Is It Normal to Feel Worse After an EMDR Session?

HEALING MODALITIES & THERAPEUTIC PROCESS • April 12, 2026

LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026

Last updated: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: EMDR is a structured, eight-phase therapy that uses bilateral stimulation to help the nervous system reprocess traumatic memories so they no longer hijack daily life.

Why Was She Crying in the Whole Foods Parking Lot?

It’s a Tuesday afternoon, two days after Cleo’s most recent EMDR session. She’s 38, a tech executive, someone who has run product launches and managed cross-functional teams of forty people without flinching. She’s sitting in her car in a Whole Foods parking lot, and she’s sobbing.

Not the quiet, dignified kind of crying she can manage in a bathroom stall. The ugly, heaving, body-involved kind, the kind she hasn’t done since she was maybe seven years old, long before she learned to press it down into something manageable, something that didn’t take up so much space. She’s cried during a team standup with her camera off. She’s cried watching a commercial for insurance. She’s cried for no particular reason, pulled over to let it move through her before she could drive again.

She texts her therapist: Is this supposed to happen?

The answer comes back quickly: Yes. This is the material moving.

If you’ve had a similar experience after an EMDR session, if you’ve walked out of the therapy room feeling more unraveled than when you walked in, more sensitive, more raw, more exhausted: you’re not doing it wrong. You’re not having a breakdown. EMDR isn’t hurting you. What’s happening is something far more specific, far more neurobiological, and ultimately far more hopeful than it feels in the parking lot.

Let me explain what’s actually going on.

What Is EMDR, and Why Does It Stir Things Up?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It was developed in the late 1980s by psychologist Francine Shapiro, PhD, the founder of EMDR therapy and creator of the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, who noticed, almost accidentally, that moving her eyes back and forth while holding a distressing thought seemed to reduce its emotional charge. What began as an observation became one of the most rigorously studied trauma therapies in existence, now endorsed by the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association for treating PTSD (PMID: 11748594).

EMDR uses bilateral stimulation: guided eye movements, alternating taps, or sounds that shift from left to right, to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories that got “stuck.” According to Shapiro’s Adaptive Information Processing model, trauma interrupts the brain’s natural capacity to integrate experience. The memory doesn’t get filed away as a past event; it stays raw and accessible to the nervous system as if it’s happening right now. EMDR restarts that natural processing system, letting stuck material move through and integrate.

That sounds clean and tidy in theory. In practice, “restarting” a stuck system means engaging it first, and engaging a traumatic memory (really activating it, not just talking about it) means it comes online. The grief that got locked away in 1994 doesn’t know it’s 2026. When EMDR touches it, it responds like it’s still 1994. If this resonates, you may want to explore EMDR online vs in person.

That’s what Cleo felt in the parking lot. Not a malfunction. A thaw.

This is why EMDR is categorically different from talk therapy. In a traditional session, you might talk about a difficult memory from a safe narrative distance. EMDR asks you to enter it, activating it sensorially, emotionally, and somatically, while bilateral stimulation keeps one foot in the present moment. That dual attention is what makes reconsolidation possible, and it’s also what makes the hours afterward feel like the psychological equivalent of a deep-tissue massage: necessary and uncomfortable as hell.

If you’re considering or currently doing somatic trauma therapy, EMDR often works alongside body-based approaches to release what’s been held. Both access what talk therapy often can’t reach.

Why Do You Feel Worse Before You Feel Better?

When EMDR activates a traumatic memory, several things happen in the brain simultaneously. The amygdala, your brain’s threat-detection center, lights up, interpreting the memory as current danger. Cortisol and adrenaline are released. This is why you might feel a racing heart, tightening in your chest, or a wave of nausea during a processing session. You’re not imagining it. Your nervous system is genuinely responding as if the past event is present.

