You can, and it is cheaper, and for some people it is the right call. It is worth knowing what you would be getting, because what we run is somatic based EMDR, and it is not the same job done in the same way. I got the order wrong myself before I got it right, so this is written from that rather than from a brochure.
Book a consultMost people who come to us have already done talk therapy. CBT, ACT, something along those lines. It is genuinely useful for understanding what happened to you and for having somewhere to put it. But the symptoms we are dealing with are physical rather than psychological, and talking about them does not shift them.
EMDR means holding a memory or a sensation in mind while a practitioner guides bilateral stimulation. Usually eye movements, sometimes sound or touch. That combination lets the brain reprocess something it filed away without ever finishing.
It is not talk therapy. You are not explaining your history, analysing it, or being helped to feel differently about it by discussing it. If you have done CBT or ACT, this is not that with a different name.
It is a physical process. You hold something in mind while your practitioner guides the bilateral stimulation, and your nervous system does the work. Most of a session is not conversation.
It is why the sessions are so physical. Shaking, crying, tension letting go, being wiped out afterwards. That is survival energy actually moving rather than being discussed. If you have only ever had talking therapy, it is a different experience entirely.
The way I think about it is a knot. Your system is pulled tight and it cannot release on its own. Most approaches pull harder. The programme is built to release it instead, and that happens in an order.
Take the first two away and you are asking your body to process deep material while it is still braced and alert. You either get nothing from a session, or you get far too much.
EMDR alone is not what got me better. It was one part of three, and I learned that the hard way rather than by reading it somewhere.
Most EMDR training is built around a clear single event. A car accident, an assault, something with a date attached. Almost nobody in this population has that.
If you are thinking "nothing bad ever happened to me, so this cannot be my problem", that is the single most common thing people say to me, and it is not a disqualification.
What you have instead is years of a body being unsafe, with no obvious moment to point at. In the literature that gets called small t trauma, as opposed to one big T event. Not one thing that happened, but a long accumulation of a system living in threat. It means the material is spread out rather than sitting in one place, which changes both how you find it and how fast you can go.
Standard EMDR is led from the mind. You bring a memory, you work from the narrative, and the body follows along. That works well when there is a clear event to work from.
Somatic based EMDR is led from the body. The entry point is a sensation rather than a story, and the practitioner tracks what is happening physically to decide where to go, when to slow down and when to stop. For people whose material is cumulative rather than single incident, the body is not just a better route in. It is often the only one.
It is also why our practitioners work alongside somatic clinicians rather than separately from them. The two are doing the same work from different ends.
So we do not run standard EMDR slightly slower. The method itself is different in the room.
None of this is a criticism of private therapists. Several of our own practitioners work privately too. The argument is about sequencing and support, not about competence.
These are the two patterns I see most often in people who have tried EMDR already and concluded it does not work for them.
Your brain does not want you to feel this material and it is extremely good at keeping it away from you. If you go straight in without preparation, you often arrive too guarded to reach anything at all. The session happens, nothing moves, and you leave assuming you are the problem.
What actually helps:
Feeling wiped for the rest of the day, and fragile for a few days afterwards, is normal. I want to say that plainly, because people expect to be told it should be gentle and then think something has gone wrong.
Going from crash to crash is not normal. If that is happening, either the preparation was not done or the pace is wrong. Both are fixable, and neither means EMDR is not for you.
It is sad how many people get four sessions into conventional EMDR, have a horrible or unproductive time, and conclude EMDR could not work for them. Usually the method was right and the sequencing was not.
This is the part I want to be careful about, because it is easy to make it sound dramatic and it is not. Nothing here is about danger in the way people mean when they say a treatment is dangerous. It is about cost, and the cost is usually paid in weeks.
That last step is the real damage. Not the crash itself, which passes. What is much harder to undo is somebody deciding they are the exception, that their case is different, that they have now tried the thing everyone recommended and it made them worse.
I have met a lot of people carrying that conclusion. In almost every case the method was right and the pacing was not.
Working alone, you are the one judging whether you are too fragile this week. That is a difficult call to make well from inside your own body, particularly when you are motivated to get better and inclined to push. Three people hold that decision here instead of one.
Those three talk to each other. So when the decision is to slow down, pause, or bring somatics in before the next session, it gets made between people who can see the whole picture, rather than by you at nine on a Sunday night trying to work out whether you are being sensible or being a coward.
This is the sensible response to everything above, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a brush off.
Accredited EMDR training is generic. It qualifies someone to deliver the standard protocol, which is built around a clear single incident. It says nothing about whether they have worked with post exertional symptoms, whether they know what a crash looks like, or whether they will read a flat session followed by three bad days as a pacing problem rather than as resistance.
Finding someone who does EMDR is easy. Finding someone who has done it with this population is the actual search, and most people asking this question have not run it.
Even a very good one. It is outside their remit, it is not what you came to them for, and it is not what they are trained to deliver. So the sequencing problem does not get solved by hiring a better therapist. It gets solved by somebody holding the whole arc, which is a different role.
