The most common thing people from Singapore say when they first make contact is that they do not understand why this is happening now.
Nothing has gone wrong. The job is going well, the family is settled, the difficult years are behind them. And yet sleep has become unreliable, something ordinary produces a reaction out of all proportion, and a memory they had genuinely stopped thinking about has started arriving unbidden.
This is the most misunderstood feature of trauma. It waits for safety, not for readiness. While a person is coping, the coping takes precedence. When conditions finally become stable enough, the nervous system attends to what it had to postpone, and the person concludes that they are getting worse at exactly the point they had expected to feel better.
The expatriate version of this
For the international population there is a particular shape to it. You are a long way from wherever it happened and from everyone who was there. Nobody in your current life has any context for it, which makes mentioning it feel disproportionate, and the absence of anyone who remembers can make the whole thing seem unreal.
Distance does not process anything. It simply removes the reminders, which is not the same as resolution.
What EMDR does, and does not do
It works directly on traumatic memory. For a discrete event, properly processed, it can be remarkably effective and sometimes quick. The memory remains accessible but loses its capacity to overwhelm.
Where the trauma was prolonged, or began in childhood, the work is slower and broader, because the problem is not one memory. Anyone offering to resolve that in a handful of sessions is overstating what is possible. On that distinction.
Practical
Singapore is seven or eight hours ahead of London, so London mornings suit Singapore evenings. 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
Why has this surfaced now, years later?
Because trauma tends to wait for safety rather than for readiness. A great many people manage extremely well through the difficult period and find that the symptoms arrive once life becomes stable enough to permit them.
Can EMDR be done online?
Yes, and it has been for years. What matters is that the clinician is experienced enough to notice what is happening and slow down when needed.
Is it confidential from my employer?
Entirely. Nothing is disclosed to any employer or insurer without your written consent, and nothing is held in Singapore.