The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: Can Eye Movements Heal Trauma? Bessel Van Der Kolk Explains EMDR Therapy!

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist and best-selling author best known for his groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score. A pioneer in the study of trauma, he explores how trauma reshapes both mind and body, and how people can find pathways to healing through therapies that go beyond talk alone. In today's Moments episode, Bessel explains why simply reliving a traumatic memory isn’t enough to heal, and dives into EMDR - how it works, why it’s effective, and guides Steven through a live demonstration. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/IlUlTu5jLWb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/t1VI0Z9jLWb Watch the episodes on YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. how many people do you think i mean this is maybe a ridiculous question but how many people what percentage of people do you think have trauma in some form how you define it uh you know the figures are a quarter of people get physically abused one of five people got sexually abused uh one of eight kids witnesses as far as being their parents uh etc etc so you know yeah If I sit in a room, you know, it's not a binary issue.

It's not either you were traumatized. You didn't get traumatized. But when I talk to a room of professionals, which I do a lot, I assume that at least half the group viscerally knows what trauma means. And what is trauma doing to my brain? You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging scans. If I was traumatized and you scanned my brain, is there something you could see? Not necessarily.

I can see how your brain may be different from other people's brains. I may take a particular population. You can average it out and you can say, or there's a little more activation of the very active to gray, a little bit less of the bite insulin. So you see certain patterns of connectivity in the brain. But to some degree, you know, I think we learn a lot about the brain, but we don't know much about it.

brain. And I think people tend to overstate how much the brain pictures can teach us. You know, I love the Hubble telescope or the web telescope. You know, our brain is like a universe and our technology is very inadequate to really know about all the unbelievably complex connection the brain. But we have learned a few things in the last 20 years. So how does trauma affect the brain? It affects the brain that you tend to, you know, there's one part of your brain that I call the cockroach center of your brain, the periaccharis gray, that lights up, it's sort of

underneath the amygdala, everybody knows the word of the mixla these days. So the part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger. But you're traumatized, you're likely that that little part of your brain, way back in your brain's stem, is firing all the time. All the time you go like, I'm in danger, I'm in danger, I'm danger. And that's where it starts in a very elementary, sensory level. You don't know what the danger is, but you just feel that you should be scared. And then there's certain parts, other parts of your brain, for example, your insula,

which makes the connection with your physical sensations and your body awareness that for many people get shut down because trauma, basically, experience of trauma is a visceral experience of heartbreak and gut venge. And if you have a lot of that, you can learn to shut that part of your brain down so you don't feel your body so much anymore. You don't feel your body so much. You don't feel very alive either, but you don't feel so scared all the time. But it's likely that you will want to take some drugs to make yourself feel alive sometimes. Stuff like that. Yeah. So the part of my brain, you said just under the around the amygdala.

Below the amygdala. People that are traumatized, they have some kind of dysfunction in that typically. The dysfunction is that it keeps firing. Keeps firing. And how does that make you feel? And then the amygdala, so there's a constant sense of subliminal dread.

Is that anxiety? Exiety is already to hire a mental functioning. Okay. It's more elementary, it's like your dog's shaking. Yeah, my daughter has. adopted a dog three years at times

and two years later the dog still walks from my house you've adopted a dog and it shakes in your house still yeah yeah but still

never quite comfortable and that's how many times you meet never quite comfortable so when someone says they're triggered no trigger

isn't a higher level thing okay so then the next level is indeed the trigger that is in part mediated by the amygdala is your amygdala

if you smoke detector that tends to become hypersensitive so that minor things get blown up and a minor thing that you may say to me, I take it's the most insulting thing in the world. And so you're constantly triggered by things and that makes you feel like you are doing terrible things to me. And it's not like I'm hypersensitive and when you have an off day, that is your issue and not my issue. No, when you have an off day, I feel you off day and we start getting into trouble

together. I've got a picture here of what the brain looks like when the brain smoke detector goes off. Is that what it looks like on the brain? That is one particular guy and nobody is exactly the same as everybody else. Can you explain this to me? But basically, but what you see here is this is a guy who is reliving terrible car accident. He was involved in. Like you see here is that The right posterior part of the brain there's temporal parietal junction on the right side of the brain fires, and that's the feeling part of your brain. So you go, oh my God, oh my God, I'm terrified. But there's no cognition.

