Using EMDR to get unstuck in coaching

Sometimes, no matter how much motivation you have and how great your coach is, you can feel as if you are barely making progress. You can’t understand it. You know what to do, and you know how to do it. But somehow you just feel stuck.

Often this feeling can be linked to long-held memories or behaviour patterns, responses that we learnt many years ago and that are still working to protect us but are no longer needed and so are just holding us back from making the progress we want to make. 

It can be truly frustrating to feel as if something that happened long ago still affects our choices and behaviours all these years later. This can be truly frustrating when you feel as if you should be ‘over it’ by now.

But the truth is that healing is about more than rationally understanding why something happened and deciding to move on. Our rational minds do not always get to decide on this. Instead, it is often about how experiences are stored within us, in our bodies, in our feelings, in our nervous system.

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a type of therapy that can help your brain process experiences that have become stuck, allowing them to become part of your past rather than something that continues to feel present.

When incorporated into a coaching session, it can provide breathing space for change to take place by allowing the trauma memories to be reprocessed, ensuring you can make plans and change long-standing behaviours into the future.

What is EMDR?

EMDR was first discovered as a therapeutic tool in the 1980s by a female therapist, Dr Francine Shapiro. She noticed that, using bilateral stimulation, her clients could work into and process away from deep-seated, long-held traumas. Although it is called Eye Movement Desensitisation, it is often practised using gentle arm movements and is a relaxed and uncomplicated process, and one that your therapist or coach guides you through from start to finish.

The bilateral stimulation is an important part of the process, allowing your brain to revisit experiences in a safe and supported way so that they can be processed differently. EMDR does not try to erase the memories but instead changes the way they are stored by actively supporting your hippocampus to send these memories back into your long-term, harder-to-reach memory storage. In this way, the memory remains, but the emotional charge attached to it becomes much less intense.

Without this deeper processing, certain situations, sounds, smells or conversations can trigger powerful emotional and physical reactions. Whilst your logical mind may know that you are safe, your nervous system is being constantly held at the ready for a recurrence. 

Many people notice this as an overreaction to a trigger or circumstance. Others might feel overwhelmed, shut down emotionally, or find themselves responding in ways that feel out of character. In all these ways, it can leave you feeling stuck in behaviour patterns and conditioned responses which inhibit progress.

Using EMDR as part of a coaching session

EMDR is particularly well known for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and its success with trauma is well documented. However, its uses extend far beyond this, and it can be a wonderful tool in both therapy and coaching sessions.

EMDR can be used to work on issues with: 

• anxiety
• persistent worry
• overwhelming emotions
• difficult early life experiences
• relationship breakdowns
• bullying
• single trauma experiences
• ongoing complex trauma
• grief
• situations in which they felt frightened, powerless or deeply ashamed

All these emotions and situations can leave you feeling stuck and unable to make changes. This is kryptonite for coaching sessions and can leave you, as a client, wondering why your sessions are going well but puzzled as to why, between sessions, you are not making the changes and progress you want to.

"But I don’t have trauma"

When we hear the word trauma, we often think of the soldier returning from battle or the victim of an assault. In reality, trauma is better understood as anything that felt too much for us to process at the time. For one person, this might involve a serious accident. For another, it may be years of feeling criticised, emotionally overlooked or never quite good enough. And for another, this might be a difficult relationship, a betrayal or an early childhood experience.

EMDR recognises that both significant life events and quieter, repeated experiences can leave lasting emotional footprints. The role of EMDR is to allow these moments to be processed so that they can stay a part of you but a part that feels calmer, more integrated and more at peace, enabling you to move ahead into new, improved behaviours.

The role of negative self-beliefs

One of the most common aspects that coaching addresses is that negative inner voice, often derived from early childhood experience, which tells us unhelpful and disempowering narratives about ourselves. It’s a common blocker to making progress and can leave coaching clients feeling stuck and frustrated.

EMDR not only helps process memories but also helps address the beliefs we have developed because of those experiences. Often it is not so much the experience of the trauma that causes the long-term issues but the narratives we then build up about ourselves and about the world based on that experience.

When difficult things happen, particularly during childhood or at vulnerable points in our lives, we often draw conclusions about ourselves.

Narratives like:

• I'm not safe.
• I'm not good enough.
• I have to keep everyone else happy.
• I don't matter.

These beliefs can develop gradually through our experiences and become so familiar that we mistake them for facts. Over time, they shape our relationships, our confidence and the choices we make. We start to believe that the stories we tell ourselves are unalterable truths about who we are. This can affect the progress we can make through life, meaning that even small changes to our behaviours and habits can feel stuck.

As memories are processed through EMDR, these long-held beliefs can begin to soften. This is not because we are being forced to think more positively about what happened, but because we are changing the emotional experience of these memories and altering the beliefs they gave us about ourselves. A belief such as "I'm not good enough" can become "I matter to those around me." Or “I’m unlovable” can become “I am loved and cherished”.

Remember, it is not that we are denying the truth. It is that we are allowing your brain a new, equally true perspective on it. By giving that new perspective, we can suddenly feel a release from those feelings of being stuck and unable to make progress. The invisible blocker is released.

Using EMDR in a coaching session

One of the biggest misconceptions about EMDR is that you will need to describe every painful detail of what happened. In reality, that is often unnecessary. Some clients like to take the time to talk through what happened to them and why it matters, and to feel that experience validated by another person. For others, they would rather keep the details within themselves and engage with the process internally. Both options work just as effectively. 

EMDR is designed to be a safe, contained and carefully guided process. Before any memory processing begins, care is taken to help you feel safe, build resources for regulation and make sure you feel ready to proceed. Often this period of preparation can take a few sessions to establish, and sometimes it can be done within one session. Throughout all sessions, you remain fully awake, aware and in control. You can pause at any point and are guided through the process at a pace that works for you. 

Often memories begin to change naturally as the sessions continue and a lot of the deep work is done at a subconscious level between sessions. Images may become less vivid, emotions less overwhelming and physical sensations less intense. There is more distance, more perspective, and the memory no longer feels as though it is happening in the present. 

Each session builds on the last, allowing time to notice changes as they happen. You may find yourself responding differently in situations that once felt overwhelming or noticing that something which used to trigger anxiety simply no longer has the same emotional grip. There is a growing sense of being released from long-standing beliefs that have held you back, allowing you to move ahead into new habits and behaviour patterns.

Moving ahead

Often our minds and bodies still carry experiences that have never had the opportunity to be fully processed. This can leave us feeling stuck in old, unhelpful patterns, inhibiting the success of coaching sessions. 

EMDR within coaching allows you to strip away some of those barriers. Not to forget what happened, but to allow it to settle into its correct position as something in the past that does not define you in the now. By processing your memories and shifting your negative self-beliefs, you will be freed to make those changes to your life and finally get unstuck.