When Healing Feels Like Falling Apart
Whether you’re navigating anxiety, depression, or overcoming past traumas, we’re here to provide a safe space for growth and healing. Our evidence based approaches blend trauma informed therapy, mindfulness, and holistic practices to nurture your well-being. We can help you take the next step to a healthier and happier you.
Janay Langford is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and is the owner of Desert Sage Counseling in St. George, Utah. She specializes in trauma as well as using an Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapeutic approach. She also assists clients in navigating life transitions, grief and loss, stress management, relationship issues, anger management, PTSD, C-PTSD, ADHD, Postpartum and Perinatal Trauma.
When Healing Feels Like Falling Apart
Understanding This Experience Through EMDR
As an EMDR therapist, one of the most common concerns I hear from clients is:
“I felt like I was healing—and now it feels like I’m going backwards.”
This question often comes up during or after EMDR processing, and it can feel confusing or even discouraging. You start therapy hoping to feel lighter, steadier, more regulated—yet suddenly old emotions, memories, body sensations, or coping patterns resurface.
Here’s the truth many people aren’t told upfront: this experience is often a sign that EMDR is doing exactly what it’s meant to do.
Why EMDR Can Make Things Feel Worse Before They Feel Better
EMDR works by activating the brain’s natural healing system. When we reprocess traumatic memories, we’re not just talking about the past—we’re engaging the nervous system, the body, and the parts of the brain that learned how to survive overwhelming experiences.
Your brain and body don’t label this as “healing.”
They recognize it as familiar danger.
So when EMDR brings traumatic material online, your system may temporarily respond as if the threat is happening again—even though you are safe in the present.
What’s Actually Happening in the Brain and Body
1. EMDR activates survival memory networks
Traumatic memories are stored differently than everyday memories. They live in sensory, emotional, and bodily form. EMDR intentionally activates these networks so they can be reprocessed. When that happens, old survival responses—shutdown, hypervigilance, self-blame, avoidance, or numbing—can reappear. These aren’t habits; they’re survival memories being reactivated.
2. EMDR lowers the barriers that kept trauma contained
Before EMDR, many people function by keeping trauma tightly controlled through dissociation, over-functioning, perfectionism, or emotional numbing. EMDR gently lowers those protective barriers. As that “lid” comes off, unresolved material rises to the surface—including coping strategies that once kept you safe.
3. Your nervous system prefers what it knows
Even painful patterns feel predictable to the nervous system. EMDR introduces something new: the possibility of processing and releasing trauma. To a system shaped by past danger, change itself can feel unsafe. So it may try to pull you back toward old patterns that once ensured survival.
4. New regulation skills haven’t fully integrated yet
During EMDR, healthier beliefs and coping strategies are installed—but integration takes time. Under stress, the brain defaults to what’s fastest and most deeply wired. This is why you might “know” you’re safe, capable, or worthy, yet still feel otherwise in your body for a while.
5. EMDR healing is non-linear by design
Reprocessing isn’t a straight line. Old patterns often resurface right before a memory network fully integrates. This doesn’t mean EMDR isn’t working—it often means your system is testing whether it’s truly safe to release old defenses.
The Most Important Reframe
When old behaviors or symptoms show up during EMDR, they are not signs of failure.
They are signs of loyalty to survival.
Those patterns formed at a time when your nervous system had limited options. EMDR doesn’t aim to shame or erase them—it helps update them, allowing your brain and body to recognize that the danger has passed.
If EMDR feels uncomfortable, destabilizing, or like you’re moving backward at times, it may actually mean your system is doing something incredibly brave: learning how to live without armor.
Healing doesn’t always feel like relief.
Sometimes it feels like disruption before integration.
And in EMDR, that disruption is often the doorway to real, lasting change.
