Trauma can have a major impact on your life, from causing depression and anxiety to making it difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Luckily, there are ways to break the hold that trauma has on your life, including traditional talk therapy and medications, but one emerging technique is also becoming increasingly popular: EMDR. Developed by trauma therapists, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) helps you to process traumatic memories in an unusual way: through your eye movements.

EMDR has been shown to be effective in a wide variety of mental health disorders, including PTSD and stress-induced physical symptoms. It’s a simple, straightforward approach that can have powerful results.

While experts aren’t entirely sure how EMDR works, they know that it helps change the way a memory is stored in your brain. It may also be effective because remembering distressing events feels less upsetting when you’re not giving them your full attention. During a session of EMDR, your therapist will ask you to think about a specific memory or situation and follow a set of instructions that include side-to-side eye movements, rhythmic hand tapping and audio stimulation.

During the first few sessions of EMDR, your therapist will work with you to identify the events or situations that cause you the most emotional distress and identify potential targets for EMDR processing. This could be a past event or something that’s happening in the present. During this phase, your therapist will explain the EMDR process and ask you questions to assess whether EMDR is right for you.

In EMDR sessions, your therapist will ask you to think of a specific traumatic memory or situation and then instruct you to focus on the negative feelings and thoughts that come up as you recall it. They’ll also have you perform the lateral eye movements and other external stimuli, which are called bilateral stimulation. They do this in the hopes that reprocessing these memories will help to decrease the painful, vivid quality of the images and emotions associated with them.

As you go through EMDR, your therapist will check in with you on how things are going. They may adjust the treatment protocol if it’s not working, or offer new approaches that might be more effective.

Though EMDR is widely known to treat PTSD, recent studies suggest that it may be beneficial for other conditions, too. For example, a 2017 study found that EMDR was just as effective at treating panic disorder symptoms as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Currently, most researchers agree that it’s important to continue further researching EMDR as a treatment for other mental health problems.