Make a Memory Less Painful: Without Forgetting It

A memory’s sting can ease even if you never forget what happened. Ground yourself first, then hold the memory briefly in mind while doing short rounds of bilateral stimulation (BLS), the left-right technique behind EMDR. Go slow, work with one memory at a time, and stop if distress climbs past 7 out of 10.

Some memory you carry still has teeth. Nobody has to ambush you with it: maybe someone asks what happened, maybe a date on the calendar brings it up, maybe you just let your mind wander there on its own, and it still stings the way it did back then.

Why does a memory’s sting outlast the event itself?

Time alone doesn’t always finish the job of filing a memory away as something that’s over. EMDR’s own theory, the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, holds that an intensely distressing moment can get stored in a raw, unprocessed form, according to EMDRIA, the field’s professional association. The image, the body sensations, the emotion, and whatever you concluded about yourself in that moment stay locked together the way they felt at the time, instead of settling into the rest of what you know now. A 2017 paper in Frontiers in Psychology by Hase and colleagues describes this as a memory sitting isolated from your brain’s other, more adaptive memory networks.

Here’s the more hopeful part: a memory’s emotional charge isn’t fixed forever. Recalling a memory appears to briefly make it changeable again before it gets re-stored, a process researchers call memory reconsolidation. A 2017 review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by Lee, Nader, and Schiller describes this window as a real chance to update a memory’s emotional associations, not to rewrite what happened.

Deliberately bringing a memory to mind, carefully and briefly, is part of what opens that door. Avoiding it completely just leaves the charge exactly where it is.

Ground yourself before you sit with it

Before you deliberately recall the memory, spend a minute somewhere calmer. Picture a real or imagined place where you feel safe, or run through a quick grounding check: name a few things you can see, feel your feet on the floor, slow your exhale. The goal is staying present enough to think clearly while the memory is in view, not so flooded that it takes over. If you’re already overwhelmed, ground yourself and leave the rest for another day.

Go slow: one memory, not the whole story

Pick a single moment, not the entire event or everything that followed it. “The look on their face when they said that” is workable. “That whole year” is too much to hold steady at once. Keep each round short, seconds to a couple of minutes, and expect to return to it more than once rather than settling it in a single sitting.

Know your stop point

If your distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and doesn’t settle back down, stop. Ground yourself, and consider working with a professional rather than pushing through alone. That’s useful information about how much weight this memory carries, not a sign you’re doing it wrong.

A short bilateral stimulation practice to ease a memory’s charge

With those three pieces in place, here’s a short round of bilateral stimulation, the rhythmic left-right technique at the center of EMDR:

• Rate it. On the 0–10 SUDS scale, how painful does the memory feel right now, just touching its edge? Note the number.
• Bring it briefly to mind. The moment you picked, not the whole story around it. Let it be there without pushing it away or digging deeper into it.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes smoothly left and right for 20 to 30 seconds, tap your knees or shoulders left-right (the butterfly hug), or use alternating left-right audio tones through headphones.
• Pause and notice. Stop. Breathe. Notice anything that shifted: a little distance, a duller edge, a physical release, without forcing it.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking in after each one.
• Re-rate it. Many people notice the number drop. If it climbs instead and won’t come back down, stop, ground yourself, and pick this up another day.

Pacing rounds and tracking numbers while you’re holding a painful memory is a lot to manage solo. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, is the guided version of this technique: it runs the same left-right pattern for you, with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, at whatever pace you set, in the web app.

Does this actually make it less painful, or just distract you?

There’s a specific mechanism behind it, not just a change of subject. A 2020 meta-analysis of 15 laboratory studies in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, pooling 942 participants, found that eye movements meaningfully reduced both the vividness and the emotional intensity people rated for a distressing memory held in mind. A 2012 review by van den Hout and Engelhard in the same journal explains why: holding a memory in mind while tracking a moving target or tone taxes your limited working memory. Two demands compete for the same mental resource, and the memory that comes out the other side tends to feel less vivid and less charged.

That’s also how clinicians track whether the approach is doing anything. The American Psychological Association describes EMDR sessions as tracking a memory’s disturbance rating as it drops, a process called desensitization, while the facts and sequence of what happened stay exactly as they were. Making a memory less painful and forgetting it are two different things. Only the first one is what this practice is built for.

If the memory traces back to one clear, identifiable event, that’s worth naming to yourself. Our guide to single-incident trauma covers why a memory like that tends to respond well to this kind of work, and how a trained EMDR therapist can take it further than self-guided practice can.

When does a painful memory need more than this?

This practice is built for memories that sting but don’t carry ongoing danger. Reach out to a licensed therapist, ideally one trained in EMDR, if:

• The memory involves real danger, like abuse, an assault, a serious accident, or combat.
• It disrupts your sleep, work, or relationships whenever it surfaces.
• You notice dissociation (feeling unreal or checked out), flashbacks, or panic that frightens you.
• During the practice above, distress climbs past a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle.
• The memory brings on hopelessness or thoughts of harming yourself. That’s outside what self-guided practice is built for. A licensed professional, or our crisis resources page, is the safer next step.

A trained therapist can help you work through a memory like that far more safely than doing it alone. If what you’re carrying feels more like a flashback than a memory you can hold and set back down, our step-by-step guide to grounding during a flashback covers that specific experience. And if the trouble isn’t a memory stinging when it comes up, but the same memory intruding over and over, uninvited, how to stop thinking about a bad memory covers that closely related pattern. Our guide to calming triggers and distressing memories is a good next stop if this shows up around more than one memory at a time.

A memory that still hurts to touch isn’t a sign you’re stuck. It’s a sign of how much weight it carried going in, and easing that weight, even partway, is real progress.