EMDR Emotions Between Sessions: What to Do

Feelings, memories, or dreams surfacing between EMDR sessions is normal — your brain keeps processing bilateral-stimulation material after a session ends. Ground yourself if it feels intense, jot down what surfaced without digging into it, and save it for your next planned session rather than chasing it. Distress that won’t settle is your cue to slow down or get support.

You did a session two days ago and closed it out feeling steady. Then a memory you weren’t thinking about shows up while you’re loading the dishwasher, or a wave of sadness hits mid-meeting for no clear reason. Neither means something went wrong.

It usually means the practice is still doing its work, quietly, after you’ve stopped. This is different from a session that feels too intense while it’s still running, or the first few hours right after one ends. This page is about the gap in between: the ordinary days where life continues and something related to your practice shows up anyway.

Why do feelings keep surfacing after a session ends?

EMDR’s own professional body is direct about this. The EMDR International Association tells clients, as part of ordinary preparation, that processing doesn’t necessarily stop when a session does. Thoughts, feelings, memories, or dreams connected to what you worked on can keep surfacing for a day or two afterward, and that’s part of the process, not a side effect. It’s closer to what the technique is meant to do, running on a timeline of its own.

Sometimes what surfaces doesn’t even look related to what you targeted. EMDR’s underlying theory, the Adaptive Information Processing model, describes memory as stored in associative networks. Images, emotions, body sensations, and beliefs that share something in common get linked together, whether or not they happened anywhere near the same time. A 2024 narrative review in Frontiers in Psychiatry describes this network structure as part of why working on one memory can activate connected material elsewhere in the same web. Patterns like this usually have roots in earlier experience, and a session on one branch can occasionally shake something loose from another.

This is also, generally, mild. A 2025 review in Current Opinion in Psychology looked at adverse effects across 51 randomized trials of therapist-led EMDR and found that, where effects were tracked at all, they were typically described as mild and temporary. Between-session surfacing tends to fit that pattern: a feeling or memory that visits and passes is ordinary. One that sets in and won’t lift is a different situation, covered further down.

Dreams deserve a specific mention. If a night or two after a session brings unusually vivid or strange dreams, that fits with what’s known about sleep’s role in emotional processing generally. A 2009 review in Psychological Bulletin found that sleep, and REM sleep specifically, appears to help strip some of the emotional intensity off a memory while leaving the memory itself intact. A stranger-than-usual dream isn’t a malfunction — it may be your brain doing exactly that overnight.

Before anything else, settle three things

Ground yourself first if it’s intense. If what surfaced has you keyed up, tearful, or spinning, settle your body before deciding anything else. Name what you can see around you, feel your feet on the floor, slow your breath. If you don’t already have a go-to for this, our guide to building a calm, safe place walks through a resource you can drop into in a couple of minutes.

Go slow — this isn’t a cue to run a full session right now. The instinct, when something surfaces, is to sit down and process it immediately, as thoroughly as possible. A 2020 commentary in BJPsych Open on self-administered EMDR warned that skipping preparation and chasing whatever surfaces, instead of following a plan, turns solo practice into what the authors called an “unregulated recipe for disaster.” One small, planned target at a time is what keeps that from happening to you.

Know your stop point. If your distress is at or above a 7 out of 10 and it isn’t easing after a few minutes of grounding, that’s your line. Stop trying to manage it alone in the moment, and treat a repeated pattern of this as a cue to bring in a professional rather than something to keep pushing through solo.

What do you actually do when something surfaces?

1. Notice it, and name it in a few words. A feeling, an image, a body sensation, a stray thought. You don’t need to figure out where it came from right now, just that it showed up.
2. Ground first if you’re activated. Staying inside your window of tolerance, calm enough to keep functioning while still feeling something, is the actual goal here. Making the feeling disappear immediately isn’t.
3. Log it instead of digging into it. A sentence or two is enough: what surfaced, roughly how strong it is on a 0-to-10 scale, and what was happening right before. Our guide to keeping a processing journal has a simple template built for exactly this.
4. If it keeps intruding, set it down on purpose. Picture something secure enough to hold it until later using a container exercise, a real EMDR resourcing technique described in a 2011 clinical piece in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research. You’re not suppressing anything. You’re deliberately postponing it.
5. Save it for your next planned session, if it still matters once you get there. Most of what surfaces settles on its own before your next sit-down. If something is still live, bring it in deliberately, sized down to fit a short session. If you use EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, its customizable pacing lets you set that next round short and deliberate, and its built-in journaling gives you one place to log what surfaced, at app.emease.com.
6. Reassess before you decide what’s next. A therapist checks in on what happened since the last appointment before choosing the next target. EMDRIA calls this step Reevaluation, one of EMDR’s eight phases. Running your own version, a quick “how did the last few days actually go” check, is what keeps solo practice from drifting.

Ordinary processing, or a sign to slow down?

Usually just processing	Worth taking seriously
Passes within hours to a couple of days	Stays high, or builds, over several days
Loosely tied to what you actually worked on	Feels disconnected from anything you can place
You can still function: work, sleep, talk to people	Feeling foggy, unreal, or unable to function
One wave that peaks and settles	Repeated waves that keep escalating, not easing

When is this more than a between-session wave?

Bring in a professional if:

• The pattern above keeps repeating instead of easing, even once you’ve gone smaller and slower.
• Distress stays elevated for several days instead of settling.
• You feel disconnected from your body, or flooded by memories you didn’t choose, rather than a wave that comes and goes.
• What’s surfacing turns out to be heavier material than you expected to be working with at all.

If it’s specifically the pattern of pushing too hard that concerns you, our guide on signs you’re going too fast covers that angle in more depth. For exactly where the line sits between solo practice and professional support, see our guide on when to stop self-guided EMDR and see a professional.

If what’s surfacing includes hopelessness or thoughts of harming yourself, this isn’t a between-session-processing question anymore. Please visit our crisis resources page or call or text 988 (in the US) right now.

The bottom line

A feeling, memory, or dream that shows up days after a session, without an appointment, is one of the more disorienting parts of this work, and also one of the most ordinary. Ground yourself if it’s intense, name what surfaced without digging into it, and set it aside for your next planned session instead of chasing it in the moment.

If that pattern keeps repeating, or distress stops easing and starts building instead, that’s no longer a between-session question. That’s your cue to slow your pace down, or bring in a professional who can help you carry it.