EMDR is the most effective treatment I know for a traumatic memory that will not settle. A single event, clearly remembered, still generating distress years later: that is what EMDR was built for, and it can resolve it faster than talking around it ever will.
I have practised it for more than twenty years. I am also going to be honest about its limits, because most pages on this subject are not. EMDR does not resolve complex trauma the way it resolves single-event trauma. When someone has been living inside something for years rather than surviving one thing that happened, EMDR is part of the work rather than the whole of it.
It genuinely works online
This is the part people doubt, so let me be specific.
Bilateral stimulation can be delivered online. The protocol holds. I have now done well over a hundred EMDR sessions remotely, and it works without a problem.
Some of the best results I have had have been with people who could not reach my consulting room at all: clients in Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon, and in parts of England too far from London for a weekly appointment. Distance turned out not to be the obstacle everyone assumed it was.
The research agrees, which is worth saying because my experience on its own is not evidence. Randomised trials comparing video-delivered EMDR with in-person treatment have found no statistically significant difference in symptom reduction. A twelve month service evaluation at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board found that patients who had EMDR online finished treatment with lower PTSD scores than those seen in the room. The consistent caveat in that literature is fidelity: it works when the therapist adapts the protocol properly, not automatically because it is on a screen.
Why someone in Dublin might come to me
Ireland has very good addiction counsellors. There are people doing good work with eating disorders, and there are people doing EMDR. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What is harder to find is one person who can hold all of it at once.
Addiction, eating disorders and trauma are not three separate problems that happen to occur together. They are usually one psychological profile presenting in three directions. Someone arrives about their drinking, and underneath it is a relationship with food that nobody has asked about, and underneath that is something that happened long before either. Add the anxiety and the depression that travel with all of it.
You can find clinicians in Ireland who do each of those things separately. If you arrive with the full package, you will struggle to find one person who can follow you through the whole of it.
That is my specialism: the complex case, complex PTSD, where addiction and often an eating disorder sit in the same person. Eating disorders are where most of my clinical life has been spent, and where I work with art, creativity and Jungian thought alongside everything else.
The other reason, which nobody writes down
Ireland is a small island, and everybody knows everybody.
I lived in Ireland in 2003 and 2004, training and doing some volunteering. While I was there I had dinner in Cork one evening, and said something about the bed and breakfast I was staying in. Nothing dramatic. Mildly unflattering.
By the time I got back, the landlady knew. A friend of hers had been in the pub, had heard it, and had passed it on. She let me know she was not impressed.
That is a funny story about a bad night’s sleep. It is not funny at all if the subject is your drinking, your marriage, or an eating disorder you have never told anybody about.
If you see a therapist in Dublin, there is a reasonable chance they know somebody you know. Not through any fault of theirs. It is a small country and the professional and social circles overlap.
A year of volunteering two decades ago does not make me an insider, and I would not claim otherwise. But I know the place well enough not to misread you. And, far more to the point, I am not in it. I do not know your GP. I do not know your employer. I do not know anyone who drinks in your local, and nobody I know will be in the pub when your name comes up.
For some people that is the whole reason they get in touch.
When EMDR is not the right place to begin
If you are drinking or using daily, EMDR is not where the work starts. Processing trauma while a substance is doing the regulating tends to destabilise rather than resolve. That sequencing is part of what an assessment is for.
The same applies in the acute phase of an eating disorder. There is a medical reality that comes first.
Practicalities
Sessions are held online by secure video, from Dublin or anywhere else in Ireland.
I am a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. My doctorate at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be verified on the UKCP register.
If in-person work is what you need, I will say so at the assessment. That is a real conversation rather than a formality. Sometimes the right answer is a person in the room, and occasionally it is residential treatment, and I would rather tell you that at the start than six sessions in.
If you are in crisis in Ireland, Pieta is free and open twenty four hours on 1800 247 247, or text HELP to 51444. Samaritans is free on 116 123, day or night. In an emergency call 112 or 999.
This page is for information and does not replace assessment or treatment.
Arrange a consultation