Here’s what the research has been showing for decades, and what I watch happen in session almost every week. At the same time the amygdala is lighting up, the bilateral stimulation keeps the prefrontal cortex (the thinking, reasoning, contextualizing part of your brain) partially engaged. Think of it like a smoke alarm going off during a kitchen fire that happened years ago: the alarm sounds, loud and real, but a second system is also online, gently reminding the rest of the house that the fire is over. Neuroimaging studies have found that during EMDR, cortical firing shifts away from limbic structures toward regions with higher cognitive valence, which is what Shapiro described as adaptive information processing in motion. In practice, this is why you can leave a session shaking and still remember to text your therapist, pick up your kid, and drive home. Both systems are working. Neither one is broken.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, trauma researcher, psychiatrist, and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about why trauma treatment must engage the body directly, not just the narrative. “Trauma interferes with the brain circuits that involve focusing, flexibility, and being able to stay in emotional control,” he writes. I think about that sentence often, because it names precisely what clients describe the day after an intense session: less focus, less flexibility, less emotional control than when they walked in. EMDR addresses this at the neurobiological level, but doing so requires temporarily disturbing those same circuits (PMID: 9384857).

Peter Levine, PhD, psychologist, developer of Somatic Experiencing, and author of Waking the Tiger, describes trauma as energy that gets locked in the nervous system when the body’s natural response (fight, flee, freeze) is interrupted. The line of his that has stayed with me is his insistence that healing requires allowing that locked energy to complete its cycle, not talk it into submission. EMDR is one of the ways that process gets initiated, and like any locked system suddenly released, it doesn’t discharge quietly. It moves through you. Sometimes loudly (PMID: 25699005).

What I see consistently in my work with clients is that the between-session window, typically 24 to 72 hours after a session, is often the most disorienting part of the EMDR process. Clients who’ve managed their emotions skillfully for decades suddenly find themselves crying at podcasts or waking at 3am from dreams so vivid they feel like lived experience. This isn’t regression. It’s the processing wave moving through.

The temporary intensification of symptoms during active EMDR treatment is well documented in the clinical literature. If you’ve been doing high-functioning anxiety management strategies for years (staying busy, staying productive, staying ahead of your feelings), EMDR will temporarily interrupt those strategies. That interruption is by design. It’s also the part that tends to scare my most ambitious, driven clients the most.

How Does the Between-Session Window Show Up in driven women?

In my work with driven women, the lawyers, executives, physicians, and entrepreneurs who run demanding lives with impressive competence, there’s a specific flavor of post-EMDR distress that shows up again and again. It’s not just the emotional intensity that’s hard. It’s the loss of control over their own inner experience, often for the first time in years.

Driven women tend to be excellent emotional managers. Many of my clients spent their childhoods learning to read rooms, regulate other people’s emotional states, and suppress their own needs to keep the peace or maintain performance. That skill got them very far. It also meant they’ve spent twenty or thirty years keeping a tight grip on what they allow themselves to feel and when.

EMDR loosens that grip. Sometimes it removes it entirely, at least temporarily. Of course that feels like a crisis. For women whose sense of safety is built on internal control, a sudden loss of regulation registers as danger, even when it isn’t one.

Cleo built her professional identity on being the person in the room who doesn’t panic, who thinks clearly, who leads without falling apart. Her childhood emotional neglect, the quiet, chronic kind where no one hit her but no one was really present either, taught her that falling apart was dangerous, that big feelings weren’t safe, that staying composed was how you stayed loved.

So when EMDR begins moving that stored grief and rage and loneliness out of the body where it’s been packed away, it doesn’t come out quietly. It comes out like it’s been waiting a very long time, because it has. The crying in the parking lot isn’t a breakdown. It’s a thirty-year backlog finally finding an exit.

What I want Cleo, and every woman like her, to understand is this: the fact that you’re feeling it means your nervous system trusts the process enough to let it move. The body doesn’t release what it doesn’t believe it can survive releasing. Your tears aren’t a sign of weakness. They’re a sign that something that needed to move is finally moving.

This is deeply connected to what I see in women healing from complex PTSD. The wound is often less about a single event and more about a chronic environment of emotional unsafety. EMDR can produce particularly intense processing waves on that material. Not because something is wrong, but because there’s a lot to move.

What’s Normal Processing, and What’s a Red Flag?

