Is It Normal to Feel Worse After an EMDR Session?

HEALING MODALITIES & THERAPEUTIC PROCESS • April 12, 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

She Cried in the Whole Foods Parking Lot

It’s a Tuesday afternoon, two days after Kira’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 is 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 has cried during a team standup with her camera off. She has cried watching a commercial for insurance. She has 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. And 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, emotionally active, accessible to the nervous system as if it’s happening right now. EMDR restarts the brain’s natural processing system, allowing that stuck material to move through and integrate.

That sounds clean and tidy in theory. In practice, “restarting” a stuck system means you have to engage 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.

That’s what Kira felt in the parking lot. Not a malfunction — a thaw.

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

The Neuroscience of Feeling 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 activated memory as a current danger. Cortisol and adrenaline are released. The body’s stress response comes online. 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.

At the same time, the bilateral stimulation keeps the prefrontal cortex — the thinking, reasoning, contextualizing part of your brain — partially engaged. Neuroimaging studies have found that during EMDR, cortical firing shifts away from limbic structures (your emotional brain) toward regions with higher cognitive valence (your thinking brain). This is what Shapiro described as adaptive information processing in motion: the memory activates, the nervous system responds, and then the bilateral stimulation helps the brain shift from pure reactivity toward integration.

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. EMDR addresses this at the neurobiological level, but doing so requires temporarily disturbing those same circuits — which is why you may leave a session feeling less focused, less flexible, and less emotionally regulated than when you arrived. The disruption is the mechanism. (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. Healing, in Levine’s framework, requires allowing that energy to complete its cycle. 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, unable to focus on spreadsheets, 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 driven clients the most.

How the Between-Session Window Shows Up in Driven Women

In my work with driven, ambitious 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 in service of keeping the peace or maintaining performance. That skill — call it emotional containment, call it fawning, call it survival — got them very far. It also meant that by the time they’re sitting across from me, they’ve spent twenty or thirty years keeping a very tight grip on what they allow themselves to feel and when.

EMDR loosens that grip. Sometimes it removes it entirely, at least temporarily. And for women whose sense of safety is built on internal control, that temporary loss of regulation feels like a crisis — even when it’s not.

Consider Kira. She’s a tech executive who has 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. Which it has. The crying in the parking lot isn’t a breakdown. It’s a 30-year backlog finally finding an exit.

What I want Kira — 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 are not 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 that required constant self-suppression to navigate. EMDR, when it works on that material, can produce particularly intense processing waves. Not because something is wrong, but because there’s a lot to move.

Normal Processing vs. Red Flags: How to Tell the Difference

One of the most important things I do with clients who are actively in an EMDR process is to 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 is what is 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. Many clients report particularly intense dreaming in the nights following an EMDR session — sometimes nightmares, sometimes dreams that feel like they’re replaying old scenarios, sometimes dreams of scenes and people from childhood. This is your brain continuing to process during REM sleep, which shares neurobiological features with the EMDR state itself. The dreams may be alarming; they are rarely a sign that something has gone wrong.

Physical fatigue. EMDR is neurologically exhausting in a way that doesn’t fully register until afterward. Your brain has been doing intensive work. Many clients feel bone-tired the day or two following a session. Plan for this if you can — a heavy meeting schedule the morning after is not your friend.

Temporary symptom increase. Anxiety, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, or old nervous system patterns may temporarily increase during active EMDR phases. This is particularly common when processing is targeting a dense memory network, or when the memory being targeted is connected to many associated experiences. It typically resolves as the processing cycle completes.

Heightened sensitivity. Sensory sensitivity, emotional reactivity to news or media, a lower threshold for feeling overwhelmed — these are all common. Your window of tolerance has temporarily narrowed while your system reorganizes. This too is temporary.

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

Complete destabilization. If you are 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 is important information for your therapist. It may mean processing has moved too fast, or that more resource-building (establishing internal safety and regulation tools) is needed before continuing.

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

Thoughts of self-harm. Any thoughts of harming yourself or others require immediate attention. Contact your therapist, a crisis line, or emergency services.

Feeling worse with every session, without any improvement across weeks. A temporary intensification is normal. A sustained, progressive worsening without any islands of relief or glimpses of integration is not. This may indicate that the pacing needs to be adjusted, that additional resourcing is needed, or that the specific memories being targeted need to be sequenced differently. A skilled EMDR therapist will adjust the treatment plan based on this feedback.

The critical principle here — one that I revisit with clients regularly — is that EMDR should be challenging without being destabilizing. You’re meant to feel the wave. You’re not meant to be swamped by it. If the wave is consistently swamping you, that’s important clinical information, not a personal failing.

