Bilateral Stimulation, Memory, and the Healing of Traumatic Experience: What Catholics Should Know About EMDR

What bilateral stimulation actually does

When someone experiences a traumatic event, the memory does not always consolidate the way ordinary memories do. Instead of becoming part of an integrated narrative — something recalled with some emotional distance — the memory persists as a raw, fragmented intrusion. A smell triggers panic. A tone of voice collapses present time into past harm. The person is not remembering; they are re-experiencing.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, developed by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s, addresses this through a deceptively simple mechanism: alternating bilateral stimulation (BLS). The therapist guides the patient's eyes back and forth in rhythmic horizontal sweeps — or, in variant protocols, alternates taps on the knees or tones in each ear — while the patient holds a traumatic image or belief in mind. Over a series of sets, the emotional charge attached to the memory typically diminishes. The patient can recall what happened without being flooded by it.

The neurobiological account most often proposed draws on Shapiro's Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model: traumatic memories are stored in a dysfunctionally isolated state; BLS appears to facilitate communication between the brain's hemispheres and activate the same neural consolidation processes that occur during REM sleep, when the eyes move similarly beneath closed lids. The result is not erasure but integration — the memory migrates, so to speak, from an alarm state into autobiographical narrative.

This is not simply relaxation. The mechanism is specific. Numerous randomized controlled trials support EMDR's efficacy for PTSD, and the American Psychological Association and the World Health Organization recognize it as an evidence-based treatment.¹

Filippini's integration: complexes and EMDR

Angela Andolfo Filippini's 2025 chapter, 'Treating Complex Episodes Through Bilateral Stimulation: An Integration of the Theory of Complexes and EMDR in the Analytical Setting,' moves the discussion into territory that is clinically richer and philosophically more challenging.²

Filippini works within the Jungian tradition, where a 'complex' is not simply a colloquial hang-up but a technically defined structure: an autonomous cluster of affect-laden representations organized around an emotionally charged core, often rooted in early relational wound or developmental disruption. Complexes are not merely thoughts; they have quasi-autonomous energy. When activated, they can temporarily displace the ego's governing function — the patient speaks, acts, and feels from within the complex rather than from a more integrated selfhood.

Filippini's proposal is that bilateral stimulation can serve as a bridge within the analytical setting precisely during these complex-activated states. Rather than waiting for the complex to subside before processing, the therapist introduces BLS to interrupt the complex's grip while the patient retains access to the affect — holding enough emotional contact with the wound to work with it, without being overwhelmed. Clinical practice, Filippini argues, demonstrates that this integration extends EMDR's reach beyond discrete traumatic incidents to the diffuse, relational suffering that characterizes more complex presentations.

This is a meaningful clinical contribution. Single-incident PTSD is the paradigm case for standard EMDR protocols. But many patients present with what clinicians call complex trauma or developmental trauma — harm that accrued not in one shattering event but in thousands of small relational failures across years of childhood. Filippini's framework addresses this population more directly.

A Catholic Christian reading of the mechanism

From the standpoint of the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, EMDR and its extensions sit in interesting anthropological territory.

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus (2020) ground their model in the unity of body and soul: the human person is not a soul using a body, but an embodied soul whose psychological, neurological, and spiritual dimensions interpenetrate at every level.³ Memory is not merely cognitive storage; it is inscribed in the body, shapes the passions, and conditions the exercise of the will and intellect. When Thomas Aquinas describes the passions as movements of the sensitive appetite — not intrinsically disordered but requiring formation — he assumes that the body's states are morally and spiritually relevant. A man whose nervous system is locked in a chronic alarm response is not simply uncomfortable; his capacity for recollection, deliberation, and free choice is genuinely impaired.

EMDR, understood this way, is not magic and not manipulation. It is a somatic intervention that restores the conditions under which genuine freedom and virtue formation become possible. This is not the same as virtue formation itself, but it prepares the ground. The Catholic counselor who uses EMDR to help a survivor of childhood abuse reprocess intrusive memories is doing something analogous to what a surgeon does when setting a broken bone: removing an impediment so that healing — which the person's own nature then accomplishes — can proceed.

Benjamin Suazo's work on the cogitative sense is useful here.⁴ The cogitative sense — the faculty by which the individual perceives the particular as harmful or beneficial — can be persistently miscalibrated by traumatic experience. A person whose cogitative sense has been shaped by repeated early violation will habitually perceive ambiguous situations as threatening, will have difficulty distinguishing present safety from past danger, and will experience an emotional reactivity that reason alone cannot override simply by issuing commands. Bilateral stimulation, in Suazo's terms, may work partly by recalibrating the cogitative sense — giving it new experiential data, processed in a neurological state more conducive to integration, so that the faculty's judgments gradually align with reality rather than with the distortions of unprocessed trauma.

Concerns for the Catholic reader

Filippini's framework, because it is Jungian, raises one concern that Catholic readers should hold with some care.