One of the most important things I do with clients who are actively in an EMDR process is set clear expectations about what’s normal and what’s worth flagging, because the distinction matters enormously, both for your safety and for your ability to stay in the therapeutic process long enough for it to work.

Here’s what’s normal after an EMDR session, particularly in the first 72 hours:

Emotional intensity. Heightened sadness, grief, anger, or anxiety that feels disproportionate to your immediate circumstances. You might cry more than usual, feel irritable, or find yourself pulled toward particular memories or feelings without an obvious trigger. This is the processing wave in motion. It’s uncomfortable and it’s temporary.

Vivid, active dreams and physical fatigue. Many clients report intense dreaming in the nights following a session, sometimes nightmares, sometimes dreams replaying old scenarios from childhood. This is your brain continuing to process during REM sleep, and it’s also neurologically exhausting; many clients feel bone-tired the day or two after, so a heavy meeting schedule the morning after isn’t your friend.

Temporary symptom increase and heightened sensitivity. Anxiety, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, or old nervous system patterns may temporarily increase during active EMDR phases, especially when the targeted memory connects to many associated experiences. Your window of tolerance has temporarily narrowed while your system reorganizes, and this typically resolves as the processing cycle completes.

Now, here’s what’s worth bringing to your therapist’s immediate attention.

Complete destabilization. If you’re unable to function, unable to care for yourself, unable to manage basic daily tasks, unable to access any sense of safety or groundedness, for more than a day or two, that’s important information for your therapist. It may mean processing moved too fast, or that more resource building is needed before continuing. Tell your therapist. Don’t wait for your next scheduled session if it’s severe.

Dissociation that doesn’t resolve. Brief dissociation during or after a session can be normal. Prolonged dissociation, feeling detached from your body or your sense of self in a way that doesn’t lift, is a signal to contact your therapist and adjust the pacing.

Thoughts of self-harm or suicide. Any thoughts of harming yourself or someone else aren’t something to manage alone or wait out. Contact your therapist right away, or if you’re in immediate danger, call or text 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or go to your nearest emergency room. Safety always comes before processing.

Feeling worse with every session, without any improvement across weeks. A temporary intensification is normal. A sustained, progressive worsening without islands of relief isn’t. This may mean pacing needs adjustment, more resourcing is needed, or the targeted memories need to be sequenced differently. A skilled EMDR therapist will adjust the treatment plan based on this feedback, and you’re allowed to ask for that adjustment.

The critical principle here, one I revisit with clients regularly, is that EMDR should be challenging without being destabilizing. If the wave is consistently swamping you rather than moving through you, that’s important clinical information to bring to your therapist. It’s not a personal failing, and it’s not something to push through on your own.

When Cleo and I went through this list together, three sessions after her Whole Foods parking lot afternoon, she recognized almost every item in the first column. “So I’m not broken,” she said, and it wasn’t quite a question. What she’d actually been afraid of, she admitted, was that the crying meant EMDR was making things worse, permanently, and that she’d opened something she couldn’t close back up. Naming the difference between a processing wave and a red flag gave her something her spreadsheet brain could hold onto: a way to track her own data without pathologizing it.

Both/And: EMDR Is Working and It Feels Terrible Right Now

Sneha is 43, an attorney who has spent two decades in a high-stakes litigation practice. She’s precise, articulate, formidable. She chose EMDR for the same reason she chooses most things: it has the best evidence base, the strongest outcome data, the most rigorous research backing of any trauma treatment in existence. She approached it the way she approaches a case, with preparation, strategy, and a plan.

After her sixth EMDR session, targeting the chronic emotional neglect of her childhood and the family home where feelings were never named and certainly never welcomed, she had a dream so vivid she woke up gasping. In the dream she was eight years old, standing in her parents’ kitchen, and she was screaming. Screaming for someone to listen, screaming to be seen, screaming with a force and rage she never once allowed herself as a child. She was the quiet one. The one who didn’t make trouble.

She called her therapist the next morning, shaken. Had something broken? Was she getting worse?

