When Understanding Isn't Enough
How Talking Therapy and EMDR Work Together
Some experiences make sense long before they stop hurting, and that gap deserves understanding rather than blame.
You can explain it perfectly. You know where the reaction comes from, which year it started, perhaps even which room it happened in. You have talked it through with friends, read the books and made the connections. Then a car door slams in the street, or someone's voice takes on a particular edge, and your body is somewhere else entirely before your mind has caught up.Your hands are cold before you know why.
Many people arrive in counselling carrying this quiet frustration. They have done the understanding. What they have not been able to do, however hard they try, is make that understanding reach the part of them that still reacts. Often this is where a private verdict begins to form: if I know all this and it still happens, the problem must be me.
That verdict rarely tells the truth. It is worth looking at more closely, because the gap between knowing and feeling is not a failure of effort or intelligence. It is something that happens to people, and something that can change.
When Knowing Why Isn't the Same as Feeling Different
There is a difference between understanding a memory and a memory being finished.
Think about the post that lands on your doormat each morning. Most of it you open, read, deal with and put away. A bill gets paid and filed. A birthday card sits on the mantelpiece for a week and then goes into a drawer. Each piece has been read, and each now belongs to a particular day in the past.
Some letters are different. They arrived at a time when opening them properly was impossible, perhaps because you were too young, too frightened, or simply too busy getting through the day. They were never read in full and never filed. Instead, they keep arriving. Every so often, usually when you least expect it, the same envelope drops through the letterbox again, looking as urgent as the first time.
You smell a particular aftershave in a supermarket queue and need to leave.This is often how overwhelming experiences are held. The mind did what it needed to do at the time, which was to keep you going. It set the letter aside. That was wisdom, not weakness. The difficulty is that a letter set aside is not the same as a letter dealt with, and the part of you that reacts has no way of knowing that the danger belongs to another time.
You're not broken. You're responding to yesterday's danger in today's world.
Perhaps you've told the story so many times that you can recite it without feeling a thing. Perhaps you've also noticed that one small detail, a sound or a smell or a turn of phrase, can still undo you in seconds. Both of those things can be true at once, and neither means you have got something wrong.
What Talking Therapy Offers
Talking therapy is a broad name, encompassing approaches including counselling and psychotherapy. What lies at the heart of both is relationship. Two people sit together, week after week, and slowly make sense of what has been carried.
Carl Rogers believed that people move towards growth when they feel genuinely understood rather than judged. Decades later, that belief still runs through good therapy.
In the room, this can look very ordinary. Someone describes their week. They mention, almost in passing, how they always leave a party early in case they have outstayed their welcome.
You apologise before you have finished the sentence.
Over time, patterns like this begin to make sense. The over-apologising, the constant checking, the way certain relationships feel both longed for and unbearable. Talking therapy offers the chance to sit at the kitchen table with someone and open those old letters slowly, reading them in good company. You begin to understand who sent them, why they arrived when they did, and what you had to become in order to survive them.
This work is often where shame begins to loosen. Shame thrives on secrecy and on the belief that if anyone saw the whole picture, they would turn away. Saying something out loud to another person, and watching them stay, can quietly rewrite that belief.
You hear yourself say it for the first time, and it sounds different outside your own head.
For many people, counselling and psychotherapy are exactly what they need, and nothing more is required. Understanding, relationship and time can bring real and lasting change. For others, some letters remain stubbornly unfiled even after they have been read and understood. This is where EMDR can help.
What EMDR Adds
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, and it was developed by Francine Shapiro, who noticed that difficult memories seemed to lose some of their charge when attention moved rhythmically from side to side.
In a session, you bring a particular memory to mind while following a therapist's hand movements with your eyes, or while noticing gentle taps or tones that alternate between left and right. You stay awake, aware and in charge throughout. You can pause or stop whenever you choose. There is no hypnosis involved, and you do not need to describe every detail of what happened for the process to work.
What many people notice is that the memory begins to shift. Images may blur or move further away. The feelings attached to it often settle. Thoughts that have been fixed for years, such as "it was my fault" or "I should have stopped it", can start to loosen by themselves, often without anyone arguing against them.
Something you have always blamed yourself for starts to look like something that happened to you.
Returning to the doormat, EMDR does not throw the letter away. The memory remains part of your life. What changes is that it finally gets filed with a date on it. It becomes something that happened, rather than something that keeps happening.
The memory is still there. It just no longer arrives as news.
EMDR is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the World Health Organization for PTSD. It is also used clinically with people whose distress is connected with experiences such as traumatic birth, bereavement, anxiety and painful childhood memories, although the evidence base varies according to the difficulty being treated. It is not a quick fix, and it does not promise a tidy before and after. Many people do find, however, that it reaches places words alone have struggled to reach.
Where the Two Meet
It can be tempting to think of talking therapy and EMDR as separate options, as though you choose one or the other. In practice, they can work alongside one another.
EMDR is itself a form of psychotherapy, and much of it is talking. Before any processing begins, there is time spent getting to know you, understanding your history, and making sure you have ways to steady yourself if feelings become strong. Daniel Siegel coined the phrase "window of tolerance" to describe the range in which we can feel difficult things without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. Good EMDR pays close attention to that window, and talking therapy is often how it is gently widened.
This matters because trust matters. Opening an old letter is far easier when you know who is sitting beside you. The relationship built through counselling is often what makes EMDR feel possible in the first place, and your choice about whether, when and how to begin stays with you throughout.
You notice you can think about it and still feel the chair beneath you.
Talking therapy also matters afterwards. When a memory settles, space opens up, and that space is rarely empty. There may be grief for what was lost, anger that had nowhere to go, or relief that feels unfamiliar. Some people find they need time to understand who they are without the old weight. Psychotherapy offers room to make sense of that change, and to let the new understanding become part of everyday life rather than something that happened in a single session.
You find yourself laughing at something that would once have flattened you.
Seen together, the two approaches do different and complementary things. Talking therapy helps you understand your story and feel less alone in it. EMDR helps the parts of that story that remain stuck to become part of the past. Moving between the two, sometimes within the same course of therapy, allows both understanding and relief to grow at a pace that feels bearable.
The goal was never to become a different person. It was to become freer to be the person you already are.
The letters are still yours.
They no longer run the house.
You decide when the drawer opens.
Choice returns.
Your history stays part of your story, and you get to live well beyond it.
Written by Kay Parkinson, MBACP (Accred) psychotherapist. Place to Talk Therapies offers individual counselling, EMDR therapy and couples counselling in person and online across the UK and internationally.
Free resources
If this article has helped you make sense of the letters you've been carrying, The Letters That Keep Arriving is a free client guide that takes the same idea a little further. It explains, in plain language, what happens in EMDR, what stays in your hands throughout, and answers some of the questions people most often ask.
Sources
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2018) Post-traumatic stress disorder (NICE guideline NG116). London: NICE.Rogers, C.R. (1961)
On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Shapiro, F. (2018)
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures. 3rd edn. New York: Guilford Press.Siegel, D.J. (1999)
The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York: Guilford Press.World Health Organization (2013)
Guidelines for the Management of Conditions Specifically Related to Stress. Geneva: WHO.
