Change Your Brain Every Day - The Trauma Therapy No One Talks About: EMDR Therapy

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

In this week's mini episode, Dr. Amen discusses the trauma therapy no one talks about: EMDR therapy.

Every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn how you can change your brain for the better every day. I am here with one of my teachers and mentors and friends and Dr. Curtis Roundsen, who is a psychologist, who is a senior trainer in EMDR, a specific psychological treatment for not only trauma, but for anxiety, for depression, for optimization. And we're going to talk today about EMDR and a professional training course. If you are a medical or mental health professional, you want to pay particular attention. And if you're in therapy, tell your therapist about the conversation that we're going to have and also tell us where you're from I always love to know where people are from so

dr. Roundsen welcome thank you so how did you learn about EMDR now you and I've been doing this for a long yeah we've been helping people for a long time but how did EMDR come into your life well it came into my life 31 years ago Francine Shapiro the psychologist that developed it was developing trainings at that time. And frankly, I was at a place in my psychological practice where I was getting bored and frustrated because I had been training many therapeutic interventions through my doctoral program. And I was good at most of them, you know. I felt good at most of them. But I found myself being frustrated because so many of the people I saw would come in, and let's say they were, you know, not functioning well.

And I was able to get them from not really functioning well with those interventions to a place I called functional. Now, that would mean, like, I had someone that could, agoraphobia couldn't leave their room and couldn't drive their car at all. And I got them to the place where they could drive their car on side streets or they could get to work. And they were perfectly happy with that change. change because now they weren't in their room anymore.

And I got asked to go to this training with Dr. Shapiro, and I got trained in EMDR. And the first thing that happened, Daniel, I had the practicum experience where I myself was sitting there and we were practicing this crazy thing that I thought was silly. And then I had an experience in a practicum, in a room of all these people with someone that was trying to be a clinician, reading the manuals and trying to learn it. had this profound physical change from something happened to me when I was in third grade. It shifted. It had always been there. I had done all these other therapeutic kind of interventions in my doctoral program, you know, everything you could imagine. And I could talk about it,

but I never had that experience. And so I went to this training, and all of a sudden I realized that, my gosh, I can now move people from not just non-functional, through functional, to thriving. and that's why I'm still in the business 31 years later because I see that in my office every day. Well, and I've actually studied the MDR on a group of police officers who are involved in shootings and none of them could go back to work

and after an average of eight sessions, all of them went back to work and we could see the changes in their brain. So actually, for the last 31 years, I've recommended it, but it was only recently, I'm like, okay, I need to learn how to do this. And I have actually never had more fun as a psychiatrist because I became a psychiatrist to help people. That is the biggest joy I have, and Kurt trained me. He has a training company, EMDR professional training.

We'll put the link there, EMDR professional training. Training.com. So can you explain what EMDR is to the group? Yeah, EMDR is a methodology that really is helping the brain do what it's built to do normally. And as Daniel and I spoken before, the brain is designed. It has evolved to heal itself. Just like if you cut your finger and you go to your physician, he or she does not heal you. They'll butterfly, they'll suture, they'll bandage. And you walk out of that office. And the finger continues to healing itself unless something, an obstacle, something intervenes that needs added intervention. It gets torn open, it gets infected, then added interventions are necessary.

Well, the brain works to heal itself, and our brains will go over things again and again, ruminate over them, when bad things happen, we'll dream about them. But if our brain's working normally, normally at the end of that process, which may take a few weeks or months, a bad thing that we experienced gets stored in what I call it. a narrative historical form where they can talk about it without the upset without that punch in the gut. Hyper-arousal.

Traumatic memory gets stored in the nervousism. In EMDR, we like to say, trauma is never defined by how big the event is, but how it gets stored in the nervous system. And traumatic memories tend to get stored in a frozen bubble of isolated experience with all the sights, sound, smells, physical sensation,

hyper arousal, the emotions at the time. and one other thing gets stored and as the developmental age or coping ability present for that person at the time it happened. So if something happens at six years of age, a grown-up adult will go back and if they experience that frozen

traumatically stored memory, they're going to have the coping ability to that six-year-old which is why so many come in to me and say, Kurt, I know I shouldn't feel or think this way, but in my heart at heart it feels like it's true. Wow. And EMDR just developed, some abilities to help the brain.

