EMDR Therapy: What It Is and How It Compares

If you have been reading about trauma treatment, EMDR comes up quickly and often. It has a memorable name, an unusual-sounding method, and a lot of people who say it helped them. It is reasonable to arrive at a therapy practice's website having already decided that EMDR is the thing you want.

This page is here to be useful about that rather than to sell you something adjacent. Two things worth saying at the top: EMDR is a genuinely well-evidenced treatment, and Grand Oaks does not currently offer it. We are actively recruiting a clinician trained in it. Until that person is in post we would rather say so plainly than let you find out at an intake call, so if EMDR specifically is what you are looking for, the last section tells you how to find someone who does it properly.

What EMDR actually is

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing was developed in the late 1980s. In a session, you bring a distressing memory to mind while the clinician guides you through sets of bilateral stimulation — usually following their fingers with your eyes, sometimes alternating taps or sounds. That is repeated across sessions, with the memory revisited each time.

The theory is that traumatic memories are stored differently from ordinary ones, and that this process helps the brain file them properly, so that recalling the event stops producing the full physical alarm response. The mechanism is still debated; the outcomes are not. EMDR appears in treatment guidelines from the World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a recommended treatment for PTSD.

What the guidelines actually say, which is the part usually left out

EMDR is on those lists. It is not alone on them.

The same guidelines recommend trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy, and the head-to-head research has not established that any one of them outperforms the others for most people. They work differently and they take different amounts of time, but the destination is similar.

This matters because the most common version of the question — "should I get EMDR or ordinary therapy?" — contains a false distinction. EMDR is not an alternative to evidence-based trauma therapy. It is one of several.

And there is a finding that sits underneath all of it: across decades of psychotherapy research, the strength of the working relationship between client and clinician predicts outcome more reliably than the method does. A clinician you trust, using an approach they know well, tends to beat a specific technique delivered by someone you have not clicked with.

What we do offer

Fourteen of our twenty-one clinicians work with trauma. Between them they name trauma, PTSD, complex trauma, generational trauma and trauma-related disorders as specialisms, and the approaches they use include:

Trauma-focused CBT, which works on the thoughts and the avoidance that keep a traumatic memory active, and which carries the same first-line guideline status as EMDR
Internal Family Systems, for trauma that has organised itself into conflicting parts of how someone relates to themselves
Attachment-based work, where the trauma is early, relational, or bound up in how safety was or was not established in childhood
DBT skills — distress tolerance and emotion regulation — where the immediate problem is that feelings arrive faster than they can be managed
Trauma-informed practice across the board, which is less a technique than an assumption: that pacing is the clinician's responsibility, and that going too fast is its own harm

What we do not do is start by picking a protocol. The first appointments establish what kind of trauma this is, how long it has been carried, and what else is sitting on top of it — because treating the wrong layer accurately is the usual reason trauma therapy stalls.

If you want EMDR specifically

That is a reasonable thing to want, and we would rather point you somewhere good than talk you out of it.

The EMDR International Association keeps a directory of clinicians who have completed its training, and it distinguishes between those who are trained and those who are certified — certification requires supervised consultation hours on top of the basic course. If you are searching for yourself, that distinction is the one worth filtering on. Ask how many sessions of preparation they do before any reprocessing begins; a clinician who starts bilateral stimulation in the first session is moving too fast.

We are also hiring for this. If you are an EMDR-trained clinician working in the North Shore or Lake County area, our careers page is the way in.

And if what you actually want is a clear picture of what trauma treatment involves before you choose a method, what trauma therapy actually involves walks through how it is sequenced, why stabilisation comes before processing, and why you do not have to retell everything to benefit from it.

If you are not sure what you want

Most people are not, and that is a normal position from which to make a first call rather than a reason to delay one. If what you know is that something happened and you are not the same since, that is enough to start a conversation.

Our offices are in Northbrook on Academy Drive and in Libertyville at Hawthorn Health Center, with telehealth available anywhere in Illinois, and we are in network with most major plans including Medicare. Our Intake Team matches on what you describe rather than on who is free — so if the right person for your situation has a two-week wait, they will tell you that rather than booking you with the wrong one on Thursday.