A private therapist sees you for fifty minutes. They do not see the session you did the day before that left you numb, the fortnight where your function quietly narrowed, or the fact that you have dropped a rung three reviews running. That context is what determines whether a session lands.
Here, the somatic practitioner knows what came up in therapy, your 1:1 support knows what the week looked like, and your practitioner gets both. On your own, you are the integration layer, and you are doing that job while unwell.
The most common problem is arriving numbed out and unable to reach anything. With a private therapist the only available response is to try again next week. We can bring a somatic practitioner in to unlock a specific area, change the entry point, adjust the pacing, or pause the arc and come back to it. That is not a better therapist, it is a bigger toolkit.
If those answers are vague, you have found a good EMDR therapist who has not done this particular job. That is worth knowing before you start rather than four sessions in.
It is not that private EMDR therapists are worse. Several of ours are private practitioners. It is that a therapist delivers a therapy, and what this needs is somebody holding a sequence.
People do try this, including people in our own community, so it is worth answering properly rather than pretending it does not occur to anyone.
Stabilisation is not a box you tick. It is a judgement about whether a system can tolerate activation, and this condition distorts exactly that judgement.
I see it constantly. Someone who can walk 10k but cannot jog for sixty seconds, who knows perfectly well it is fear rather than capacity, and still cannot act on it. Someone whose response to a crash is more practice. Someone arriving numbed out session after session without connecting it to what they did the day before.
Readiness is not something you feel, it is something someone assesses. And the people least able to judge it are usually the ones who most need it judged.
Anyone can learn the protocol. What cannot be done alone is noticing you have dissociated, deciding whether nothing surfacing means stop or means change the entry point, catching flooding before it turns into a crash, and knowing when to bring body work in because a target will not open.
Those are real time decisions, made by somebody watching you.
The material that surfaces is not always the material you targeted. That is not a flaw in the technique, it is how it works. When something larger than expected arrives, there is nobody to slow it down and nobody to help you land afterwards.
You cannot stabilise yourself while you are inside it. That is the whole problem with doing this alone, and it is not a rule we made up to sell you something.
People get four sessions into self directed or unsequenced EMDR, have a horrible or unproductive time, and conclude EMDR does not work for them.
That is the actual risk. Not that you hurt yourself, but that you use up the one thing that would have worked, and write it off permanently. I would much rather you did it properly with somebody else than badly on your own.
People usually ask about money and then discover the real question was time. So here it is up front.
This runs alongside your medical care, not instead of it. Keep your appointments, keep investigating, stay on whatever you are on. Nobody here will ask you to choose between this and a medical route, and if you are mid workup that is not a reason to wait.
If your week has genuinely nothing in it, that is worth saying on the consult so we can be honest about timing rather than starting and having it go badly.
And it is messy. It goes up, down and sideways, pausing and resuming is normal, and anyone promising you a smooth path is lying to you.
"I expected it to be absolutely horrendous, and it actually wasn't as bad as I thought."
A client, on starting EMDRYou never feel ready. I want to be honest about that rather than reassuring. If it felt comfortable there would probably be nothing there worth addressing, so the fear is information rather than a warning sign.
The markers we actually look for are practical:
And it needs adjusting as you go. Sometimes the spacing between sessions is too intense. Sometimes somatics need to come in. Sometimes you pause and resume later, and that is a normal clinical decision rather than a failure.
This stuff is messy. It goes up, down and sideways, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
If you were going to do this privately, these are the four things that decide whether it works.
If all four are genuinely true for you, then yes, go and do it privately. It will cost you less and I would tell you the same on a call.
But I want to be candid about something, because the framing of the question hides it. The first item on that list is not a prerequisite you complete and then leave behind. It is not a gate you pass through on your way to the real treatment.
The somatic work is the recovery. Changing how you relate to your body, what you do when a sensation arrives, whether your system reads an ordinary day as a threat. That is not preparation for EMDR. That is the thing itself, and it carries on running the whole way through and afterwards.
So I do not think EMDR on its own sorts people out, and I would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise to seem reasonable. It is a powerful part of the work and it is not the work. People who treat it as the treatment tend to get a few good sessions and then wonder why their life has not changed.
This programme works alongside medical care. It does not replace it. We are not a medical service, we do not diagnose, and we do not advise on medication. If you have symptoms that have not been investigated, please see a doctor first.
If you are in crisis right now, this is not the right place to start. In the UK you can call 999 in an emergency, NHS 111 for urgent advice, or Samaritans free on 116 123 at any hour. Outside the UK, contact your local emergency number or crisis line.
EMDR is not something to attempt alone or from videos online. It needs a trained practitioner, whether that is one of ours or somebody else's.
Book a consult. It is a proper conversation about where your system actually is and whether this fits, not a sales call. Sometimes the honest answer is no, or not yet, and we will say so.
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