Using a Bilateral Stimulation App Between EMDR Sessions

Yes. A bilateral stimulation app is generally safe to use between EMDR sessions when you aim it at everyday stress, not the memory your therapist is actively working on. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, guides that same calming technique for the days between appointments, as a wellness practice alongside therapy, not a replacement for the processing happening in session.

Maybe you had a session yesterday and something is still humming under the surface. Maybe your next appointment is a week out and today has already been a lot. You know bilateral stimulation, the left-right eye movements, tones, or taps your therapist uses in the room, and you’re wondering if it’s really okay to reach for an app version of it on your own, with nobody watching.

What actually counts as “between sessions” in EMDR?

It depends which part of EMDR you mean. The American Psychological Association notes that EMDR differs from other trauma-focused therapies in one specific way: it doesn’t build in extended exposure, detailed retelling, or formal homework assignments. That part, the deliberate work on a specific memory, happens in the room, with your therapist guiding it directly and watching how you respond.

But EMDR also has a preparation phase built to travel. Phase two of its eight-phase structure teaches self-calming tools like breathing, imagery, and grounding, meant for daily life, not just the therapy hour. EMDRIA also tells clients that processing can keep going quietly after a session ends, so noticing something surface over the next day or two is expected, not a warning sign.

EMDRIA, the field’s professional association, is direct: EMDR therapy “should only be offered by properly trained and licensed mental health clinicians,” and it doesn’t endorse do-it-yourself EMDR (EMDRIA). That line is exactly why this page focuses on the stabilization layer, not deliberate reprocessing.

So “practicing between sessions” almost always means that second layer: stabilization and self-regulation, not the memory itself. A bilateral stimulation app lives here too, not in the part that stays with your therapist.

What do therapists already want you doing in that gap?

More than you might think. Three tools show up constantly in EMDR’s preparation phase, and each is built specifically for the time between appointments.

The calm place. An image of somewhere you feel safe, held in mind with its sights, sounds, and how your body feels there.

The container exercise. A mental image, a box, a vault, anything sturdy, where an unwanted thought can be set down and closed away until you’re ready to reopen it, ideally with your therapist. A 2011 clinical guide in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research describes the container as built in part to help you manage what surfaces between sessions, not only during them.

The butterfly hug. Crossing your arms and tapping your own shoulders left-right in a slow rhythm, a self-administered form of bilateral stimulation many therapists teach directly.

If any of these sound familiar, you already know what’s safe to practice alone. Our deeper walk-through of which EMDR techniques travel between sessions covers each one step by step.

How is an app different from doing it by hand?

Functionally, not by much. An app runs the same underlying technique, a moving on-screen target or alternating tones instead of your own hand, but it’s the same rhythmic left-right input behind the butterfly hug. What changes is the shape of the practice, not the ingredient.

	Manual technique (butterfly hug, calm place, container)	App-guided bilateral stimulation
Cost	Free	EmEase: 7-day free trial, then $14.99/month or $69.99/year
Pacing	You set and hold your own rhythm	Adjustable pacing, set for you
Where you learn it	Usually taught by your therapist first	Self-directed from the start
Tracking	Whatever you remember to write down	Built-in progress tracking and journaling
Best for	A quick reset anywhere, no device needed	Longer or more structured sessions

Neither column is the right answer for everyone. The butterfly hug needs nothing but your own hands, which matters in a waiting room or a parked car. An app adds guided pacing and a record you can look back on, which matters if you’d rather follow a structure than hold your own rhythm. EmEase is also roughly 90% cheaper than traditional therapy, worth naming as a difference in cost of access, not a claim that it does the same job as your sessions.

Does using an app between sessions actually have research behind it?

Here’s where honesty matters more than reassurance. Research on EMDR-related apps specifically is thin, and what exists comes with real caveats.

A 2018 review in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research evaluated 12 mobile apps built to facilitate EMDR treatment. It didn’t recommend any of them for unsupervised client use, and rated only six useful even as a tool a clinician runs in session. A 2020 commentary in BJPsych Open reviewing self-administered EMDR found just one small trial, and even that included weekly clinician contact throughout.

