of rational thought seems to budge. This is because traumatic experiences often bypass our conscious processing systems. They get stored implicitly in sensations, reflexes, patterns of attention, and physical reactions, often outside our awareness.

That’s where EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) can help.

EMDR is a structured, evidence-based approach to therapy that helps people reprocess traumatic experiences that have become “frozen” in the nervous system. These frozen memories don’t just include the facts of what happened; they include the emotions, beliefs, body sensations, and meanings attached to them at the time.

If you’ve ever noticed yourself reacting in a way that feels out of proportion or out of your control, it could be because your nervous system is still carrying a past event as if it’s happening now.

EMDR helps change that.

Using bilateral stimulation typically in the form of eye movements, tapping, or sound tones that alternate left and right, EMDR activates both sides of the brain, allowing the memory to be “unlocked” and processed more adaptively. Unlike traditional talk therapy, EMDR doesn’t require you to explain every detail of what happened. The focus isn’t on re-telling the story, it’s on shifting the emotional and physiological charge the memory still holds.

Clients often describe EMDR as unexpectedly powerful. Sometimes a flashback that’s haunted them for years suddenly loses its grip. Emotional responses that once felt overwhelming become more manageable. The body begins to relax in ways it hasn’t in years. And most strikingly, these changes don’t feel forced. They feel natural, like the nervous system is finally doing what it was always trying to do: make sense of things and move on.

EMDR can be used to support people dealing with a range of issues from anxiety, low self-esteem, and chronic stress, to childhood trauma, emotional neglect, or experiences that felt too much, too soon, or too fast. EMDR can also be helpful for people who’ve felt like their difficulties “don’t count as trauma” but still carry a sense of inner pain or fragmentation that they don’t know how to shift.

For those who have tried talking, journaling, understanding and still feel stuck, EMDR offers a different kind of doorway. It meets the parts of us that don’t speak in words. The parts that are remembered in feelings, in tension, in silence. And gently, at your own pace, it supports integration.

If any part of this resonates with you, if you’re curious, or if you’ve started to wonder whether talking alone is enough, EMDR might be the next step worth exploring.