Jungian complex theory carries metaphysical assumptions that do not map straightforwardly onto Catholic anthropology. The Jungian 'Self' — the archetype of wholeness toward which individuation moves — is not the same as the theological category of the soul ordered to God. Jung's framework is empirically grounded in psychological observation but is metaphysically naturalistic. When Jungian language about 'autonomous complexes' and 'the unconscious' is used clinically, it does not necessarily import the full Jungian metaphysic, just as using attachment theory does not require accepting Bowlby's reductive account of the origin of religion. Catholic therapists and patients can use the clinical observation — that certain affect-laden patterns behave with a quasi-autonomous force — without accepting the broader theoretical account of what that autonomy ultimately is.

Ignatius of Loyola's rules for the discernment of spirits offer a relevant frame here.⁵ Ignatius observed that the enemy of human nature scouts our weaknesses — examining where we are most fragile in the theological and cardinal virtues — and attacks at those precise points. Complex-activated states, in which the ego is temporarily displaced and disordered affect takes the lead, create exactly the conditions Ignatius identifies as spiritually vulnerable. This does not mean that complexes are demonic, but it does mean that a Catholic patient engaging in EMDR-assisted processing should not assume the work is spiritually neutral. Spiritual accompaniment alongside psychological treatment is not a luxury; it is part of integral care.

Jordan Aumann's caution in his Spiritual Theology about the need for careful guidance in states that alter ordinary consciousness — particularly his insistence on proper context, qualified assistance, and prayerful accompaniment⁶ — applies in a modified way here. EMDR is not an altered-state practice in the same category Aumann addresses, but the principle holds: processes that engage deep affect and temporarily destabilize the ego's ordinary governance require a relational and, for the believer, a spiritual container.

Royo Marín's broader framework for the normal development of the Christian life adds a complementary note: transitions between psychological states should not be forced to be abrupt.⁷ The patient who has just reprocessed a painful memory in an EMDR session needs time to re-orient — a liturgical analogy might be the period of thanksgiving after reception of the Eucharist. The therapist who respects this pacing serves the whole person, not only the symptom.

Practical implications for Catholic Christian care

For the Catholic counselor or therapist, several orientations follow from this analysis.

First, EMDR is an appropriate tool in Catholic Christian clinical practice when used for what it demonstrably does: reducing the intrusive, dysregulating power of traumatic memory so that the patient's genuine freedom is restored. It is not a spiritual practice, and it should not be presented as one. Its proper domain is the removal of psychological impediments.

Second, Filippini's integration with complex theory extends EMDR's usefulness to patients with developmental and relational trauma — a population that is common in Catholic counseling settings, given the frequency of complex family of origin dynamics among those who seek faith-integrated care. The Catholic counselor can adopt the clinical technique while holding the Jungian metaphysical frame loosely, using it as a descriptive map rather than a doctrinal commitment.

Third, spiritual accompaniment — whether through spiritual direction, sacramental life, or simply the therapist's explicit acknowledgment that the patient's work takes place before God — should run alongside, not after, the clinical process. The passive purifications that John of the Cross describes in the Dark Night of the Soul often occur precisely in the period when a person's false interior structures are being dismantled. The person who is in EMDR processing may find that old defensive patterns — patterns that organized not only their psychology but their prayer life — begin to loosen. A confessor or spiritual director who understands this will recognize the spiritual opening rather than being alarmed by the instability.

Fourth, for the patient who is a Catholic Christian, the reprocessing of traumatic memory is not only psychological work. It is, at a deeper level, an encounter with the truth of one's own history — and truth, for the Catholic, is a participation in the divine Logos. Bringing a traumatic memory out of its hidden, dissociated state into conscious integration can be understood as an act of light overcoming darkness, of reality displacing distortion. This is not therapy spiritualized by metaphor; it is a genuine convergence between what psychological healing does and what the grace of redemption does.

The CCMMP's Created-Fallen-Redeemed arc is directly relevant here. Trauma is a wound inflicted in the Fallen condition upon creatures made for communion. The reprocessing of that wound — the restoration of memory to integrated narrative, of affect to governed passion, of reactivity to free response — belongs to the Redeemed state, even when the proximate agent is a trained therapist guiding eye movements in an office. Grace works through nature, including through the nature of bilateral stimulation and the brain's own integrative capacities. For Catholic practitioners, Filippini's work is most valuable not as a theological statement but as a clinical bridge — one that extends a well-evidenced method toward the relational wounds that matter most to the whole person.

Endnotes

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy: Basic principles, protocols, and procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press. See also: World Health Organization. (2013). Guidelines for the management of conditions specifically related to stress. WHO Press; American Psychological Association. (2017). Clinical practice guideline for the treatment of PTSD. APA.

Filippini, A. A. (2025). Treating complex episodes through bilateral stimulation: An integration of the theory of complexes and EMDR in the analytical setting. In [Editor(s) if known], [Volume/anthology title]. [Publisher details to be confirmed upon full citation availability].

Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and mental health practice. Divine Mercy University Press.

Suazo, B. (n.d.). The cogitative sense and its relevance to trauma and psychological healing [Unpublished or in-press work; cite specific publication details when available].

Ignatius of Loyola. (1548/1992). The spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius (G. E. Ganss, Trans.). Institute of Jesuit Sources. See especially Rules for the Discernment of Spirits, First and Second Weeks.

Aumann, J. (1980). Spiritual theology. Sheed & Ward.

Royo Marín, A. (1962). Theology of Christian perfection (J. Aumann, Trans.). Priory Press.