For most of its public life, EMDR has been the therapy associated with one thing: post-traumatic stress, especially among military veterans. That reputation is accurate as far as it goes, say practitioners in the field, but it has quietly undersold what the technique is now being asked to do.
EMDR, or eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, asks clients to hold a distressing memory in mind while tracking the therapist’s moving finger or a pair of pulsing lights. The theory is that the bilateral stimulation helps the brain reprocess memories that were stored in a raw, unresolved state. It has held a NICE recommendation for PTSD in the UK since 2007, and a growing body of smaller studies has since probed its use for anxiety, chronic pain and distressing life events that never met any clinical definition of trauma.
Filip Pasterski, a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and accredited EMDR practitioner who runs an online practice serving English-speaking clients between the UK and Poland, says the enquiries he receives have broadened. Divorces, redundancies and medical diagnoses appear on his waiting list alongside the operational trauma of veterans, his long-standing specialism.
“People arrive having googled EMDR because a friend tried it for something completely different from what they expect,” Pasterski says. “The interesting part is that the mechanism does not care whether the memory came from a battlefield or a hospital corridor. It cares whether it got stored whole.”
He is careful with expectations, as most accredited practitioners are. Therapy aims to reduce the charge a memory carries, he notes, not erase the memory itself, and EMDR works best inside a longer therapeutic relationship rather than as a standalone fix.
Pasterski trained at Regent’s University London and qualified in EMDR in 2009, with clinical experience across the NHS and private sectors in both countries. He works online from Poland with clients in English, Polish and through interpreters.
Further detail on his approach is on his site, filippasterski.pl.