What Is Depth EMDR?
A sensibility, not a protocol
When I started using the term Depth EMDR, I wasn't describing a new protocol or a specific modification to standard technique. I was reaching for a name for something harder to define — a set of sensibilities, an orientation to the work, a particular way of being present with a person in the process of healing.
It has taken me time to find words for it. This is my best attempt.
EMDR already contains depth
Standard EMDR is a highly developed, extensively researched therapeutic approach. It also has, over the decades, been systematized in ways that can pull it away from something that I think was always latent in it — something that gets lost when the focus shifts too heavily toward protocol, toward linear progress, toward what healing is supposed to look like from the outside.
EMDR, at its foundation, is built on what's called the adaptive information processing model — the theoretical framework that underlies everything the technique does. In clinical language, this model describes the mind's innate capacity to process experience and move toward integration when given the right conditions. In plainer terms, it names something that depth psychology has pointed toward for over a century: that there is an organizing principle in human beings that gravitates toward wholeness. That healing isn't something the therapist produces — it's something the person's own system moves toward when the obstacles are removed and the conditions are right.
That idea, to me, is the heart of depth work. And it was there in EMDR from the beginning.
What depth means in practice
Depth, as I use the word, isn't about complexity or duration or the use of any particular theoretical framework. It's about trust.
Specifically, trust in that organizing principle — whatever you want to call it. In Jungian psychology it might be named the Self, or the collective unconscious. In other traditions it might be called something else entirely, or nothing at all. What matters isn't the name. What matters is the clinical stance it produces: a willingness to follow where the process leads rather than steer it toward a predetermined destination.
An EMDR session approached with depth is one where the therapist isn't managing the outcome. They're holding the container, tracking what's present, and trusting that something in the person knows where it needs to go — even when the path isn't linear, even when what surfaces is unexpected, even when the session doesn't end where either person thought it would.
This is harder than it sounds. It requires a particular kind of discipline — not the discipline of control, but the discipline of staying present without needing to fix. My years of immersion in Jungian thought, and my own experience in Jungian analysis, shaped in me a capacity for exactly that. A long, sometimes humbling apprenticeship in trusting the wisdom of a process rather than overriding it.
Two sentences on a piece of paper
There are two statements I've written on a piece of paper and stuck to my computer screen. They've been there long enough that I don't always consciously register them anymore, but they're probably the most honest description I have of how I try to show up in this work.
The first is: I am not the source of healing. It's a reminder I apparently need to keep visible — that my role is not to produce something but to create the conditions for something that already wants to happen. The healing belongs to the person. My job is to get out of its way while staying fully present with it.
The second is: Healing is invited when the imagination and the body come together. This one feels like the closest I've come to describing what Depth EMDR actually is in a single sentence. The body is where EMDR works — in the nervous system, in sensation, in the places where experience is stored below the level of thought. The imagination is where depth psychology works — in image, in meaning, in the symbolic life of the person. When those two things meet, something becomes possible that neither can produce alone.
What this asks of the client
Depth EMDR asks something of the person receiving it too. Not a belief system, not a particular framework, not any prior experience with therapy or meditation or inner work. But a willingness to learn a certain way of being in the process — to lean into it rather than manage it from a distance.
Most people find their way into this relatively quickly. After a session or two, something shifts. They begin to recognize what it feels like to follow rather than analyze, to stay with an experience rather than explain it. That shift — from judging and managing your inner life, to observing it, to inhabiting it — is often where the real work begins.
I try to keep my own beliefs and frameworks out of this as much as possible. What I bring instead are the things most fundamental to the process itself: presence, trust, and a genuine curiosity about where this particular person's healing wants to go. The organizing principle I'm trusting isn't mine. It belongs to the person sitting across from me.
Why it matters
The people who tend to find their way to Depth EMDR are often those for whom something has plateaued. They've done good work — in therapy, in self-reflection, in understanding themselves — and they've hit a ceiling. Not because they haven't tried hard enough, but because the kind of work they've been doing operates at a different level than where the stuck material actually lives.
What Depth EMDR offers isn't a more sophisticated explanation of what's wrong. It's a different quality of encounter with it. One that trusts the process, follows the emotional charge, and makes room for healing to take the shape it needs to take rather than the shape we expect.
That's what the word depth points toward. Not complexity, not theory, not a particular school of thought. A quality of presence and trust that allows something deeper to move.