The EMDR Therapist Weekly aims to provide a weekly dose of insights, tools, and opportunities for EMDR therapists; designed to support your growth, sharpen your practice, and connect you with what's next. To achieve this, we like to invite subject matter experts as guest writers. This week I'm excited to introduce our newest guest writer, Alex Penrod, MS, LPC, LCDC.

Alex Penrod, MS, LPC, LCDC, is the founder of Neuro Nuance Therapy and EMDR, PLLC, an EMDR-primary psychotherapy practice in Austin, Texas. With a background in residential substance use and mental health treatment centers, Alex specializes in trauma-focused therapy for individuals struggling with complex, overlapping concerns. His work emphasizes EMDR therapy as a core approach to helping clients achieve deep, durable healing and integrate trauma recovery into their broader process of growth and change.

I'm excited for you to read Alex's informed perspective on how EMDR works to support our clients, compared to other modalities. And how EMDR can beautifully unlock adaptive beliefs that are already under the surface for our clients. So, without further ado, Alex Penrod...

When Insight Isn’t the Problem: How EMDR Changes Beliefs at the Nervous System Level

One of the most consistent patterns I see in EMDR therapy happens as a disturbing memory begins to desensitize. My clients often start spontaneously saying things like, “I realize I’m not to blame for everything,” “it’s actually over now,” “I feel like I can trust my judgment more now,” or “I’m not a bad person.” This can happen without ever challenging the previous beliefs or discussing the trauma at all. It often starts happening even before phase 5, when EMDR formally focuses on strengthening positive cognitions.

This tells me that this information is already present, waiting to come back online. It’s not that an adaptive and nuanced perspective is intellectually elusive to trauma survivors. It’s that it becomes unavailable when they need it most. What they logically know gets overridden by threat detection systems that prioritize safety and protection over higher reasoning and rational accuracy. The brain doesn’t worry as much about being technically correct as it does about staying alive.

When Trauma Isn’t an Insight Problem

I often reflect on my experience of using worksheets and Socratic questioning to challenge trauma beliefs prior to my EMDR training. CBT is one of the most evidence-based approaches to PTSD according to most authoritative organizations, but in my experience, this particular aspect of the approach often felt patronizing and infantilizing. A client might have a belief like, “Because I didn’t fight back, I am to blame.” They would be sent home with worksheets to deconstruct this belief from all angles.

I found myself routinely clarifying with clients that it’s not that I think they don’t know these beliefs are distorted, it’s just a way to consciously reinforce a new belief until it starts to stick. This did a great job of clarifying the targets for change. Clients often agreed with the desired belief, but with visceral, somatically entrenched trauma it frequently didn’t do the heavy lifting for a real shift. It was logically plausible, but not a felt reality.

Trauma survivors often know their automatic responses are exaggerated and rigid. In my experience, it’s not usually an insight issue. They tell me about situations where they know they are safe, the other person isn’t attacking or abandoning them, or their catastrophic thinking is objectively not likely, but it doesn’t seem to matter when their body won’t relax, and it still feels threatening. The question I repeatedly get in consultations is not, “What’s going on with me?” but, “How do I change it?”

What they mean is: is it possible to stop having these knee-jerk thoughts and responses altogether or is it an ongoing process of using coping skills for symptoms and challenging what the brain is doing forever?

Knowing vs Feeling True

What I’ve found is that there’s a difference between “knowing” at the symbolic level of higher reasoning and something “feeling true” at the sub-cortical level of automatic prediction processing. With trauma, the barrier creating a disconnect between these two levels of processing seems to be the highly distressing emotional and somatic material. Simply reexperiencing this material doesn’t seem to alleviate the block unless a corrective frame creates safety and present-moment connection during recall.

Survivors often avoid reexperiencing their memories for good reason; it is rarely productive on its own. The old, “you just need to talk about it,” wisdom often misses the mark. But safely metabolizing traumatic material using EMDR is very different and can bring the two processing systems back into coherence with updated information.

Why Talking About Trauma Usually Isn’t Enough

Coherence and integration is the essence of Shapiro’s Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model. But is this just a theory of change reconstruction to explain away a process that objectively works with opaque “brain science” that sounds cool? For a long time, skeptics wrote off any kind of neural mechanism of action underlying EMDR. But modern neuroscience research on memory reconsolidation, brain network coherence, and predictive processing appears to support many of the foundational concepts of EMDR, which had to be articulated long before these mechanisms were understood.

A 2025 article in Nature caught my attention, explaining that during traumatic memory retrieval, people with PTSD show a marked disruption in communication between subcortical systems involved in prediction, timing, and bodily regulation and higher-order cortical networks responsible for integration and contextual understanding. Instead of functioning as a coordinated whole, the brain temporarily shifts into a more fragmented, survival-oriented configuration, with altered cerebellar and thalamic connectivity and reduced long-range cortical integration. In this state, traumatic memories are not experienced as information about the past, but as present-moment threat signals, making it difficult for higher reasoning systems to update or override what the nervous system is predicting.

Beliefs as a Property of an Integrated Nervous System

From this perspective, EMDR’s emphasis on restoring integration and coherence across these systems is less about changing beliefs and more about allowing the brain’s predictive machinery to finally update. EMDR’s “installation” phase, where the chosen positive cognition (PC) is strengthened until it “feels true,” could be interpreted as a nod to the cognitive behavioral model, where a positive belief needs to be implanted or installed through effort. I challenge this belief about beliefs, with the proposition that adaptive beliefs are the natural state of an integrated brain operating under conditions of safety and autonomy. We simply reinforce what’s already emerging.

G.I. Joe said that “knowing is half the battle.” In EMDR, being able to hold the memory and the positive cognition together with a clear and relaxed body state is the other half. Moving from knowing to feeling true is a unique journey I have never seen repeat exactly the same, but the process is consistent.

Conclusion

I don’t mean to come off as dismissive of top-down cognitive behavioral models, they have helped many people and the evidence clearly indicates they are effective in many cases. But I’ve encountered many trauma survivors who did not respond well to cognitive therapy alone. EMDR’s combination of bottom-up and top-down processing continues to impress me in such cases.

If you’re interested in learning more about EMDR therapy or neuroscience-based trauma recovery, visit Neuro Nuance Therapy and EMDR. Or check out How to Heal from Trauma: The Six Pillars of Holistic Trauma Recovery - A Guide to Preparing for EMDR, available for free on my website.

Alex Penrod, MS, LPC, LCDC

Founder & EMDR Therapist

Citation:

Kearney, B. E., Densmore, M., Théberge, J., Jetly, R., McKinnon, M. C., Shaw, S. B., … Lanius, R. A. (2025). Reduced cerebello-thalamo-cortical functional connectivity during traumatic memory retrieval in PTSD. Nature Mental Health. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00476-6

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