Her therapist explained that the dream was her psyche doing what her body couldn’t do at eight years old: expressing the rage that had no outlet then, the scream she couldn’t make in her parents’ kitchen because it wasn’t safe, because she needed them too much, because she’d learned so young to make herself small. Her nervous system had been holding that scream in the tissue of her body for thirty-five years. EMDR gave it somewhere to go.

This is the both/and of EMDR that I think about often in my practice. EMDR is working and it feels terrible right now. These aren’t contradictory statements. They’re the same statement, viewed from different angles.

Dickinson wrote this, one of the most precise descriptions of psychological fracture in the English language, about a different kind of break. But what she captured is exactly what the EMDR processing window can feel like: the experience of a mind that’s been opened, whose contents have been disturbed and don’t yet fit back together in the familiar way. That cleaving isn’t a wound. It’s the process of reorganization. The seam will close. It will close differently: more authentically, less armored, more truly than it was before.

For Sneha, the dream of the eight-year-old screaming in the kitchen was, paradoxically, one of the first signs of healing. The psyche was no longer suppressing what had been suppressed for decades. The material was finally moving. Three sessions later, she described sitting in the same family home over a holiday weekend and feeling, for the first time, a kind of equanimity she’d never accessed before. Not the controlled, managed equanimity of someone holding it together, but something quieter and more genuinely stable.

She also noticed that her relationship with childhood emotional neglect had shifted. Not that it hadn’t happened, not that it hadn’t shaped her, but that it no longer had the same grip. She could think about her parents with something closer to compassion, and something closer to sadness, rather than the flat numbness that had previously protected her from both.

This is what EMDR does, when it works. Feeling terrible in the middle of it’s often the clearest evidence that it’s working.

The Systemic Lens: Why Control Is the First Thing EMDR Takes

There’s a specific dimension of the post-EMDR experience that deserves its own attention, particularly for the driven women I work with, and it’s this: EMDR requires you to surrender control of your own inner experience. For women whose primary coping mechanism is control (internal, external, emotional, professional), that requirement isn’t trivial. It’s the thing.

We live in a culture that prizes emotional regulation, particularly for women in professional settings. The expectation is: manage your feelings, be composed, don’t let your emotions affect your performance. Women who cry in meetings are still, in 2026, described as “too emotional” to lead. The professional world has told capable women that their feelings are liabilities.

Many of my clients absorbed this message long before they entered the workforce, in families where emotional expression was punished, dismissed, or ignored. They became masters of internal control. Then they came to therapy, often after a career success that didn’t feel the way they expected, and discovered that the tools that made them successful were also keeping them stuck.

EMDR, specifically, dismantles the control mechanism temporarily, not permanently. You will get your regulation back. You will be able to function again. But during the active processing phase, EMDR asks you to let the emotions move, to stay with the discomfort rather than suppressing it, to trust a process happening at a neurobiological level beneath your conscious direction. For women accustomed to being the one who directs things, this is deeply uncomfortable.

What I want to name here’s the systemic reality underneath the personal one. The women most likely to find post-EMDR processing waves destabilizing are often the ones who had the fewest models for emotional expression growing up: girls raised in families, cultures, or religious contexts where big feelings were dangerous or shameful, girls praised for being “so mature,” “so responsible,” “so easy,” girls who learned that their value was in what they produced, not in what they felt.

That conditioning doesn’t disappear. But it can be metabolized, and trauma-informed therapy, including EMDR, is one of the most effective ways we have of doing that metabolizing. The between-session discomfort is part of the metabolic process. It’s the system working through what it’s been asked to hold for too long.

This is also relevant for understanding betrayal trauma in particular, which often involves a double wound: the original injury and the injunction against acknowledging it. EMDR can be particularly activating when targeting betrayal memories, because the body is holding the grief of what happened and, underneath it, the muscle memory of self-silencing.

How Do You Manage the Between-Session Window?

If you’re in an active EMDR process, the space between sessions is where a significant amount of the integration work happens. Here’s what I recommend, and what I share with my own clients, for managing that window with both honesty and care.

