More often than I can say, I get a client who feels EMDR won’t work for them, NOT because they don’t believe in EMDR but because they are certain there is a trauma back there somewhere causing their issue, but they just can’t remember it.
“I don’t remember my childhood.”
“I don’t know why I react this way.”
“I freeze in conflict.”
“I know I’m okay, but my body doesn’t believe it!”
“I had a good childhood, so why on earth would this be happening?”
They are expecting the Big T trauma, and they believe they need a specific image to work with or at least be able to place a finger on the source story—the “this is why I’m anxious” insight.
But honestly, a huge percentage of people don’t come in with that.
Instead, we rely on the nervous system and the memory network to hold energetic wisdom that we may not fully, verbally or consciously, understand.
The body/nervous system may remember the feeling of danger, shame, helplessness, unpredictability, etc. There may not be a narrative, or a “tell me what happened” that goes with that. Instead, these body experiences are a part of the triggered memory network. And once it gets triggered, whether we consciously remember all the details or not, the rest of the memory network “lights up” alongside it, beliefs, patterns, urges and more emerge.
These memory networks, conscious or not, contain all the information we need: self-beliefs, body activations, sensory information, emotional states. It all rises to the surface, even without words or images.
Essentially, the nervous system remembers what the mind doesn’t organize into story.
Why does this happen?
The lack of a traumatic image can happen quite readily when the environment is the challenge moreso than a single incident. Things like attachment wounds, emotional neglect, chronic criticism, developmental trauma, medical trauma, lifetime neurodivergent masking, growing up around dysregulation or even “good families” where emotions weren’t safe to express can create situations where there aren’t specific memories but instead a nervous system learning to cope.
The lack of a specific memory does not mean there was “nothing bad enough” to call trauma either. These things have an impact!
Likewise, this can also happen in single incidents where the experience was just so overwhelming that the nervous system needed to shut it out (read: dissociate) and sequester it to survive.
The lack of specific memories can also happen when trauma was normalized, when events were preverbal, or when sheer survival required us to minimize our experience.
So how do we handle these situations?
EMDR often starts with present-day triggers, not old memories.
My phrase for this approach is “working the periphery.”
I don’t have to go to a source to create change. Instead, I can go to the ill-defined edges of an experience by using current manifestations. Present day experiences and triggers will still light up the same memory network that initiated the issue.
So our focus could be things like what happened at work yesterday, a repeat nightmare, the Sunday night scaries, the overbearing feeling of guilt, or overreacting to your partner’s requests.
The EMDR works, because we know the behavior comes from a source, known or not, and that source is in the memory network, known or not.
As we focus on the present challenges, and we check in between EMDR sets with the question, “What do you notice right now?” the brain starts following the connections being made . . . conscious or not.
And honestly, one of the biggest fears people secretly have is:
“What if nothing comes up?”
But processing can look wildly different from person to person.
Some people get vivid memories.
Some get body sensations.
Some get emotions.
Some get random associations.
Some get colors.
Some process quietly and simply begin noticing changes later in life outside the session.
EMDR isn’t a performance art where you “do it right.” There isn’t a gold medal for having the most dramatic processing experience.
Sometimes people suddenly remember moments they had forgotten. Sometimes they don’t remember anything in particular—but the emotions become clearer and seem to self-resolve.
Sometimes the body shifts before insight arrives (but who cares if you are finally out of the slump, am I right?).
Think of it like this: it’s kind of like when someone points out you have a bruise, asking you what happened, but you have no idea. And yet, the body still heals.
It just knows what to do.
It’s just that wise.
And honestly, for my high-functioning, thoughtful, often perfectionistic people out there: the fact that you survived by becoming competent, insightful, productive, caregiving, spiritual, analytical, or high-achieving does not mean your nervous system never absorbed overwhelm.
Many people dismiss themselves from healing work unless they can produce courtroom-level evidence of suffering.
But EMDR is often about helping the nervous system stop requiring proof before it’s allowed to heal.
So, in the end, the nervous system does not require a perfect “origin story” to heal, yet the healing itself WILL become your superpower (couldn’t resist the superhero analogy.)
Love, Renee