Hong Kong’s English-speaking professional community has a specific problem: excellent medical provision, and very little of it in English at the level of depth this work requires.
For the expatriate and internationally educated population in finance, law and the professions, that gap matters more than it sounds. Psychological work happens in language. Conducting it in a second language, or through a clinician whose English is functional rather than fluent, produces sessions that are polite, articulate and largely ineffective, because the material is being translated before it can be felt.
Add that the professional community is small and interconnected, and that the hours leave almost no room, and the ordinary outcome is that nothing happens for years.
Which is one reason EMDR suits some people
EMDR requires less narration than talking therapies. You do not have to give an ordered account of what happened, or explain it to somebody’s satisfaction, in order to work on it.
For someone who has spent a decade not speaking about something, that lowers the threshold considerably. It is not a trick and it is not avoidance: the memory is worked with directly rather than described.
What it can and cannot do
For a discrete traumatic event, properly processed, EMDR can be remarkably effective and sometimes quick. The memory remains accessible but loses its power to intrude.
Where trauma was prolonged, or ran through childhood, the work is slower and broader, because there is no single target. Anybody promising to resolve that quickly is overstating it. On that distinction.
Practical
Hong Kong is seven or eight hours ahead of London, so London mornings suit Hong Kong evenings. No referral required. UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, HCPC-registered art psychotherapist, twenty-five years of practice and over twenty using EMDR. Both registers are public and can be checked independently.
EMDR therapy in London and trauma therapy.
Common questions
Is EMDR effective online?
Yes, and it has been used remotely for years. The protocol adapts. What matters is an experienced clinician who can tell when to slow down.
I have never talked about this. Is that a problem?
No, and it is extremely common. One of the reasons people choose EMDR is that it requires less narration than talking therapies. You do not have to give a full account of what happened in order to work on it.
Is it confidential from my employer?
Entirely. Nothing is disclosed to any employer or insurer without your written consent, and nothing is held in Hong Kong.