A man goes to see a therapist and talks about the scariest night of his life. His car veered off the motorway, the steering suddenly out of control.

Luckily, he managed to bring the car to a halt. He had whiplash, and his nerves were shredded, but it could have been worse.

Two years later, he’s driving again—but only around town, very carefully. He avoids dual carriageways and big, sweeping bends.

EMDR in action: focus on the light

The therapist asks if he can picture the accident in his mind. He can—vividly. The headlights suddenly pointing away from the road, the lurching sense of panic. He begins to sweat, his hands tremble. The therapist asks him to rate his distress on a scale of 10.

Then she introduces something unexpected: a strobing light set on a tripod in front of him. Along with little dongles to hold in each hand, that pulse in sync with the light. And she asks him to gently follow the light with his eyes.

He does this for 40 seconds. She asks him to picture the scene again. Has anything changed? How does the panic feel now?

And repeat. Picture the scene, rate the feeling, then focus on the strobing light. He feels more at ease. The number comes down. The idea of driving confidently again, feeling safe again, starts to feel more real.

How is this happening? Just by watching a light and holding pulsing handles?

EFT in action: tap to release trauma

Elsewhere, a woman who was relentlessly bullied at school is asked to recall one of the worst incidents. She revisits that corridor in her mind—the two girls who tormented and attacked her, the hot tears, the frustration, the terror.

The therapist asks her to repeat a phrase: “Even though I was bullied, I deeply and completely accept myself.” She taps a specific spot just under her nose a number of times and repeats the phrase.

More memories of these girls come to mind, but as she continues the tapping sequence—nose, moving to collarbone, repeating the phrase—she can feel the tears and terror start to abate. Even the anger she’s carried for ten years starts to feel different.

From tapping and repeating a phrase… again, what’s going on here?

The Rewind Technique: watch the bad stuff on the screen

In another therapy room, a man describes the day he discovered his fiancée’s affair. The disbelief turning to rage, the accusations and fighting that followed. The woman he loved and was due to marry—seeing the reality of who she really was.

The rage and humiliation wells up in him just thinking about it.

The therapist helps him slow his breathing and guides him to imagine a mental movie of the event. It starts just before he found out and ends the next day, when he was supported by his family and beginning to make sense of it all. A lot of despair and heartbreak in between.

Then the therapist asks him to imagine watching this memory on a screen, like a movie. He’s given a mental remote control to stop, start, and rewind it. He speeds it up, rewinds it, plays it again—all in his imagination.

After 20 minutes, something shifts. The memory starts to feel different, boring even. It’s no longer emotionally overwhelming.

An imaginary TV screen and remote control? Watching the memory backwards? What’s going on?

How trauma gets stuck in the brain

These are all different—but surprisingly effective—ways of working with trauma. Those horrible life experiences that trigger anxiety, OCD, depression, and, of course, PTSD. The threats and humiliations that stick around after the event and get in the way of living life.

Whether it’s a single traumatic event or something sustained over months or years, our brains pattern-match to it today. Driving around a big bend, entering a corridor alone, trying to trust a new partner—we’re right back there, revisiting the distress in our bodies.

At the centre of this is the amygdala—a small, almond-shaped part of the brain responsible for threat detection.

When something traumatic happens, our amygdala sits up and takes notice. “That was bad, we didn’t see that coming. We’ll be watching out for it from now on” it says to itself.

And watch out it does, hypervigilantly. It matches with false positives. It matches bends to motorways, office corridors to work corridors and current partners to ex-partners. A scene, sound, smell, a facial expression or tone of voice can make the match go off.

Usually, these associations settle over time. But when an experience is profoundly traumatic, the memory gets stuck. Sometimes for years, for a lifetime.

How rapid trauma treatments work

Traditional therapy tends to involve talking through the painful past in a safe space. Going over the details, exploring all the feelings then and now. Making emotional sense of what happened, essentially.

This can help. But for some, it reinforces the trauma, keeping it stuck. Recounting the experience over and over can even be re-traumatising.

That’s why modern trauma treatments focus on reprocessing the memory—changing the way it’s stored in the brain without needing to relive every painful detail.

• EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) uses bilateral stimulation (eye movements, pulsing handles, stereo sounds) to help the brain reprocess traumatic events, reducing their emotional intensity.
• EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), or tapping, works on the principle of reducing emotional distress by stimulating acupressure points while focusing on the memory. It aims to rebalance energy levels in the body.
• The Rewind Technique, developed by Dr David Muss, guides the person to replay a traumatic memory in a specific, relaxed way that helps the brain process it differently. To file it in the hippocampus as a regular memory, so it no longer triggers distress.

I’m summarising here, of course. All three therapies have protocols to follow and deeper explanations. I would say they’re all based on theories that are up for scientific debate (balancing the body’s energies?).

But there is positive evidence of effectiveness for all three.

What they all have in common, and potentially explains their effectiveness, is reprocessing combined with actively doing something – focusing, tapping, playing and rewinding the movie. There’s an element of dissociation going on, in a positive sense.

The therapist and the client acknowledge the bad thing that happened and the feelings around it, but we don’t get bogged down in it. “OK that happened, let’s see if we can do something with it…”

One way or another, we nudge along that natural healing process, putting it more in the past emotionally. We’re not changing the memory or hypnotising it away, we’re working with it.

Which rapid trauma treatment is best?

As a therapist, I know the least about EFT tapping. I have training and experience of using EMDR, but the Rewind Technique is my go-to for this kind of thing.

One major benefit of the rewind? It’s non-voyeuristic. Clients don’t need to talk about their trauma at all. We set up the mental movie, do the work, and the therapist doesn’t need to know the details.

It’s also fast. The technique can be explained, set up, and completed in a single session. Sometimes we repeat it or set up the rewind for another memory, but results often come quickly. People feel lighter, freer—sometimes after just one good night’s sleep.

EMDR, on the other hand, is great for people who struggle with visualisation or prefer to keep their eyes open. The structured nature of the light or sound stimulation gives the visual senses something to do—again, creating that positive dissociation that allows deeper shifts to happen.

Trauma treatment is evolving

Sometimes, these approaches are all that’s needed. Other times, they lay the foundation for further therapy—helping people feel more emotionally settled so they can move forward.

I want to give credit to Joe Griffin, co-founder of Human Givens therapy, who was explaining and making sense of these approaches 20 years ago. His insights remain invaluable.

What’s clear is that trauma treatment is evolving. We no longer have to endlessly relive our worst experiences to move past them. Instead, we can work with the brain’s natural ability to heal—nudging it along, so painful memories become just that: memories, not open mental wounds.