EMDR Safe Place Exercise: A Calm Place to Return To

The EMDR safe place exercise is a preparation technique. You build a vivid, sensory-rich mental picture of somewhere calm or safe, real or imagined, then link it to a cue word. Building it takes five to ten minutes the first time. After that, recalling it takes seconds, whenever stress spikes.

Maybe your chest is tight before you’ve even opened your eyes this morning. Maybe a memory surfaced out of nowhere, and your body is still catching up. Either way, you want somewhere calmer to stand. You want the exact steps to get there, not just the idea that one exists.

What is the EMDR safe place exercise, and where does it come from?

“Safe place” is the common name for a stabilization step built into Phase 2 of EMDR therapy, the preparation stage before any hard memory work starts. Francine Shapiro’s scripted protocol has you picture somewhere calm, real or imagined. Then you build it out in sensory detail until your body responds to it, not just your imagination (Luber & Shapiro, 2009).

Therapists still use it today to open sessions, close them safely, and help a client regain footing if something heavy surfaces mid-session (EMDRIA).

Researchers later folded this kind of resourcing into a broader framework called Resource Development and Installation, or RDI. A 2002 study on RDI looked at people with complex trauma histories, using the technique to help them stabilize before harder work began. It found the approach could measurably strengthen someone’s capacity to access calm, positive states on demand (Korn & Leeds, 2002).

You don’t need any of that clinical background to use the exercise yourself. It works the same way as a stand-alone practice for ordinary, everyday stress.

What do you need before you start?

Nothing special. A few quiet minutes and somewhere to sit or lie down are enough for your first attempt. After that, you can call up your safe place anywhere: a waiting room, a stalled subway car, your desk between meetings.

Building it the first time usually takes five to ten minutes. Once it’s built, recalling it takes seconds. Keep a pen and paper nearby if you’d like to jot down the details as you land on them. Some people find writing them down first makes the image easier to hold onto later.

How do you build your safe place, step by step?

1. Choose a place, real or imagined. It only needs to pass one test: it feels calm or safe when you picture it. A porch, a lake you visited once, a place from a favorite book, all work equally well. If you pick a real memory, make sure nothing unsafe ever happened there. If nothing real fits, invent one; an imagined place works just as well.
2. Start with what you see. Picture the scene in as much visual detail as you can: color, light, time of day, what’s near you and what’s far away. Specific beats general. Not “a beach,” but the exact color of the water and where the sun sits.
3. Add sound. What do you hear? Waves, wind, birdsong, or silence itself. Sound often deepens a scene faster than any other sense.
4. Add smell and touch. What does the air smell like? What’s under your feet or against your skin: warm sand, cool grass, a soft blanket? These two senses are easy to skip and worth the extra few seconds.
5. Locate the feeling in your body. Where do you notice the calm physically? Shoulders dropping, a slower breath, warmth in your chest. This is what turns a nice mental picture into something your nervous system actually registers.
6. Give it a cue word. One word or short phrase that calls the whole scene back on its own: “shoreline,” “porch,” “the lake house.” Say it silently while you hold the image so the two link together.
7. Decide whether to add a light round of bilateral stimulation. Some people layer in a few slow taps or eye movements while holding the image, to help it stick. It’s optional, and it doesn’t suit everyone; more on that below.
8. Test it against something small. Bring up a minor, everyday annoyance, not something distressing, then bring back your cue word and image. Notice whether your body shifts at all. This is how you confirm the resource works before you need it for something bigger.
9. Practice retrieval on its own. Over the next few days, try calling up just the cue word without deliberately walking through the whole scene first. The faster it arrives by itself, the more useful it’ll be in an actual stressful moment.

Why does an imagined place calm a real nervous system?

This isn’t just a mental trick. Brain-imaging research has found that picturing a scene recruits much of the same visual machinery your brain uses to actually see it. A well-known fMRI study found that visual mental imagery activates many of the same brain regions as real visual perception, especially in areas that process what you’re looking at (Ganis et al., 2004). A vivid enough picture registers as something closer to real than most people assume.