Communicate with your therapist. If you’ve had a rough week between sessions, say so at the beginning of your next appointment. Your therapist needs this information to pace the treatment appropriately. EMDR therapy isn’t one-size-fits-all. Good EMDR therapists adjust the speed, depth, and focus of processing based on how you’re responding between sessions. Advocating for what you’re experiencing isn’t weakness. It’s clinical information.

Build in recovery time. If you can, schedule EMDR sessions on days where the 24 to 48 hours afterward don’t require peak performance. The morning after an activating session isn’t the moment to give a board presentation or negotiate a settlement.

Stay with the basics. Sleep, hydration, food. These aren’t glamorous, but they’re the infrastructure your nervous system needs to process effectively. Deprive it of sleep or nutrition and the processing gets harder and more dysregulating.

Move your body, and limit what you consume. Gentle movement, walking, yoga, swimming, anything that invites your body into the present moment and helps discharge the activation processing stirs up. Somatic approaches complement EMDR well here. Also limit emotionally charged content in those days: news, social media, intense dramas. Your window of tolerance is temporarily narrowed.

Write it down, and find a grounding anchor. If memories or emotional material arise between sessions, write them down, not to analyze them, just to record them for your therapist. Have a few reliable grounding practices ready, too: box breathing, cold water on your wrists, the safe place visualization your therapist may have established with you. These don’t stop the processing. They help you stay within your window of tolerance while it happens.

Trust the arc, not the moment. This is harder than it sounds. When you’re in the middle of a processing wave, it can feel like this is all there is. It isn’t. The wave moves. Clients who stay with the discomfort, without catastrophizing it and without suppressing it, emerge with a genuinely different relationship to the material.

Of course this phase feels disorienting. You’re not imagining how hard it is, and you’re not doing it wrong. If you’re working through the deeper patterns beneath the post-EMDR disorientation, the Fixing the Foundations^™ course offers a structured, self-paced framework for that layer of work, alongside your broader trauma recovery timeline. It complements active EMDR therapy well, particularly between intensive processing phases. This is educational support, not a substitute for your therapist’s clinical judgment about your specific treatment.

The cleaving Dickinson described eventually resolves. The seams eventually match, not as they were before, because before was the shape of the wound. After EMDR, the shape is something truer, something that belongs to the life you actually want to live, rather than the one you built to survive what happened to you.

Cleo still parks in the same Whole Foods lot most Tuesdays. Six weeks after that first afternoon, she told me she’d cried there again, once, over something smaller this time: a song on the radio, not a memory. “I let myself sit there for it,” she said. “I didn’t drive off right away.” She still runs cross-functional teams of forty people without flinching. She’s also, now, a woman who can sit in a parked car and feel something all the way through before she puts the car in drive.

If you’re ready to bring a skilled, trauma-informed eye to the patterns beneath the patterns, I’d love to connect. You can learn more about working with me individually or explore executive coaching if you’re facing this at the intersection of professional and personal life. If you’re not sure where to start, Fixing the Foundations^™ offers a structured, self-paced course for mid- to high-functioning adults with relational trauma.

Warmly, Annie.

This post is educational and general in nature. It’s not a substitute for individualized clinical care. If you’re in an active EMDR process, decisions about pacing, resourcing, and treatment adjustments belong to you and your own therapist, not to a blog post. Don’t wait, and don’t try to push through a mental health emergency on your own.

This content is psychoeducational in nature and isn’t a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

If you left an EMDR session feeling scraped raw, more tired or tearful or activated than when you walked in, I want to say clearly: that doesn’t mean it isn’t working, and it doesn’t mean something went wrong with you. Reprocessing stirs things up before it settles them. You can trust the process and also honor that this part is genuinely hard, both at once, and the difficulty isn’t a sign of failure. The old material is moving, and movement, at first, can feel like disruption. Please go gently with yourself in the hours and days after a session. Rest more than feels reasonable. Tell your therapist exactly what came up, especially if it felt like too much, because the pacing is meant to be collaborative and yours to adjust. You’re not doing this wrong. You’re doing something brave. When you’re ready for support, I’m here.

Warmly,
Annie

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.

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