EMDR Therapy in London

EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is an evidence-based therapy for psychological trauma, recommended by NICE and the World Health Organization as a first-line treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. It uses bilateral stimulation to help the brain reprocess memories that were never properly integrated.

EMDR therapy in central London

EMDR therapy at 45 Fitzroy Street in Fitzrovia (W1T 6EB) and at Harley Street W1, with Dr Philippe Jacquet, who has practised EMDR for more than twenty years alongside integrative psychotherapy and Jungian analysis.

That length of practice is less a credential than a source of restraint, and the restraint is the part that matters. More on that below.

“I want EMDR”

Most people who contact me about EMDR have already decided. They have read about it, or a psychiatrist has told them it is what they need.

It is a little like going to a brain surgeon and saying: I want surgery.

The request is understandable. It is usually a measure of how badly someone wants the thing to stop. But my job is not to deliver the technique you came in asking for. It is to establish whether it is safe for you, and whether it is the right one.

The assessment comes first, and it is a real session

The work begins with a full assessment. It can be done online or in the consulting room in central London, and it is a charged clinical session like any other.

I do not offer a free first meeting, and I want to be straight about why. A free introductory session is not an assessment. It is a space in which the therapist sells himself and the client decides whether to buy. Nothing clinical happens in it. A proper assessment is work: what happened, what is still holding, what else is going on in your life, and whether EMDR is the right method for you at this point.

If it is, I will say so and we will start, and a course of EMDR usually runs to somewhere around ten sessions. If it is not, I will say that instead, and I will tell you what I think would help more.

Where EMDR works well, and where it is harder

I do not think EMDR is the best approach to all trauma.

It works very well on a specific, bounded event. A car crash. A single incident with a large impact. There it can be remarkably effective, and sometimes faster than people expect.

Where the trauma is a cluster from early childhood, it is less predictable. It can help a great deal, and sometimes it does not reach everything that needs reaching. That is not a reason to rule it out. It is a reason not to promise it in advance. What I usually suggest there is one or two sessions to see what happens, and then we decide together from what we have actually found rather than from what the method is supposed to do.

There is also a question of timing. Sometimes EMDR is the right method but the wrong moment, because a person’s life does not yet have enough stability in it to do that kind of work safely. In that case we do ordinary psychotherapy first, build the ground, and come to EMDR when there is something to stand on.

Why I will tell you if it is not right

This is worth saying plainly, because it explains a difference you may not otherwise see.

A great many practitioners offering EMDR are trained in EMDR and in nothing else. It is the only thing they do, and so it is the only thing they can offer you. When the only tool is EMDR, every problem turns out to need EMDR, and the client has no way of knowing that is what is happening.

I am a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst who also practises EMDR. That means I can say no to it without having nothing left to offer, and it means I can combine the two: EMDR for the traumatic material, and analytic work for everything around it. In practice that is usually what happens. EMDR is a very useful approach to trauma, and it is one part of the work rather than the whole of it.

What EMDR is

EMDR. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, is a structured therapy for traumatic memory.

The working idea is straightforward. Ordinary difficult memories get filed: they lose their charge, take their place in the past, and recalling them is unpleasant rather than overwhelming. Traumatic memories are not filed. They stay live, stored with the sensory and emotional intensity of the moment, so that a smell, a tone of voice, a particular quality of light returns you there completely, years later, as though it were happening rather than being remembered.

EMDR works on the filing rather than on the event. While holding the memory in mind, you follow a repeated bilateral stimulus, classically eye movements, sometimes alternating taps or sounds, in short sets, saying briefly between sets what came up. What tends to happen is that the memory loses its physical charge and becomes something that happened, rather than something happening.

It does not erase memory. It is not hypnosis, and you are awake and in control throughout. You do not have to describe the event in detail, which is often the reason people can begin at all.

What a course of work actually looks like

The first sessions are not EMDR.

They are assessment and preparation: what happened, what is currently stable, what supports exist, and whether you can settle yourself again after distress. This phase is skipped more often than it should be, and skipping it is the commonest way EMDR goes wrong.

Reprocessing follows, and for a single incident in someone otherwise stable it often takes six to twelve sessions in total. For repeated or developmental trauma, childhood neglect, prolonged fear, an environment rather than an event. There is no honest number. The work is slower, the reprocessing sits inside a broader therapy, and the useful question is not how many sessions but whether the relationship can hold what emerges.

When EMDR is the wrong first move

This is worth saying plainly, because the enthusiasm around EMDR tends to leave it out.

Where someone is drinking or using heavily, where the situation is still dangerous, where a person is holding themselves together to get through something, or where there is no stable ground to return to after a session, opening traumatic material can leave them worse than before. In those cases the correct first move is stabilisation, and EMDR comes later if it comes at all.

That judgement, when not to start, is what two decades of practice actually buys. The protocol itself can be learned in a matter of days. Knowing when to hold it back cannot. On the genuine risks and where they lie, see the dangers of EMDR therapy and what the research shows.

What it is used for here

Most widely known for PTSD, EMDR is used in this practice across a wider range:

• Single-incident trauma, an assault, an accident, a medical event, a bereavement witnessed. These often respond faster than people expect, provided the person is otherwise stable.
• Complex and developmental trauma, repeated or prolonged experience, usually beginning in childhood. Slower, and inseparable from the wider therapy.
• Anxiety and phobias with an identifiable origin, where the fear traces back to something specific.
• Grief that has become stuck rather than moving.
• Trauma beneath addiction, where the substance has been managing something that was never processed.
• Trauma beneath an eating disorder, where adverse early experience shaped the relationship with the body.

It is particularly useful where someone understands intellectually why they react as they do, and the understanding changes nothing, because what holds the reaction sits below the level language reaches.

Sequence, when trauma is not the only thing

Where trauma sits underneath addiction or an eating disorder, order matters more than technique.

Reprocessing traumatic material while someone is still drinking, using, or in an acute eating disorder tends to destabilise rather than help: it removes the anaesthetic before anything has replaced it. Stabilisation comes first, reprocessing second.

Dr Jacquet is Hazelden-trained in addiction and holds a doctorate on male eating disorders, so that sequencing is held by one clinician within one relationship, rather than negotiated across three services that may not agree.

The evidence

EMDR is among the most rigorously researched psychological therapies available. NICE recommends it as a first-line treatment for PTSD alongside trauma-focused CBT, and the World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association have reached the same conclusion.

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in the British Journal of Psychology (Simpson et al.) analysed 29 randomised controlled trials and found EMDR significantly more effective than waitlist or usual care, and equivalent to trauma-focused CBT. A 2024 meta-analysis by Wright et al. found it equally effective as Prolonged Exposure and Cognitive Processing Therapy. Independent bodies of evidence reaching the same conclusion.

If you are weighing private treatment against the NHS route, EMDR on the NHS versus private sets out waiting times, what the NHS will and will not treat with EMDR, and what it costs privately.

EMDR by location

In person at Harley Street W1, Fitzrovia and Colchester. Online for Monaco, Geneva, Zurich, Brussels, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, the Channel Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, Tokyo and Nairobi.

Practical details

Sessions are held in person at 45 Fitzroy Street, Fitzrovia, W1T 6EB, a short walk from Warren Street, Great Portland Street and Oxford Circus, at Harley Street, W1, and online by secure video.

No GP referral is required. Sessions are available in English and French. A first appointment is usually possible within the week, and that first conversation establishes what happened, what is stable, and whether EMDR is the right instrument at all. Sometimes it is not, and saying so is part of the assessment.

Arrange a first conversation.

See also: the clinical concepts behind trauma and EMDR.