I'm doing this because we do eye movements. We do bilateral stimulation. This is just phase four of an eight-phase treatment. So it's just not this. It's actually a very complicated procedure, don't you think? Well, I think how you teach it, you actually make it really simple. Yeah, trying to simplify it. And who among us have not had traumas in the past?

I give all of our patients here at Damon Clinic something called the ACE quiz, the adverse childhood experiences, and it's on a scale of zero to 10. And it's like 10 of the worst things that can happen to kids from physical, emotional, sexual abuse, to your parents getting divorced, to watching a parent being abused, to being raised with someone who goes to jail, someone with an addiction, someone with the mental health challenge. And a lot of anxiety, right? Anxiety is at epidemic levels.

A lot of depression, a lot of anger and rage actually has its foundation or it started in early childhood trauma. Absolutely. Absolutely. On average, how many sessions do people go to? Well, being a psychologist, I'm going to give you the great psychological answer. It depends. The research has shown from the very early days that a single traumatic incident, a single incident, can usually be resolved in one to three, what we call reprocessing sessions. But that does not include history taking, all the preparation, all the things like that. When we start in what we call phase four desensitizing, two to three sessions are significant for one event.

But then as I tell the people I train, but what if instead of one event, you had hundreds? Do the math. So in cases what we would call complex PTSD trauma, it starts very early in their life and continues to the present, and maybe hundreds and hundreds of experiences, it will take longer. But the good news is EMDR also helps the memory generalize the desensitization so that other memories can be desensitized as a result of the generalization of targeting a singular traumatic experience. And I tell my patients, you know, initially when you bring up the traumas, it can be hard. But the beautiful thing about EMDR, as opposed to talk therapy, you bring up the trauma, you feel traumatized, and then you've been, leave with EMDR you bring it up and then it tends to dissipate and it gives you that emotional freedom.

How so if you're a medical or mental health professional go to this link that we're going to put EMDR professional training.com if someone is interested and I've seen people on here from Portugal and India and Sweden and so all over the world. But there are people trained all over the world. How would somebody watching find a competent, certified EMDR therapist? Well, I would refer them to the EMDR International Association. That is the EMDR. It's like an American Psychiatric Association or American Psychological Association for EMDR

trained therapists and they have a data bank of people all around the world that have been trained and the other great thing about EMDR International Association I tell people that whenever you go and you see a training one of the first things you want need to ask yourself is that training been approved by the EMDR International Association because they have standards that all of us must you know fulfill in order to be accredited by them approved by them so I would go to the EMDR.org EMDR IA EMDR I AMDR I AMDR International Association Association.org, nonprofit, professional organization, and they have places all around the world.

And if you want, there's nothing there, leave a message, and they'll get back to you, or they'll give you someone who can. And all around the world. And it can be so helpful. And somebody asks the question. So EMDR, what does it stand for? Eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing. And someone said, I can't, I know I had trauma. but I can't remember it, does it still help?

Yes, because one of the things we teach our people that come in for treatment is that when we think of trauma, we usually think of pictures and memories. But the brain records memory across not only pictures or images, all our senses, but the irrational negative beliefs, the ants you call them, that gets stored at the time of trauma, the emotions that we feel and where we feel in our body. And a lot of times when people say I have no memory of it, but I feel something's wrong. What they're really talking about is the memory networks are emotions and sensations. And it may be early childhood memories because their brain had not developed to the place where they could have adequate pictures or words to place on it. Because developmentally it occurred so early that the only world that little child had was the emotional sensory network. But EMDR can help pre-process those because we look at it as a memory network.

