Most Replayed Moment: Can Eye Movements Heal Trauma? Bessel Van Der Kolk Explains EMDR Therapy!

How many people do you think have trauma in some form, however you define it?

Roughly a quarter experience physical abuse, about one in five sexual abuse, about one in eight children witness violence between parents. It is not binary; people carry different imprints of what trauma means.

What is trauma doing to my brain? If you scanned me, would you see it?

Not necessarily in one person. In groups you see patterns—more or less activity in certain regions, altered connectivity—but our technology is crude compared to the brain’s universe. Still, we have learned some consistent things.

So how does trauma affect the brain?

A little alarm circuit—the periaqueductal gray, what I call the cockroach center—keeps firing, I am in danger. The insula, which links body sensations to awareness, often shuts down so you feel less scared but also less alive, which can push people to seek intensity or drugs. The amygdala, your smoke detector, becomes hypersensitive so small cues feel huge and you assume others are doing terrible things to you—like a traumatized dog that still shakes in a safe house.

What does that look like on a scan when the smoke detector goes off?

With a man we triggered by recreating his specific car crash—what he saw, heard, smelled—fear circuits lit up, the left language and reasoning side went quiet, and crucially the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the timekeeper, went offline. You lose perspective and cannot tell past from present. Trauma is not a memory; it is a reliving.

Are you consciously reliving it? I have had instant fight or flight where my body feels right back there.

It feels like now. You are not thinking, my dad hit me when I was four; you feel as if you are being hit now. The body leads.

Can that man ever stop the triggering—and what is the most radical improvement you have seen?

Yes. He did EMDR—eye movement desensitization and reprocessing—and he is fine. I have seen people come back to life. A woman shattered by a crash went from frozen to saying, that was awful and it is over, and drove her granddaughter again after three sessions. I was a skeptic—move fingers and eyes side to side, really?—until I saw it work.

You are telling me wiggling your fingers can heal trauma—and how effective is it?

We spent about fifteen years getting research funded. During recall, eye movements seem to engage pathways between the temporal parietal junction, your sense of self, and the insula, your sense of body, so the brain tags it as past rather than present. In our study of adults assaulted by strangers, seventy-eight percent were completely cured. Early childhood trauma is tougher because early experiences shape who you are; the imprint is deeper.

There are strong meta-analyses across PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Can you show me how it works on me?

Bring up a recent unpleasant event—what you saw, heard, felt in your body, and thought—and rate how vivid it feels. You said about six or seven out of ten. Now follow my finger with your eyes and breathe. You took a breath and said you felt calm, and that it was hard to recall why you were bothered. That is the point. EMDR sparks new associations without you having to narrate or filter; it reorganizes core perception. When I did it myself, stray childhood images popped up and the charge was gone. We studied it; NIH funded our main trial. It is not magic, but for many, it makes the past truly past.

What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want the full episode, I have linked it below. Check the description. Thank you.