How many EMDR sessions does it take to heal?
The short answer is that no one can answer that ahead of time. It will take what it will take. It depends on the nature of each person and what they have lived through.
For me, given the long duration of my abuse, the deeply ingrained messages, and the amount of trauma stored in my body tissues, it’s not surprising that it was going to take a long time. And still does at times. So the amount of EMDR and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy work from 2018 to the present has been the most intense and continuous of my life.
I went back through my journals and calendars for those years and discovered that the number of EMDR sessions alone numbered twenty-four to date. The heaviest load fell into the first two years – thirteen sessions by the end of 2019.
Particularly during those two years, I needed the constant repetition to slowly and carefully crack open some of those huge and painful topics. Many of those sessions were recurring themes: rage, grief, loss, terror, shame, mothering, women’s friendships, family systems, and such.
“Revisiting” is not failure
For anyone who has ever felt like they “failed” because they found themselves revisiting an issue they thought they had healed, know that “revisiting” is not failure. It is just having to go back to look at another angle, to stand on a different “step of a spiral staircase” and see things from a different vantage point. Only by doing that can one discover yet another aspect that couldn’t be seen or understood before.
For me, there were so many episodes of abuse, each weaving the many aspects of different times, locations, events, ages, and emotions; it was a formidable task. I am so, so deeply grateful to my husband and my therapist for their steadfast support and guidance. Even when I grew weary, they always encouraged me and affirmed how much progress was being made. And when I stopped to look at it, I could feel the progress, even if some of it was just small increments.
Why NOW?
So for sure, sometimes that work felt overwhelming, especially when you are a person who wants to just dig in, dig deep and hard, and get it all done at once. Yes, guilty as charged. I am slowly learning that healing has its own timetable, no matter how much work you’ve already done.
Daria Burke, when writing about a particular therapy session in her book Of My Own Making, described exactly what I felt:
“I just don’t understand why now, after all these years, this would be coming up….I’ve talked about all of this…”
In that scene, her therapist mirrored similar words from my own therapist:
“Grief has its own timeline…it can surface when we least expect it. Your child self did what she needed to survive. Now, it seems your adult self is ready to face what was buried…Sometimes, even when we’re talking…analyzing, there are parts of us that stay hidden, waiting for the right moment. Maybe after all these years…your psyche deemed you ready…this moment of mourning, arriving as it has, marks not an ending, but a beginning.”
So…I embrace the idea of “beginnings,” no matter how many times I have to revisit them.
How to “lasso” all the topics?
But just as it has been overwhelming at times to face all the work I needed and still need to do, I have found it equally challenging trying to figure out how to “lasso all of these issues, EMDR sessions, and journal notes” into a coherent storyline worth a reader’s time. More than once, I’ve wanted to give up. But I won’t. It is too important for all of us.
That said, I am NOT going to write twenty-four individual posts for each session of EMDR I have done. Instead, I will include some of the key sessions as I go forward to the end of this book. It will be a way to show how some of those issues evolved when revisiting months or years later, and how the growth proceeded.
To get a handle on this, I made a list of all the dates of EMDR sessions and journal entries, along with the relevant topics for each session. That way, I could get a 20,000-foot view of how the issues came up, receded, then came up again in a different way, in order to reveal how things evolved.
And because I am visual in my thinking, I made a mind map of questions to pose to myself for how to go forward in the EMDR work.
While all of this helped me narrow down what was most important to work on next, we always made sure to let the “processing brain” drive each EMDR session. We’d start with a concrete memory and statement, then let the brain work with that. ALWAYS, unexpected things would come up, revealing things I’d held inside, totally unaware of.
EMDR was ALWAYS for me, discovery. And every time I do it and wonder, Will it work this time?, I am always gifted with insight.
Blunt truths
Journaling before and after the EMDR sessions was also always helpful. For one, I wouldn’t forget what I had learned. And as I wrote, things would pop out on the page that I hadn’t planned on…often, as very succinct, even blunt truths:
The truth of the lack of mothering and bonding at an early age yielded, “I don’t matter.” It went in deep, with me unaware because I was so young. But it drove SO much of my insecurity, fear, and behavior for a lifetime. It’s that whole belief of: If your own mother (or father) doesn’t love you, who will? And worse…would anyone else love you if they knew the WHOLE story of your life?
If the above line wasn’t direct enough, this line from a 2019 EMDR session was a statement so powerful that it was an emotional punch right IN the EMDR session:
“I was unloved, not unlovable.”
NEVER had I ever considered that – either part of that sentence. Yet when it came out in EMDR, and even now, when I say it, it has such a strong emotional impact on me. After a lifetime of feeling “not good enough, unworthy, dirty even,” I now KNOW that I DID matter…I WAS loveable…and most of all: I DESERVED to be loved.
I think these are such common emotional scars for so many who have suffered abuse of any kind. Again, Daria Burke, in her book, spoke of similar emotions and beliefs:
“As I wrote, I reflected on the shame I’d felt over not being properly cared for as a child, and how this shame has stayed with me in my adult life. This neglect wasn’t just the absence of care, it was the presence of a pervasive belief that I was unworthy of it…I felt shame for craving love and connection, the lie being that I shouldn’t need so much, and what I did need, I should have been able to give myself.”
Every single word she wrote, I felt. All my life, I was “tough” and never depended on anyone else. I was determined “not to need.” Yet, the truth is, while I could deny that need and pretend it didn’t exist, it came out in my behaviors. I was seeking that love I never got earlier, from others in my life, and it made a mess of relationships.
Send a medic!
So the messages that came out of my EMDR work were like open wounds screaming for a medic. And journaling – something I’ll talk about soon – was vital. It was like the pre- and post-processing, AFTER the processing.
My previous post about what took place in that first EMDR session had me revisit those horrible Sunday afternoons and my father’s rage. But it also made me revisit my mother’s “turned back.”
As I wrote, I was suddenly swamped with the well of loneliness, abandonment, and pain because Mom never once checked on me those afternoons to see how I was doing in the wake of his attacks. Journaling about that EMDR session brought this message up:
Next steps
So going forward, I will interweave more discoveries from the EMDR and therapy sessions.
Next, though, I need to talk about some of the ways…the tools…I used to navigate all those emotions and therapy sessions. How I sustained. How I prepared for them. Because each of those sessions needed a properly prepared “me” to do them.
A geologist going out to unearth rare fossils takes along a wide swath of specialty tools – probes and chisels, brushes and hammers, sometimes even rock saws – to delicately free a treasure unseen for millennia.
Buried treasure. Yes, that is what I was after.
So, about that tool chest…
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and return home for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Soul Mosaic 
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