And basically the left side of the brain shuts down. So when you're in your trauma, you're not a reasonable person. You actually become a little bit of a blubbering idiot. All of us, when we really are angry, upset, and not very. articulate, but we have a lot of feelings. And then the piece that I showed us is that as he is

disguised reliving his trauma, these two parts of our brain go offline. This is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That's the part of the brain. That's the timekeeper of your brain. So if something unpleasant happens between us, let's say I'll go, oh, it's not a

half hour and I'll be okay. So let me just so we put up with this. But when you get traumatized, the timekeeper disappears, and this is all there is, your lucia's sense of perspective, and that is what happened when you're in your trauma. You don't know the difference between the past and the present, because the timekeeper of your brain goes offline, and whatever is your feeling is real, as opposed to be feeling like a memory. Do you get it?

Yeah, so people that can't see it in this brain scan, what I'm basically seeing is the right side is extremely activated. The left side looks like it's off. Off, yeah. And then there's these two blank, empty spaces that aren't activated called the doors. The dorsalateral prefrontal cortex.

So that's part of the system in the brain that gives you a sense of time. Okay. And as long as you have a sense, it's like little babies only have a sense of time either. Whatever happens totally. Do you see a child slowly grow

and they get a sense of perspective? It's happening by now, tomorrow it will be different. Okay, so that's when, I mean, presumably that's when you get anxiety, right, when you start thinking about the future. It is about having the perspective of this is happening right now, right now I'm really scared, but the moment I go home, the moment I call my friend, I'll feel better. And so you need to have that capacity for perspective, and that perspective goes offline

when you're in your trauma, and you become a trauma-disperous. So this particular person, this particular person, this. brain scan that I have here. This guy was in a car accident and the triggered brain that I'm looking at here is he was basically put in an M-F-M-R-I scanner and he was intentionally triggered to see what would happen in his brain. Exactly. So he was shown maybe a car accident or something.

No, no, specifically his car accident. Oh, you showed him a picture of his car. What did you see? What did you hear? What do you smell? What are you thinking? Very specific sensory details. Okay.

Not somebody else's sensory, you're a sensory details. And the right side of his brain was illuminated. Yeah, the light side of his brain became very active. Yeah. But what got inactivated was that timekeeper of his brain. So he could not lie there and say, oh, I'm remembering what happened to me yesterday. He's reliving what happened yesterday.

Instantly. You feel like it's happening right now. And that's the nature of trauma. Trauma is not a memory, it's a re-living. Are you consciously reliving it, or is your subconscious reliving? You feel like it's happening right now. With all forms of trauma. But not, it's happening right now, but my feeling is happening right now.

And my body. You don't know that the feelings actually belong to the time that your dad used to beat you. It is now I feel the same way because I disagree with you. So I've been triggered in the past, and I felt that sort of instant. fight-or-fly response because something's happened or whatever. And it's instantaneous. So although I don't feel like I'm back there, my body does feel like it's not there. So people are confused about it.

You say, oh, you really have the past. Now, actually, you're not aware that you relive the past because the past is the present. So you don't think, oh, this reminds me about the time that my dad used to beat me when I was four years old. No, it feels like you are beating me right now. And is there a way for this particular gentleman here who's been through that car crash to ever stop this triggering? Yeah, he's done quite well.

He's done quite well. He did EMDR, actually. High movement, desensitization. And what was his results? He's a all right guy. He's functioning. He's no longer traumatized person. What's the most radical improvement you've seen in your clinical practice?

are really people really coming to life people just saying it's over give me the the most the best example the good example is the videotape i showed people yesterday of a woman again terrible car accident freezing uh upset freaked out and then three sessions later we got talk about he says yeah this shitty thing happened to me i was in this car accident and uh jolted for it and my head was swollen, and boy, that was terrible back then. But I have a granddaughter, and I drive my car to my granddaughter, and I'm fine. Three sessions it took. Three sessions, yeah.

And we saw it in psychedelic therapy all the time. What did you do in those three sessions? Biggle your fingers in front of people's eyes. I mean, for me, for me, EMDR was really the gatebed work. I was like, sorry, you know, I've written three books about PCHS. He actually wrote a very first book in which they were, PTSD exists in 84 or something. But they didn't know how to treat it.

So I'm a world-renowned experts, but I have no idea how to treat it because people keep reliving their trauma and they don't know how to stop that. And somebody starts telling me about EMDR and I don't believe a word of it. And they say, just you move your fingers in front of people's eyes.