We don't need to understand it. Another question is, will it bring up some good memories? Oh, great question. Yes, one of the things we find is that if they're negative memories, say a parent who was a difficult parent, and we target the memories around that pain or that abuse that may have happened, what we find is that once you clear out the negative memories, then positive memories begin to emerge that were unable to arise. Because when you block out negative memories, guess why?

You block out the positive memories too. And so as we desensitize the negative, the positive will often come up. And I've heard people say, you know, their father was abusive and they, and then all of a sudden they'll say, you know, but he made pancakes every Sunday we had such a great time. We used to have water gun fights in the yard. It was so fun. And they hadn't even thought about that for all those years until the negative had been desensitized. The trauma can cause memories to become lopsided. Did you have before we stop like one example of a case you had that was just special?

Yes, I was one of the first cases I ever did. I had a weekend training and in that workshop I was thinking, okay, who could I try this on? Who can I experiment on? Because I didn't, I was just learning. And so I found someone, I thought, well, I want someone I already have a positive rapport with. I'd seen for a while. And so I thought I'll call him John. I thought about John.

And next Monday, the following day, I walked in, John comes in. And John, I've been working with him with systematic desensitization, Joe Wolpe's model. And John was actually the one when I talked about agoraphobia, being able to only, we got into where he could ride on the streets and get to work. And so John came in and I said, John, listen, I thought about you this weekend and I want to try something with you. Are you willing to let me try? And he says, sure, Doc, whatever you want. And so I did my first really bad EMDR session with him. As we say in EMDR, it's a robust methodology.

You can screw it up a lot and people still get better. And I screwed it up a lot. But here's a thing, Daniel. I wasn't paying attention to the time. He had two weeks vacation and I had two weeks after that. So I didn't see him for, what, five weeks? And after we had done that, he came back in the fifth week. and he looked at me and he says, I don't think that I think works.

I said, oh no, well, it may not, I'm just trying to figure it out. I said, how was your vacation? He said, oh, it was really fun. My dad flew into LAX. I picked him up the airport and went to San Diego, see his sister, went to Big Bear to see my sister and then my aunt up in Bakersfield. And he's telling me all this. And I look at him, I said, wait a minute, John, were you driving?

And he went, wow, maybe that EMDR thing does work. And that very day, coming to my office, he was late. And there was a block on the freeway. He was oblivious of the fact, going on the freeway. And there was a backup. He went off the freeway, got on side streets, and got past it and got on my office on time. And it was oblivious to him because now he was engaged in normal behaviors that he never engaged him before. He didn't, was an issue.

That was my first case. So that's why I'm here 31 years later telling this story. Wow. Yes, I'm going to save this. and reposted, someone said, can I do it to myself? Absolutely no. Well, let's put it this way. In some cases, like in performance enhancement, peak performance,

we may have the athletes or professional entertainers do it at some point in time. But the first thing we do is we want to get rid of and desensitize the previous trauma, because we don't want the bad stuff to come up, and they're not there with someone to help contain them and move through it. And so for some people doing it on your own could actually bring up negative things that can get out of control. So you want to work with a professional. Now, I saw someone in India who said, but there's nobody by me.

Now, I know there are EMDR trained people in India. So make sure you go to the MDRIA, EMDRI-A-A-A. website. But what you could do is get a therapist you trust. Send them this link and encourage them, nudge them to get training. I am going to nudge all of the psychiatrists and therapists at Aeman Clinics to go through the EMDR professional training. I found it simple, easy to understand,

but comprehensive and I love studying it. I just think it is so interesting because who doesn't wanna be free of their past? And who doesn't wanna get that just anxiety out of their nervous system so that you can have the happiest life that you can? I hope it's helpful. I'll have Dr. Roundsen back.

How can people find you if they want to come see you? Best thing to do is do that EMDR Professional Training.com. But if they're not a professional? Well, they can use that and say they want to see me, and it'll be passed on to me. Oh, great. All right. Take care, everybody. Bye.

Thank you.