EMDR in Manchester:
What to Look For in a Trauma Therapist

Last updated 20 October 2026

The profession is setting out, for the first time, what it expects of a trauma therapist. The guidance isn’t public yet, but I attended a conference where I received a briefing on it. I offer EMDR in Manchester and online across the UK and beyond, and before you choose anyone for trauma work, me included, it’s worth knowing what it says.

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) is preparing a new competence framework for counselling adults who have experienced psychological trauma. Dr Gabriel Wynn, BACP’s Competence Development Lead, previewed what it contains at the conference [1]. It sets out the knowledge, skills and abilities a counsellor or psychotherapist needs to work with trauma safely and effectively, whichever therapy they practise.

What follows is a plain guide to what EMDR is and how it works, what the framework says, and where EMDR fits into that broader BACP competence framework.

What is EMDR?

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing. It is a structured therapy for traumatic memories and associated beliefs, emotions and embodied sensations.

Unlike most memories, a traumatic memory can stay ‘unfiled’ and stay current long after its utility has faded. It’s the mind’s way of making sure you never forget a lesson that put you in danger. Unfortunately, it means the memories and beliefs and emotions can stay current, with the racing heart, the tight chest and the sense of threat, even when you know perfectly well it was years ago.

EMDR works on getting that kind of memory processed just like any other memory. You bring part of it to mind for short spells. At the same time, something else takes up your attention: following a moving image with your eyes, listening to tones that alternate between your ears, or tapping. Then you notice what comes up, and we go again. That’s the gist of it, but it is embedded in an eight-phase protocol, so we build up to it gently, at a pace that’s right for you.

NICE recommends EMDR for adults with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after a non-combat trauma, typically over 8 to 12 sessions and more where needed [2]. The World Health Organization recommends it too and points out that it doesn’t require a detailed description of the event, or homework [3].

You stay in charge. If it gets too much, you can stop at any point, and if you start to lose touch with the room, I stop too.

How does EMDR work?

“How can moving my eyes change a memory?”

It’s a fair question. The best-supported answer at the moment involves working memory, the small mental workspace you use to hold something in mind [4].

A vivid memory takes up a lot of that space. So does following a moving image. Do both at once and the memory gets less room. It comes back a little less sharp and a little less charged, and it is stored again that way. Repeat that in short sets and the charge keeps draining.

The eye movements are more than ritual. A review of 15 clinical trials found that EMDR with eye movements did better than the same treatment without them [5]. In a small study of people with PTSD, eye movements did better than tones [6].

Laboratory studies with volunteers have also found that the more demanding the second task, the more a memory loses its charge [7, 8]. A laboratory trial of EMDR 2.0, a version that deliberately loads attention more heavily, found it worked as well as standard EMDR and needed fewer sets to get there [9].

That’s why I work with up to three channels at once.

Online, you follow an image moving from side to side on your screen. Through headphones, a tone alternates between your left and right ear. And with your arms crossed over your chest and your hands on your shoulders, you tap left, then right, in time with the tones. This is called the butterfly hug, and it has been used in online EMDR before [10].

Your eyes follow the image, a tone alternates in your headphones, and your hands tap in time.

In person, it is technically possible to target all three channels at once, but I personally find doing so online is much easier for me to deliver, and usually better received by the client.

No trial has yet compared all three together with eye movements alone. So I don’t expect you to take this on trust. You will be able to judge whether it’s helping, and we check that together as we go.

I think from my experience of EMDR as a practitioner, and as a client, different ways of delivering bilateral stimulation (the left-right eye movements, tones and taps) work differently for different people, and sometimes for different memories. But this is just my hunch based on my experience and it’s not backed up by any research I can point to.

What does the new BACP trauma framework say?

It starts from a much wider view of trauma.

Twenty-five years ago, trauma mostly meant a recognisable event: combat, assault, an accident, a disaster, abuse. The event led to symptoms, and the symptoms added up to PTSD.

The new framework keeps all of that and adds a great deal [1]. It names occupational trauma, moral injury, betrayal trauma, survivor guilt, online harm, reproductive trauma, intergenerational trauma, forced migration, racism and other forms of oppression, and iatrogenic harm, meaning harm caused by treatment itself. It asks therapists to understand the neurobiology of trauma, and to see each person within their history, culture, politics, economic circumstances and relationships.

Then it divides the competences into three sections.

The first covers what a therapist needs before doing trauma work at all: knowledge of how trauma shows up, an understanding of the different approaches, sound professional practice, and core trauma skills. One of those skills is alliance-building. That means knowing a client may need the therapy space to feel secure, comfortable, clean, uncluttered and quiet, and being able to come across as regulated and consistent over time [1].

