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

When the Past Feels Present: How Trauma Rewires the Brain

There is a bluntness to the language clinicians use when they try to describe trauma: not as an event boxed in the past but as an experience that insists on happening now. In a conversation that folded clinical anecdotes into neuroimaging and treatment data, a psychiatrist described how certain primitive circuits in the brain can leave survivors living under a constant, subliminal alarm. That alarm is not metaphorical; it is a physiological state anchored deep in the brain stem and shaped by early life experience.

Primitive alarms and the anatomy of dread

At the base of the story is a small, ancient region beneath the amygdala: the periaqueductal gray. The clinician called it, with a frankness that felt almost comic, the brain’s “cockroach center.” When this area is chronically active, it produces the sensation that danger is omnipresent. The amygdala—a still-familiar shorthand for threat processing—can become hypersensitive, like a smoke detector that cannot stop ringing. The result is a low-level, constant anxiety that skews perception and social interaction.

Compounding that alarm, other systems can dampen the sense of being in a living body. The insula, which links emotion with bodily sensation, may shut down, producing a muted sense of aliveness or numbness. Without the insula’s register, survivors can feel disconnected from their own physical experience and, paradoxically, pursue substances or behaviors to feel alive again.

Reliving instead of remembering: what the scans show

Functional brain imaging provides a stark window into the difference between remembering and reliving. When people recount ordinary memories, networks on both sides of the brain stitch together feelings and narrative. In trauma, scans show a different pattern: intense activation on the right temporal-parietal junction—the feeling circuits—paired with a shutdown of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the region that governs perspective and timekeeping.

That combination explains a distinctive clinical phenomenon: the past loses its chronology. The timekeeper goes offline, and what remains are the raw sensations of the original event. A man recalling a car crash does not feel like he is remembering it; he feels like it is happening now. The memory becomes indistinguishable from present reality.

Why triggers escalate and relationships suffer

When the brain’s alarm system is tuned to hypersensitivity, small interactions can produce outsized reactions. A minor remark can register as a profound attack; an off day in one person will ripple through the relationship because the triggered person experiences the reaction as an existential threat rather than a passing annoyance. The clinician described this cascade clinically and compassionately: interpersonal friction is often fuelled by neurological states, not moral failings.

EMDR and the surprising simplicity of bilateral stimulation

Against that neurobiological background, a deceptively simple therapy has gathered both clinical acclaim and skepticism: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR. The visible technique—moving the eyes side-to-side while a patient brings up a trauma—sounds almost trivial at first. But the pattern that emerges in practice is not magic; it is measurable change.

In patients with adult-onset trauma such as assaults, controlled studies reported robust outcomes: a substantial majority experienced symptom remission or major improvement. The clinician recounted an NIH-funded trial in which 78 percent of people with adult-onset trauma were effectively cured. The mechanism, according to neurophysiological accounts, appears to involve bilateral stimulation creating new associative pathways linking the feeling centers with bodily awareness and narrative structures. In practical terms, the brain learns to slot the event back into the past.

Rapid shifts and patient stories

These changes can be startlingly fast for some people. One woman, crippled with fear after a car accident, regained her capacity to drive to her granddaughter after three EMDR sessions. During a live demonstration in the conversation, a volunteer’s distress rating dropped substantially simply by following a clinician’s finger while recalling a troubling episode. The subjective report was crisp: the event no longer felt urgent, and the memory lost its raw edge.

Limits and the stubbornness of early childhood trauma

Yet not all trauma responds the same. Early childhood trauma embeds differently; it tends to shape identity rather than merely add a painful episode to memory. Because early family environments help form core patterns of self, attachment, and expectation, those imprints resist simple desensitization. The clinician warned that childhood wounds often require a broader therapeutic arc than the rapid fixes that can work for adult-onset incidents.

Meta-analyses and recent reviews underline a mixed but hopeful picture: EMDR reduces PTSD, depression, and anxiety symptoms across trials and can offer results comparable to other evidence-based therapies. Still, the heterogeneity of trauma means treatment planning must be individualized.

What this view of trauma asks of us

Thinking of trauma as a living, present force rather than an inert past event reframes social responses, clinical priorities, and personal expectations. It alters how we listen, how we design therapy, and how we measure recovery. Recovery often requires restoring the timekeeper—the neural capacity to place feeling within a temporal context—so that the sense of threat relaxes and perspective returns.

The conversation leaves a surprising residue of optimism. Biology is not destiny: primitive circuits can be recalibrated, associative pathways reorganized, and the felt present can be returned to the past. At the same time, the clinician’s candor about the limits of our knowledge—that brain images reveal patterns but not the brain’s full complexity—keeps the account honest.

Final reflection

Trauma is therefore both a neuroscientific puzzle and a human story: an alarm system that can be soothed, an identity that can be reshaped, and a memory that can be re-situated in time. The possibility that a simple bilateral movement can help the brain reassign the emotional weight of an event is both unsettling and hopeful—an inversion of the idea that what broke you must always define you.