Neither paper was testing what this page is actually about. Both were looking at apps or programs attempting the trauma-processing piece itself, unsupervised. That’s a different and much higher-stakes question than using bilateral stimulation for everyday stress while you’re still seeing a therapist for the deeper work.

The more relevant research is smaller and more mechanical. A 2012 review in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology explains one leading theory for why bilateral stimulation calms you at all: holding a stressful thought while tracking a second demanding task, like a left-right rhythm, competes for the same limited working memory, and the thought tends to lose some of its charge. A 2025 study in BJPsych Open measured this from the body’s side, finding that brief blocks of bilateral stimulation raised heart rate variability, a marker of a calmer nervous system, in both people with PTSD and healthy participants with no trauma history.

That’s a reasonable basis for everyday, non-trauma use. It isn’t proof that any specific app matches a lab protocol or a therapist’s session.

One newer, app-specific data point exists too. A small 2025 pilot trial tested a four-app EMDR-based series against a waitlist in adults with chronic PTSD and pain, and the app group improved more. Worth knowing plainly: the apps’ developer co-authored the study, and dropout was high enough that the authors called for a larger follow-up before drawing firm conclusions. Promising, not proven.

For the fuller research picture on practicing EMDR-related techniques without a clinician, see our honest look at self-administered EMDR research.

How do you use an app safely between sessions?

A few habits do most of the work.

Aim it at something small. A tense meeting, a replaying conversation, the wound-up feeling after a hard day, not the memory your therapist is actively processing with you. That’s the boundary this page keeps coming back to.

Keep sessions short. A few minutes is usually enough for everyday stress. Longer isn’t automatically better.

Know your stop point. If distress rises above roughly a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle within a few minutes, stop, ground yourself, and bring it to your therapist instead of pushing through alone. Our safety guide for self-guided EMDR covers this in more depth.

Notice what surfaces, and let it wait. A thought or memory that comes up between sessions is common and, per EMDR’s own guidance to clients, worth noting rather than digging into alone. A quick line in a journal, or in EmEase’s built-in journaling, gives you somewhere to put it until your next appointment.

Should you tell your therapist you’re doing this?

Yes, and it’s a smaller conversation than it might feel like. Your therapist can tell you if what you’re practicing overlaps with the target you’re actively working on, which is the one real risk worth avoiding: processing the same material twice, once alone and once in session, in the same week.

Most EMDR therapists are used to clients asking about tools for the time in between and won’t be surprised by the question. If anything, naming it plainly tends to make the actual session time more focused, since your therapist already knows what you’ve been carrying.

This logic holds regardless of what else is on your calendar. If you’re combining EMDR with talk therapy or CBT too, the same boundary applies: an app is for the everyday layer between any of those appointments, not a stand-in for what happens in them.

Which fits you: manual technique, an app, or both?

A manual technique may fit better if you want zero cost, you already have a calm place or container your therapist installed, or you need something that works instantly with no device in hand.

An app may fit better if you’d rather follow a guided pace than hold your own rhythm, you want a built-in record to bring to your next session, or a structured habit is easier for you to keep than an unstructured one.

Both, honestly, is common. The butterfly hug for a rough moment in public, an app like EmEase at app.emease.com for a longer wind-down at home. Neither one competes with the other, and neither competes with your therapy.

The bottom line

Using a bilateral stimulation app between EMDR sessions is a reasonable extension of what your therapist likely already taught you in preparation: tools built to travel, aimed at everyday stress rather than the memory being actively processed. The research on apps specifically is still thin, and it’s worth saying so plainly rather than overselling it.

What’s better established is the underlying technique itself, and the boundary that keeps it safe: small, everyday targets stay yours to work with; the deeper material stays with your therapist. Tell your therapist you’re doing it, keep the two lanes separate, and let the app be one more steady tool for the ordinary days between appointments.