The second covers the work itself, in three phases: assessment, stabilisation, and processing memories and meaning. The framework calls these phases recursive. You don’t pass through them once. You come back to stabilisation whenever you need to, and coming back is part of the method.

On meaning it is careful. A therapist should be able to explore how your understanding of what happened changes, while recognising that making meaning of trauma is neither possible nor necessary for everyone [1].

The third section runs through everything else. BACP calls it ‘socially just’ meta-competences, which is a mouthful for how the therapist works. It covers the therapist’s own self-awareness, working with the overlapping parts of someone’s identity, cultural knowledge and humility, antiracist practice, attunement to social class, work with people from collectivist cultures, and faith and spirituality.

What should a trauma therapist bring?

Reading the framework from a client’s perspective, it comes down to a few plain questions you can put to any therapist you’re considering.

Have they trained for trauma specifically?

The framework says specialist competence comes from three things together: trauma training, experience and supervision [1]. I have practised as a psychotherapist since 1995. I’m a Senior Accredited Psychotherapist with BACP and a Chartered Psychologist, and I’m fully trained in EMDR.

EMDR is itself a specific and detailed training in how to work with trauma. It is a training only offered to those who are already qualified, experienced and accredited therapists.

Do they have several ways of working?

The framework is neutral about which therapy you use, and it recognises how many approaches there now are. A therapist with one method tends to offer it whether it fits or not. I’m trained in person-centred therapy, CBT, creative hypnotherapy and EMDR, with further training in Schema Therapy, Gestalt, treatment-resistant depression, mindfulness and meditation. When it comes to trauma, we have lots of alternatives to choose from.

Will they stay steady?

That’s the alliance-building point. A therapist needs to create a relationship with you that you trust. That means, at the very least, that you trust their competence and feel heard and valued.

Do they see the wider picture?

Class, culture and belief shape what counts as trauma, who gets believed and what help feels acceptable. I’m a sociologist as well as a psychologist, and I take the cultural side of trauma as seriously as the clinical side. Different people, from different backgrounds, find different things traumatic, and process that trauma differently, when it does happen.

The framework is specific about class. It asks therapists to understand how a client’s current and past social class affects whether their trauma is recognised and assessed at all [1]. In my view that cuts more than one way. Hardship can be treated as normal, and so can the toll of a high-pressure professional life.

Faith and spirituality belong in the room too, if they matter to you.

Where does EMDR fit?

Inside the framework, EMDR is one of the ways of processing memories and meaning. So EMDR is never the whole of trauma therapy. In fact its eight phases map onto the framework neatly. History taking and preparation belong to assessment and stabilisation. Assessing the memory, desensitisation, installation and the body scan are processing. Closure and re-evaluation bring you back to steady ground at the end of each session and check what has changed at the start of the next.

Installation is where meaning comes in. A traumatic memory usually carries a belief about yourself, such as “I’m not safe” or “It was my fault”. Once the charge has gone, EMDR works on that belief directly.

So good EMDR already works in the recursive way the framework describes. The real question is whether your therapist will step outside EMDR when it isn’t what you need.

When isn’t EMDR the right first step?

Processing asks a lot of you.

In my experience of working with EMDR, it is not always the correct approach to take. EMDR processing can be intense and upsetting, and at times disorientating. It is not the first choice when working with someone who is already in acute distress. Stabilisation must be the priority in such circumstances. First do no harm!

For people with complex needs, including complex PTSD, NICE advises building in extra time to develop trust, taking the safety and stability of their circumstances into account, and helping with barriers such as dissociation and emotional dysregulation [2].

The new BACP framework goes a step further by naming iatrogenic harm, the harm therapy itself can do.

“I tried trauma therapy and it made things worse.” If that rings true, there’s a fair chance this is what happened.

So, suitability is discussed, never assumed. Expect the first month or two to feel mostly like talking where, together, we work out a shared understanding of what the problem is, what you already have that we can use, and roughly where you’re trying to get to. Then, again together, we sketch a plan to help you achieve your goals.

If EMDR isn’t right for you, or isn’t right yet, I will say so and explain why. There’s useful work to do in the meantime.

Trauma work, especially early childhood trauma, can be a long process. I remember working with one person for whom we spent a year just making sure she was safe from further trauma. And another client for whom it took us a similar amount of time just to find ways to name the traumas.

What about moral trauma and shame?

I want to say something about moral trauma. This is the trauma we feel when we do something outside of our moral framework. The most important thing to note about this kind of trauma is that it is often accompanied by intense shame.

