“I’m 13 years old,” begins Claudia Gonzalez. The 34-year-old from South Bay, California was sexually abused by her father throughout her childhood, and her relationship with her mom suffered as a result. She felt neglected, and they struggled to get along. “I’m sitting in the hallway of my house, and it’s just me sitting, and my mom's with my dad. The hallway is really dark. I’m crouching on the ground.”

“Think about the first time you felt like that,” the therapist says to her patient, leaning over and tapping her leg. “Tell me about the first time you felt like you didn’t feel protected.”

Gonzalez’s therapist, Rajani Venkatraman Levis, continues to tap her knee with an index finger. Together, Gonzalez and Levis go through the process of reprocessing Gonzalez’s hallway memory using a little-known psychotherapy technique called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).

They replay the hallway scene multiple times, each time expanding upon a theme or memory that feels overwhelming. As Gonzalez describes the images in her head, Levis taps her leg or waves her finger back and forth in front of Gonzalez's face, pulling her gaze with it. They repeat the process until the memory feels less traumatic.

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Towards the end of the session, Levis encourages Gonzalez to talk to her 13-year-old self and comfort her. “This isn’t how things are now,” Gonzalez tells her teenage self. “You’re strong.”

At the end of the therapy session, her mother—they are now much closer—arrives at Levis' San Francisco office to comfort her. “It was like a full circle,” Gonzalez later explains over the phone. "It was only when I started doing EMDR therapy that I could develop a significant relationship with my mother."

EMDR therapy was first developed by American psychologist Dr. Francine Shapiro in the 1980s. As a relatively recent form of psychotherapy often used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, it is much more physical than regular talking therapies. As part of an eight-phase treatment protocol, practitioners help their patients reprocess trauma by asking them to recount distressing memories as they move their eyes from side to side, or tap their patients on their hands or legs (known clinically as “bilateral stimulation”). It’s an unorthodox approach, but EMDR therapy acolytes are evangelical about its therapeutic potential.