Can you do EMDR on yourself?

Partly. And the part you can do safely is not the part you want to do.

That is the whole answer, and everything below is the argument for it. But if you have come here because you cannot afford therapy, or the waiting list is eighteen months, or you would rather not say any of this out loud to a stranger, then I want to be straight with you rather than sell you a workaround.

What you actually can do alone

There is a real answer here and it is not a fob-off.

Bilateral stimulation itself is not dangerous and not secret. You can do it. The butterfly hug: cross your arms over your chest, hands resting on your shoulders, and tap alternately left and right at a rate that is comfortable but noticeable. Knee tapping: hands on your knees, tap left, right, left, right. Auditory: alternating tones through headphones, right ear then left. Eye movements: two fingers in front of you, tracked side to side, or your gaze moving between two corners of the room.

Megan Boardman's EMDR Workbook for Trauma and PTSD teaches all four of these, for use at home, by you. It is a legitimate book from a legitimate publisher and it is not doing anything reckless.

What is it using them for? Resourcing. Building a calm place. Strengthening a sense of your own competence. Installing something positive rather than dismantling something terrible.

That distinction is the entire piece.

The safe half of EMDR that you can do on your own is phase 2. The preparation. The calm place, the container exercise, the grounding, the self-soothing, the bit that builds your capacity to tolerate difficult feeling. You can practise those alone, and if you do nothing else, practising those alone will make you better at Tuesdays.

The half you cannot do is phases 3 to 6. Choosing a target memory, opening it up, running sets until the distress drops, and then putting yourself back together.

Why the second half does not work alone

Here is the thing about the processing phases. They are not primarily a technique. They are a technique performed inside a relationship, and the relationship is doing a specific job.

Rotem Brayer's word for this is co-regulation. When you go into a traumatic memory and your system starts to escalate, what brings you back is not your own resources, because your own resources are precisely what the trauma overwhelmed in the first place. What brings you back is somebody else's regulated nervous system, sitting across from you, calm, staying with you, not frightened of what you are feeling.

You cannot co-regulate with yourself. There is no version of that.

The second job is watching. Shapiro's clinical guidance is full of moments where the therapist is reading things the client cannot report. Whether you have gone quietly dissociative. Whether the processing has stalled or is genuinely moving. Whether you are safe to walk down the street when the session ends. She describes clients who should not leave the building yet. She describes clients who, out of loyalty or shame or simply wanting the therapist to feel good, report a low level of distress that is not true, and go home carrying material they cannot handle, and are then at genuinely elevated risk.

Think about what that means. Even in a room, with a trained professional watching, people underreport their distress and get hurt.

Now remove the professional. Who is checking whether the number you just gave yourself is honest?

The third job is knowing what to do when it gets stuck, which it will. Processing does not run smoothly to zero. It loops, it stalls, it goes somewhere unexpected, it opens a memory you did not know was connected to the one you targeted. Shapiro's phrase for this is accelerated processing, and she is explicit that it has the potential to surface previously unsuspected material rapidly, some of it extremely distressing. She gives a case of a woman who began making choking sounds and could not breathe.

That happened in a consulting room with a trained clinician present.

Sitting alone with an app, you will target what you think is a manageable memory and something else will come up the chain, and there is nobody there.

The DIY EMDR industry

So let us talk about what is being sold to you.

There are apps: Virtual EMDR, EMDR Kit, Turbo EMDR, EMDR 101, and more arriving all the time. There are YouTube videos with balls tracking across the screen. There are scripts, protocols and guides.

Some of these are fine as bilateral stimulation delivery. What they cannot supply is everything that makes bilateral stimulation safe.

Even the more permissive material on self-administered EMDR, and there is some, says this plainly. Self-administered EMDR can be less effective and can lead to potential self-harm. Bilateral stimulation and relaxation exercises can be done alone. Trauma assessment, target selection and the actual processing of traumatic memories require professional oversight, because the processing phase can produce strong emotional responses that need to be managed. Individuals with complex mental health conditions should not attempt it. Without support, people can experience intense distress or inadvertently reinforce the very negative belief they were trying to shift.

Read that last one again, because it is the most important and the least obvious. You are not just at risk of feeling awful. You are at risk of running set after set on a memory, failing to get anywhere, and installing more deeply the belief that you are broken and beyond help, because you now have direct evidence that even EMDR does not work on you.

That is worse than doing nothing.

The myth that does the most damage is the one that says EMDR is just moving your eyes. It is not. The eye movements may not even be the active ingredient, which is a whole other argument. What is unarguable is that the eight-phase structure exists to make something dangerous survivable, and if you strip out the phases and keep the eye movements you have kept the least useful part.

Where the honest sources actually land

I want to be straight about the state of the literature, because the sources disagree.

Shapiro's textbook does not have a chapter on doing EMDR yourself. What it has, at length, is a section on client safety factors that assumes a clinician in the room assessing readiness, watching for dissociation, and deciding whether you can be let out onto the street. The whole architecture presupposes a second person.

Brayer's clinical text says the same thing more directly. You never end a session with someone at a level of disturbance they cannot bring down. His mechanism for ensuring that is the therapist.

Boardman's workbook teaches self-administered bilateral stimulation, and is careful about what it uses it for, and is clear that the therapist is the guide.

The most permissive material I can find still says the processing phases need professional oversight and that people with complex mental health conditions should stay away.

And Shapiro herself wrote a self-help book, Getting Past Your Past. It is worth knowing what is actually in it. It is education, self-awareness, identifying your triggers, understanding the patterns, and self-soothing techniques. It is not a manual for reprocessing your own trauma in the kitchen.

So the honest summary is that nobody credible is telling you to do the dangerous half alone. Some sources are more relaxed about the safe half than others. That is the disagreement, and it is a much narrower one than the internet suggests.

What I would actually do if I were you

If you are on a waiting list or cannot afford therapy, this is not nothing. Here is what is genuinely available to you.

Learn the calm place. Learn the container exercise. Learn the butterfly hug and use it when you are activated rather than when you are trying to excavate. Get better at bringing yourself down, because that skill is useful whether or not you ever have a single EMDR session, and it is also the exact skill that a therapist would spend your first several sessions building anyway.

Buy the workbook rather than the app. A book by a named clinician with a publisher behind it is a different proposition from an app store listing.

Read Shapiro's Getting Past Your Past for understanding, not for a protocol.

Keep a note of what comes up. Triggers, dreams, memories, the moments where something got to you. If you do eventually get into therapy, you will arrive with the raw material for phase 1 already in hand and you will save yourself several sessions.

And do not target your worst memory alone with a YouTube video. I do not think I can put it more plainly than that.

The short version

You can do the preparation. You cannot do the processing.

The preparation is genuinely useful, genuinely available, and worth doing on your own.

The processing requires a second nervous system in the room, or at least on the other end of the call, because that is the mechanism. Not the eye movements. The other person.

Anyone selling you EMDR in a box has removed the only part that was ever going to keep you safe.

This is general information, not clinical advice. If you are on a waiting list or struggling to access therapy, speak to your GP about what is available locally. If you are in crisis, contact NHS 111 or Samaritans on 116 123.

References

Boardman, M., & Schwartz, A. (2023). The EMDR Workbook for Trauma and PTSD. New Harbinger Publications.

Brayer, R. (2023). The Art and Science of EMDR: Helping Clinicians Bridge the Gap. PESI Publishing.

Shapiro, F. (2012). Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy. Rodale.

Shapiro, F. (2017). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.