To See Something You Have To Look At It

I held two plastic pulsers, one in each hand. Left pulse, right pulse. The alternating stimulation created a quiet rhythm threading through the session, activating (in theory) both hemispheres of my brain.

"Now focus on the painful memory," my therapist instructed, "as if you're watching it play like a movie, over and over again."

This was challenging. My memory doesn't easily take shape in language or linear storylines, as I've written about before. This is a common phenomenon in traumatic memory storage, where experiences remain fragmented in implicit memory systems. There are «fragments» «flashes» but mostly, the memory is somatic: a feeling, a texture. Still, I conjured something, likely a patchwork stitched from many moments, and pressed play.

A pulse in my left hand. A pulse in my right.

"What's coming up?" she asked gently.

I described what surfaced: a color, a sound, an atmosphere. She encouraged me to find words for it, to build a thread of narrative where none had lived. I never felt language could quite capture the full truth. But the act of trying, the act of looking, mattered.

Over the course of months, we returned again and again to the same memory-scene. Until then, I had reflexively avoided it. And because I avoided it, there was so much I had never truly seen. Neither in the moments themselves nor in the years that followed.

At a recent conference, I heard someone describe EMDR as essentially a form of exposure therapy, mentioning that "there's one study everyone points to" in its defense. It made me pause. I don't know if my brain was actually "reprocessing" memories, as EMDR theory claims, or if the benefit came simply from the repeated exposure, the difficult and brave act of looking. 

Research backs up some of that skepticism. Studies suggest that the eye movements or alternating stimulation (the part that makes EMDR unique) may not be necessary at all. A 2000 paper in Clinical Psychology Review cites studies showing that the bilateral stimulation component shows minimal additional benefit compared to the same protocol without it. Clinical improvements seem more tied to the exposure itself: returning to the memory, feeling it fully, giving it shape in language. The paper’s provocation is that EMDR's core mechanism remains scientifically unproven, and that its marketing has often outpaced its evidence.

No doubt, something shifted for me through my experience with EMDR. But was it actually the EMDR? Was it simply the passage of time? Or the structure of having someone witness my remembering? I don't know.

What I do know is that it helped me see. And from that seeing came grief. 

First anger, then depression, then, eventually, acceptance and compassion. The stages of grief aren't linear, but they do reflect progressive emotional processing. Time doing its thing. 

It took years, but I felt it all—the full spectrum of emotions that trauma initially interrupted.

After a brief reprieve, I tried EMDR again with the same therapist.

This time, it didn't stick. It was as if that form of therapy had already given me all it could and would.

The varied experience shaped how I now approach any new therapy, whether backed by settled science or still unproven. I treat them as experiments. Quiet ones. I stay away from the media noise and the endless commentary online, letting myself come to my own conclusions. 

Healing feels like trial and error sometimes. The heterogeneity of traumatic response means that no single intervention works universally. It can be frustrating from both clinical and personal perspectives.

But each little experiment teaches something: what helps, what doesn't, what pieces of a method shine through even if the theory behind it doesn't hold. This iterative process comforts the scientist in me - hypothesis testing, observing, and refining. Rinse and repeat.

Maybe that's what the alternating pulses gave me. Not a miracle cure, but structure, a quiet grid laid over something too chaotic to name. A coherent sensory input that provided just enough organization to begin processing.

Maybe that's what Agnes Martin found, too, in her meticulous grids: a rhythm sturdy enough to hold a fractured world.¹ A structured framework within which the chaotic can be contained, examined, and gradually integrated. It's the same underlying mechanism that makes journaling, meditation, and other contemplative practices effective tools for healing and growth.

The science of trauma recovery continues to evolve, sometimes confirming and sometimes challenging our subjective experiences of healing. The most honest approach may be to hold both in mind: the rigor of empirical research and the authentic truth of lived experience. In that space between, we find both science and the human story, each (I would argue) incomplete without the other.

1  Images courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art