There’s evidence the body follows along too. A 2015 controlled study trained one group in guided imagery and compared their heart-rate-variability patterns, markers linked to the body’s rest-and-recovery state, against a group that skipped the training. The imagery group showed measurably better patterns on those markers (Zhang et al., 2015). A detailed mental scene doesn’t just distract you; it appears to shift what your nervous system is actually doing.

Should you add bilateral stimulation while you build it?

In therapist-led EMDR, once a resource feels solid, clinicians often pair it with a few short, slow rounds of bilateral stimulation, alternating taps, eye movements, or tones, to help “install” it. EMDRIA’s own practice guidance describes adding four to eight brief, slow sets once a resource is established (EMDRIA). The idea is that the rhythm strengthens the link between the image and the calm feeling.

Here’s the honest complication. Research doesn’t fully back that up. A 2011 study in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research had people hold positive memories in mind while doing eye movements, and the eye movements made those memories less vivid and less pleasant, the opposite of what “installing” a resource is supposed to do.

The likely explanation is the same working-memory effect that helps eye movements dull a distressing image: the side-to-side motion competes for limited mental space with whatever you’re picturing, good or bad. That’s useful for a hard memory. It can work against you here.

So consider bilateral stimulation optional in this exercise, not a required step. If you try it, keep it brief, a few seconds of slow tapping like the butterfly hug, and only while it’s genuinely deepening the image. Drop it the moment it flattens the picture instead.

If you’d rather have that rhythm paced for you, EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers paced bilateral stimulation at app.emease.com, a moving on-screen target or alternating tones. It’s the guided version of an optional step you can just as easily do by hand. The beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation covers pacing for all three methods.

What if you can’t find anywhere that feels safe?

This is common, and it isn’t a sign you’re doing the exercise wrong. If a real memory doesn’t feel unambiguously safe, build an imagined place instead. It can be as ordinary as a made-up cabin or as unusual as a place from a dream; it doesn’t need to be realistic to work.

If a whole scene feels like too much to hold, shrink the ask. Picture a single safe object instead of an entire place: a specific blanket, a pet, a pair of familiar hands. Some people do better anchoring to one sense at a time, a sound or a smell, rather than building a full picture at once.

If nothing feels safe no matter how you approach it, or picturing “somewhere safe” keeps pulling up distressing material instead of easing it, that’s worth paying attention to rather than pushing through. It often traces back to earlier experiences where safety wasn’t reliable, and building this capacity from scratch tends to go better with a therapist’s support, at least the first few times.

Does this replace deeper trauma work, or fit alongside it?

A safe place doesn’t process anything by itself. It’s a resource, a place to return to, not a way of working through a difficult memory. In full EMDR therapy, it’s deliberately sequenced before the harder reprocessing phases, not instead of them.

That’s true whether or not you’re working with a therapist. The exercise is genuinely useful on its own for everyday stress: a rough day, a mind that won’t quiet down at night, nerves before something hard. If you’re carrying something heavier, think of this as the groundwork, not the endpoint.

What it’s good for is staying inside your window of tolerance: calm enough to think clearly, still engaged with what’s in front of you. That’s also why it’s usually the first thing self-guided practice asks you to build. Our guide to preparing for your first self-guided session covers what else to have in place before you start.

How often should you revisit your safe place?

A couple of minutes, a few times a week, keeps it easy to reach. Like most mental skills, it tends to get faster and more vivid with use, not slower. You don’t need a long session; the whole point is that it stays quick once it’s built.

For a faster, ready-to-use version of this same exercise, once yours exists, see the calm place exercise. This guide is the fuller build; that one is the minute-long version for days when even nine steps feels like too much.

Nine steps sounds like a lot, but you only walk through all of them once. After that, it’s a cue word and a couple of seconds. A little effort today buys you somewhere calmer to stand on every hard day after.