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

Maya 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, 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 that 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: 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 are not contradictory statements. They are, in fact, 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 is not 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 Maya, 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. And feeling terrible in the middle of it is 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 I think deserves its own attention, particularly for the driven, ambitious 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 is not 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 are visibly emotional in the workplace are still routinely penalized. Women who cry in meetings are still, in 2026, described as “too emotional” to lead. The professional world has told high-functioning women, in countless ways and over many years, that their feelings are professional liabilities.

Many of my clients absorbed this message long before they entered the workforce — they absorbed it in childhood, in families where emotional expression was punished, dismissed, or simply ignored. They learned to manage their feelings with extraordinary efficiency. They became, in many ways, masters of internal control. And then they came to therapy — often after a career success that didn’t feel the way they expected it to, or after a relationship ended in a way they couldn’t intellectualize away, or after their body started sending signals they couldn’t override — and discovered that the tools that made them successful were also keeping them stuck.

EMDR, specifically, dismantles the control mechanism temporarily. Not permanently — this is important. 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 that is happening at a neurobiological level beneath your conscious direction. For women who are accustomed to being the one who directs things, this is deeply uncomfortable.

What I want to name here is the systemic reality: this isn’t just personal history. The women most likely to find post-EMDR processing waves destabilizing are often the women 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 who were 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 not just the grief of what happened but the muscle memory of self-silencing.

How to 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 is not one-size-fits-all; good EMDR therapists adjust the speed, depth, and focus of processing based on how you’re responding between sessions. You 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 24-48 hours afterward don’t require peak performance. This isn’t always possible, especially if you’re managing a demanding career. But if you have flexibility, use it. The morning after a particularly activating session is not the ideal moment to give a board presentation or negotiate a settlement.

Stay with the basics. Sleep, hydration, food. These aren’t glamorous recommendations, but they’re the infrastructure your nervous system needs to process effectively. Your brain is doing intensive metabolic work during the consolidation period. Deprive it of sleep or nutrition and the processing becomes harder, slower, and more dysregulating.

Move your body. Not as punishment, not as productivity — as regulation. Gentle movement, walking, yoga, swimming, anything that invites your body into the present moment and helps discharge the nervous system activation that processing stirs up. Somatic approaches complement EMDR beautifully because they help the body complete the cycles that EMDR initiates.

Limit what you consume. In the days following a particularly activating session, limit your exposure to emotionally charged content — news, social media, intense dramas, difficult conversations. Your window of tolerance is temporarily narrowed. You don’t need to add more to process.

Write it down. If memories, images, or emotional material arise between sessions, write them down. Not to analyze them — just to record them. This gives the material somewhere to go that isn’t back into suppression, and it gives you and your therapist valuable information about what the processing is touching.

Find a grounding anchor. Have a few reliable grounding practices ready — box breathing, cold water on your wrists, the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory exercise, the safe place visualization your therapist may have established with you in the resource-building phase. These don’t stop the processing; they help you stay within your window of tolerance while the processing 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 and all there ever will be. It isn’t. The wave moves. What I see consistently is that clients who can stay with the discomfort of active EMDR processing — without catastrophizing it and without suppressing it — emerge on the other side with a genuinely different relationship to the material. Not healed in the sense of nothing happened, but healed in the sense that what happened no longer runs the show.

If you’re navigating the deeper patterns beneath the post-EMDR disorientation — the childhood wounds, the relational programming, the nervous system baseline that shaped how you respond to everything — the Fixing the Foundations course offers a structured, self-paced framework for that layer of work. It complements active EMDR therapy well, particularly in the integration periods between intensive processing phases.

You can also learn more about the timeline of trauma recovery — because one of the most disorienting aspects of any trauma healing process, including EMDR, is not knowing how long the hard parts are supposed to last. Knowing what’s normal and what isn’t, knowing that the arc bends toward resolution, can make the difficult moments more bearable.

And if you’re wondering whether what you carry is high-functioning anxiety built on unresolved trauma, or whether the driven quality of your ambition is your nervous system running your career, those are questions worth sitting with — and working through with someone who understands the intersection of achievement and trauma.

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.

That’s what the material moving sounds like. Even when it sounds like sobbing in a parking lot.

If you’re ready to explore what this work might look like for you — 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 navigating this terrain at the intersection of professional and personal. And if you’re not sure where to start, taking my free quiz can help you identify the specific wound driving your current patterns.

The wave moves. I’ve watched it a thousand times. And on the other side of it is something that’s genuinely yours.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer