The 8 Phases of EMDR: What the Whole Process Looks Like

When most people picture EMDR, they picture the eye movements. Someone waves a hand, your eyes follow, and somehow the trauma fades. But eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, to give EMDR its full name, is an eight-phase therapy, and the eye movements don’t appear until phase four. Some of the most important work happens before a single memory is ever reprocessed.

I’m Masood Suliman, a Registered Psychotherapist in Hintonburg, Ottawa, and EMDR is central to my work with trauma and PTSD. Here is the whole map, phase by phase, the way I actually walk it with clients. If you want the feel of a single session first, start with what actually happens in an EMDR session, or the overview on my EMDR therapy in Ottawa page.

Before anything else: is your nervous system ready?

The thing I most want people to understand about EMDR is that we check capacity before we go anywhere near a traumatic memory. In my practice that includes an EMDR readiness questionnaire, a dissociation screening measure, and a careful assessment of two kinds of tolerance: your tolerance for negative feeling, and, surprisingly, your tolerance for positive feeling. What we’re establishing is whether you can visit a hard memory while staying inside your window of tolerance, with one foot in the memory and one foot in the room with me. Without that, EMDR isn’t reprocessing. It’s just reliving.

The eight phases are the standard structure of EMDR: history taking, preparation, assessment, desensitization, installation, body scan, closure, and reevaluation. Here is what each one actually looks like in the room.

Phase 1: History taking, or building the trauma map

We go through your life in age clusters: one to four, four to six, six to nine, nine to thirteen, fourteen to eighteen, and adulthood. Within each cluster, I ask specific questions about what happened, and together we build what I think of as a trauma map, along with the themes that run through it.

For painful things that happened repeatedly over years, we don’t need to reprocess every instance. We identify the first time, the worst time, and the most recent time. In my experience, when those are reprocessed, the brain’s own memory network tends to take care of everything in the middle.

Phase 2: Preparation, where safety gets built

Officially, preparation is phase two. In practice, with some clients, I do it before phase one even starts, because for some people just talking about their history is too much. There are two paths here.

If you have the capacity to talk about your past, we do the history taking and build resources alongside it: things like breathing and body-scan practice and the container exercise, a way of deliberately putting distressing material away until we choose to open it. I encourage clients to use these outside of therapy too. They build a sense of control and autonomy, so that when we do go into deeper memories, there’s a foundation of safety to stand on.

If your nervous system isn’t ready for the history yet, we start much slower. We work on the presenting problems, build safety and trust between us, and strengthen your internal supports first. Skipping this step doesn’t speed anything up. A flooded nervous system can’t reprocess anything; it just gets retraumatized. This kind of resourcing work in the stabilization phase has research behind it for complex PTSD specifically (Korn & Leeds, 2002).

How do I test readiness? For positive tolerance, I’ll ask you to recall a recent pleasant memory and try to recapture that feeling in the present, and simply sit with it for a minute or so. Most people can. But for some nervous systems, even pleasure isn’t safe. One client, trying to hold a genuinely happy memory, watched the face in it turn into the face of a monster. That was the nervous system saying: we are not ready to sit with this yet. For negative tolerance, we start with a smaller, less charged memory and see whether you can describe it while staying regulated, then work up. If you can stay present with both, we’re ready. If not, building that capacity becomes the work first, and that isn’t a detour. It is the therapy.

Phase 3: Assessment, or setting up the target

For the very first memory we reprocess, I deliberately don’t choose the biggest one. I look for a memory that is relatively isolated, not woven into attachment relationships with caregivers, and not carrying the highest distress. Attachment memories tend to be connected to whole networks of other memories, and the brain will follow those connections. Starting with something more contained lets you learn how EMDR works, lets your nervous system learn how it responds, and builds confidence for the harder targets ahead.

Then we set the target up precisely. I ask what image represents the worst part of the memory, and we activate it fully: any smells, tastes, sounds, anything you felt on your skin. Then the belief: when you think of that memory, what do you believe about yourself now? Almost always something like “I did something wrong” or “there’s something wrong with me.” Then the belief you would rather hold instead, and how true that positive belief feels on a one-to-seven scale, not in everyday life, but held up against that specific memory. Finally the emotions, a distress rating from zero to ten, and where you feel it in your body. Once we have all of that, we’re ready to reprocess.

Phases 4 to 6: Desensitization, installation, and the body scan

Phase 4 is desensitization, the part people know. You hold the image, the negative belief, and the feeling in your body, and we pair that with bilateral stimulation: guided eye movements, handheld pulsers, or alternating sounds, whichever suits you. After a set of about thirty seconds, I ask you to stop, take a breath, and tell me what you’re noticing. It might be a sensation, an emotion, a thought, a new memory. Whatever it is, we “go with that” and run another set. If you get stuck, I might inject a question, what EMDR calls a cognitive interweave, to nudge the processing in a useful direction.

We continue until the distress reaches zero, and then we go with the zero to make sure it holds. One honest exception: sometimes distress shouldn’t be zero. If some part of the memory involves something genuinely dangerous, a level of alertness has validity, and we keep it. I’m not trying to talk your nervous system out of protecting you.

What I see at this point, again and again, is surprise. Sometimes shock, sometimes relief, sometimes a quiet kind of happiness. People who believed they would carry that weight forever notice it just isn’t pressing anymore. I wrote more about that shift, and the evidence behind it, in does EMDR really work?

Phase 5 is installation. I ask whether the positive belief we chose still fits, or whether the processing surfaced one that fits better; that happens often. Then you hold the memory together with the new belief while we run more bilateral stimulation, and positive material starts coming up: more confidence, more control, truer statements about yourself. We continue until it settles and the positive statements hold steady.

Phase 6 is the body scan, and it matters more than it sounds. Your thinking brain can report zero distress while the body is still holding some. So you bring up the memory and the positive belief, start at the top of your head, and scan down for any leftover negative sensation. If something is still there, we target that sensation directly with bilateral stimulation until it fades. Only then do we consider the memory closed, with the aim that it no longer carries a charge when it comes to mind. This body-first attention is the same principle behind the somatic therapy side of my practice.

Phase 7: Closure, or never leaving raw

Sessions end; processing sometimes isn’t finished. When that happens, I don’t just send you out the door. We check in, and if there’s a lot present, we take real time to ground: a body scan, breathing, some movement, some talking. Then we close with the container exercise so everything goes away until we choose to reopen it. Occasionally a client wants to keep holding something that came up, because it feels less like distress and more like empowerment, and that’s fine too. Either way, you leave regulated, not raw.

Phase 8: Reevaluation, or checking what held

The next session starts by reopening the work. When you think of that memory today, what comes up? What emotions? What number, zero to ten? Where do you feel it in your body? Whatever surfaces, we go with it and continue back through desensitization, installation, and the body scan until the target is fully closed. Sometimes a memory that ended at zero brings new material the following week. That isn’t failure; it’s the network showing us what’s connected, and it tells us where to work next.

When I bring in other tools

The eight phases are the spine, but they aren’t rigid. When a memory is too charged to approach directly, I often use the Flash Technique first, a gentler method developed for exactly this purpose within EMDR’s preparation phase, to lower a memory’s intensity before we return to it with standard reprocessing (Manfield et al., 2017).

And sometimes reprocessing gets blocked from the inside. A protective part of you may hold the position that going anywhere near the old memory is dangerous, because for years, avoiding it was how you survived. That’s where parts work (IFS) comes in: we spend time with those protectors until they can see that revisiting the memory, at this pace and with this support, isn’t the threat it used to be, and may actually help. Combining IFS-informed work with EMDR for complex trauma is an emerging, case-based area of the clinical literature (O’Shea Brown, 2020), and in my experience the two fit together naturally.

How long does each phase take?

Honestly: it depends, and anyone who gives you a fixed number is guessing. The variables are the amount of trauma, the type of trauma, and your nervous system’s tolerance for the negative and positive feeling the work stirs up. Someone with a single recent event and a steady history may move through the phases quickly. Someone carrying years of complex childhood trauma will spend much longer in preparation, and that time is what makes the later phases safe and effective. My guide to complex PTSD treatment explains that pacing in depth. For people who want to move through more of the phases in concentrated blocks, I also offer EMDR intensives.

Questions people ask

Do all eight phases happen in one session? No. The phases are a map of the whole treatment, not a session agenda. Early sessions are mostly phases one and two; later sessions may run from reevaluation through body scan in a single sitting.

Can we skip the preparation phase? I won’t, and you shouldn’t want to. Preparation is what makes reprocessing possible rather than overwhelming. For complex trauma it is often the longest phase, on purpose.

What if my distress won’t go to zero? Sometimes there’s more material to process, and phase eight catches it. And sometimes remaining distress has validity, when a real threat deserves respect, and we keep it.

Do I have to use eye movements? No. Bilateral stimulation can be eye movements, handheld pulsers, or alternating tones. We use what your nervous system responds to best.

You don’t need to memorize any of this

Knowing the map can make EMDR feel less unknown, and the unknown is half the fear. But walking it is my job, not yours. If you’re wondering whether eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is a fit for what you’re carrying, you can read more on my EMDR therapy in Ottawa page, or get in touch and just ask.

If you are currently in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out for immediate support: call or text the National Suicide Crisis Helpline at 988 (24/7), the Distress Centre of Ottawa and Region at 613-238-3311, or 911 if you are in immediate danger.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice or therapy. Reading it does not create a therapist-client relationship.