I mean, you move your eye from side to side as you relive the trauma. And I go, that's crazy. everybody who hears it and that's crazy and then people start doing it and they show me how it works and go like wow and people indeed had a certain sub sample of people we studied indeed after a few sessions of EMDR go like yeah that's really sucked but it's over it belongs to the past it's not happening right now you're telling me that wiggling your fingers in front of people's eyes can help heal their trauma well and then of course we had to do it.

little research, which took us 15 years to get enough funding to get, do it, to see what happens when you move your eyes back and forth. And then we discover that if you move your eyes back and forth, as you recall traumatic experiences, you activate certain pathways between the temporal partial junction, which is your sense of self and your insolive, your sense of your body. So your brain is able to say, oh yeah, this is what happened to me. But it happened to me, the past. So these are pathways that makes it possible for your brain to make that distinction. And in the research that's been done on this, what does the outcome, what was the conclusion in terms of its efficacy? Oh, in terms of, in our research, 78% of the people who had

adults at trauma, so being assaulted or raped by a stranger, 78% percent, percent of them were completely cured. But that's not the majority of people we see because most people we see have early childhood trauma, which is much more complicated. Early childhood trauma is much more sort of stubborn and resistant to this treatment.

Yeah, because your early childhood experiences create who you are. So if you go to a fancy college when you're 18, you do become, identified by that college, but it doesn't radically change you into a new person. It becomes part of your identity.

But if you grow up in a certain family early on in your life, you actually become that. And the imprint is very deep early on. So it's called eye movement desensitation and reprocessing treatment. I was just looking up some stats about it. It says it's been extensively studied with evidence supporting its efficacy across various conditions

with PTSD, a 2014 meta-analysis of 26 randomized control trials found that EMDR significantly reduced PTSD symptoms with a large effect size, depression, a 2024 systemic review, and meta-analysis encompassing 25 studies, and more than 1,000 participants reported that it alleviated depressive symptoms. The same 2014 meta-analysis noted that EMDR led to significant reductions in anxiety symptoms among PTSD patients with a large effect. And finally, a 2024 systemic review and individual participation data meta analysis concluded that EMDR is an effective, is as effective as other psychological treatments for PTSD, achieving comparable symptom reduction and remission rates. So can you show me how it works? Can you do it on me? I could. Can I move my chair? Of course you can. You're going to come closer? So can you bring to mind a really sort of unpleasant experience you have had not too long ago?

Yeah. And can you bring to mind what you saw at that point? Yeah. Can you remember what the voices sounded like at that point? Or whatever it was. Any sounds come to mind? Yeah. Do you remember what your body felt?

like back then yeah can you remember what you were thinking or bring to mind what you were thinking yeah okay so how vivid is your feeling right now of you by collecting it like a six seven out of ten okay so stay there now follow my finger with your eyes, so look at my, look at me right now. Deep breath. So what comes to your mind right now? doing this?

I feel calm. Huh? Yeah, I just don't. I feel calm. Okay. So when you go back to what we're just feeling, what's it like now? Um, it's it's hard to recall

why I was bothered. It's the best way to describe it. That is the weird stuff. Why is that? Is that just because, why that. See, that is what's so great about this work. We don't know the linearity. And we don't know where the hell the emotional imprint is gone now, but it is. And, you know, of course, if we bring up something much worse than what you had going to, it takes it much longer and a lot of other stuff comes up. But somehow EMDR seems to do, it creates new associative

processes in the brain. So let's say, for some people did EMDR, me, something really very, very nasty had happened to me, and I started off being very upset. And then during the EMDR, I don't know if this happened to you, I had images of sitting in my dining room table as a kid and had images of playing in a playground in primary school. Don't come in mind. And then we stopped it, and indeed, so yeah, that really sucked. Time to go on. An important part of this, you did not tell me what you were going through. No.

Because I'm suspicious of language, because language is always an interactive process. And if I would ask you to tell me what's happened, you will filter yourself because certain things may be embarrassing or you don't want me to know about it. And so we circumvent this whole verbal process of your making meaning out of it, and we reorganized some core ways in which your brain is perceiving this. So you saw a little bit of this, very in minor way. For me, when I first saw this, I was blown away by it and thought, I need to study this. So when they quoted studies, the main study was done by me.

NIH founded that. but I was also the last time that somebody could fund it for N.A for EMDR. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode,

I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.