In my experience, shame is an emotion created in relationship and can only be healed in relationship. Yet it is often the thing clients find hardest to express in therapy, and some never do.

In clinical practice, an element of shame is attached to many traumas. This is particularly true for children, who, for developmental reasons, tend to blame themselves for what happens to them.

Whether your experience of ‘moral injury’ comes from fighting in a war, or from early childhood, there are ways, using EMDR, of processing that trauma, without you having to tell me about what happened at all [12]. It is possible to process the trauma, and its attendant shame, and keep what happened private. Even then, the healing still happens in relationship. I’m with you while you process it, even if I never hear the details.

Does EMDR work online?

The research on online EMDR is younger than the in-person evidence, and it points the same way. A 2024 systematic review found 16 studies with 1,231 participants. It concluded that online EMDR is feasible and potentially effective, while noting that most of the studies were small and many lacked a control group [11].

In my opinion, online work has one advantage people don’t expect. You control the exit. Ending a call is easier than walking out of a room, and for anyone whose trauma involved having no way out, that control matters.

I also find it more precise. I can set the speed of the image, the tones and the taps together, and change them in the moment.

There are limits. I can’t see all of you on a screen, so I ask more about what’s happening in your body. If you dissociate heavily, I have fewer options online, and that’s when meeting in person in Manchester may suit you better. And you do need somewhere private for every session.

Common questions

Do I need a PTSD diagnosis?

No. Most people I work with don’t have one.

How many sessions will I need?

NICE says a course of EMDR for PTSD typically runs to 8 to 12 sessions, with more where there have been several traumas [2]. Preparation can add time. I will give you an honest estimate once I have a clear picture and revise it out loud if I’m wrong. As indicated above, complex trauma can take substantially longer.

Will I have to describe what happened?

Not in full, not in detail, and, if you prefer, not at all.

Can I have EMDR in person in Manchester?

Yes. I see clients in person in Manchester and online across the UK and beyond.

What if EMDR isn’t suitable for me?

Then we do something else, and I will tell you why.

Contact me now

The first step is a free conversation of up to 30 minutes. It’s for working out where you actually are, which is a more useful question than which method you need.

Sessions after that are £125 for one hour.

Book a free initial consultation

You can read what clients say about working with me on my testimonials page.

Phil Tyson PhD · Senior Accredited Psychotherapist (BACP, registered number 18697) · Chartered Psychologist (British Psychological Society) · In private practice since 1995

References

1. Wynn, G. (2026) Insights from the forthcoming publication: BACP’s Adult Trauma Counselling Competence Framework. Presentation. Lutterworth: British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
2. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2018) Post-traumatic stress disorder. NICE guideline NG116. https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng116
3. World Health Organization (2013) Guidelines for the management of conditions specifically related to stress. Geneva: WHO.
4. van den Hout, M.A. and Engelhard, I.M. (2012) How does EMDR work? Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, 3(5), 724–738.
5. Lee, C.W. and Cuijpers, P. (2013) A meta-analysis of the contribution of eye movements in processing emotional memories. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 44(2), 231–239.
6. van den Hout, M.A. et al. (2012) Tones inferior to eye movements in the EMDR treatment of PTSD. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 50(5), 275–279.
7. van Schie, K., van Veen, S.C., Engelhard, I.M., Klugkist, I. and van den Hout, M.A. (2016) Blurring emotional memories using eye movements: individual differences and speed of eye movements. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 7, 29476.
8. Littel, M. and van Schie, K. (2019) No evidence for the inverted U-curve: more demanding dual tasks cause stronger aversive memory degradation. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 65, 101484.
9. Matthijssen, S.J.M.A., Brouwers, T., van Roozendaal, C., Vuister, T. and de Jongh, A. (2021) The effect of EMDR versus EMDR 2.0 on emotionality and vividness of aversive memories in a non-clinical sample. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1956793.
10. Lazzaroni, E., Invernizzi, R., Fogliato, E., Pagani, M. and Maslovaric, G. (2021) Coronavirus disease 2019 emergency and remote eye movement desensitization and reprocessing group therapy with adolescents and young adults: overcoming lockdown with the butterfly hug. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 701381.
11. Kaptan, S.K., Kaya, Z.M. and Akan, A. (2024) Addressing mental health need after COVID-19: a systematic review of remote EMDR therapy studies as an emerging option. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1336569.
12. Farrell, D. et al. (2022) A stage 1 pilot cohort exploring the use of EMDR therapy as a videoconference psychotherapy during COVID-19 with frontline mental health workers: a proof of concept study utilising a virtual blind 2 therapist protocol. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 901855.