Quote by Hellen Keller

Often a goal of therapy in general and EMDR Therapy in particular is to help people be able to have a coherent narrative of their life that they can talk about without getting overwhelmed or sucked back into those experiences.

When traumatic things have occurred in a person’s life, they can get stuck in the brain in an ‘undigested’ form. This means that when the person is reminded (or triggered) they don’t just remember the experience but can relive it. This is because the elements of that experience are stuck in their raw form so that the same thoughts, feelings, reactions, and physical sensations that occurred at the time can re-occur in the present.

It is possible for folks to have the opposite reaction to traumatic experiences, and cutting themselves off from their emotions as way of coping. But that is for another post on another day.