How EMDR Therapy Helps Rewire Anxiety at the Root
Author: Angela Holmes-Cruz, EMDR Psychotherapist
Reviewer: Kaitlyn Shelp, MA, LMHC ✓
Published May 22, 2025
Anxiety doesn’t always start in your thoughts—sometimes, it’s actually wired deep into your nervous system.
You may have heard the phrase, “trauma lives in the body,” and years ago, that might have sounded like a metaphor. But now, neuroscience confirms it, unresolved trauma can leave real, physical imprints—shaping how your body responds to stress, fear, and even everyday situations.
When your body holds on to past experiences, anxiety becomes more than a mental loop—it becomes a full-body reaction that’s hard to quiet with logic alone.
Have you ever noticed your chest tighten when you’re in a crowd of people? Or felt yourself start to go down a spiral when someone doesn’t text back right away? Even when you know your thoughts may not be rational, your body can still sound the alarm!
That’s when EMDR can be helpful and in this article I’ll share how I help individuals in Tampa & St. Petersburg overcome the struggles of anxiety and related anxiety symptoms.
Unlike some therapeutic approaches that focus only on managing anxiety symptoms, EMDR therapy works to heal the underlying causes—reprocessing past experiences, beliefs, and body responses that contribute to anxious patterns. EMDR helps reconnect your brain and body, allowing you to return to a sense of safety and calm.
What Is Anxiety
Anxiety is a natural, biological response to perceived danger or uncertainty. Anxiety is your body’s way of preparing you to face a challenge, escape a threat, or stay alert in unfamiliar situations where you could be in danger. You can think of it as your body’s internal alarm system.
Is Anxiety always bad?
The short answer is no, anxiety is not bad. This response is meant to protect you. Although sometimes, that alarm system becomes overly sensitive—triggering that response even when you’re not in actual danger.
Anxiety can feel like:
A racing heart or tight chest
Trouble concentrating on tasks or feeling restless
Catastrophic thoughts or “thought spirals” (“What if something bad happens?”)
A sense of dread or impending doom
Overthinking or difficulty sleeping
Avoiding certain people, places, or situations
anxiety may not be the issue
The problem isn’t anxiety itself—it’s when anxiety becomes chronic, overwhelming, or out of proportion to what’s actually happening.
When anxiety shows up too often, too intensely, or without a clear reason, it stops being protective and starts interfering with your life. Instead of alerting you to real threats, it begins reacting to imagined ones—often based on past experiences or learned patterns. This is when anxiety becomes exhausting, confusing, and even debilitating.
The goal isn’t to get rid of anxiety entirely—it’s to help your brain and body recalibrate, so anxiety shows up only when it’s truly needed. EMDR can help you do just that: it bring your nervous system out of high alert and into balance, so you can respond to life from a place of clarity and calm, not fear.
Struggling with Anxiety in Tampa? Find a New Way Forward
At It Begins Within Healing Center, we offer EMDR therapy for anxiety in Tampa, St. Petersburg, and surrounding areas to help clients find deep, lasting relief. You can schedule a free consultation anytime with our team to take the first step in healing.
What Makes EMDR Different from Talk Therapy for Anxiety?
Your brain is wired for survival. At its core is the amygdala, which you can think of as an internal smoke detector. It constantly scans for danger and reacts quickly when it perceives a threat—activating panic, hypervigilance, or the fight-or-flight response.
When you go through difficult experiences—particularly those where you felt powerless or unsupported—your brain takes notes of those situations:
“That was dangerous”
“This hurt me”
“Let’s avoid this next time”
Even if those events weren’t life-threatening (being yelled at, ignored, or embarrassed), your nervous system might have still perceived danger in that moment. These memories, along with the emotional and physical responses tied to them, often remain stored in your brain and body.
How Anxiety Becomes Wired Into Your Nervous System
Over time, the brain generalizes these responses you experience. If one moment of fear or shame created a strong enough impact, your system may respond similarly to anything that even slightly resembles it. For example:
If you froze during a school presentation, your brain might now equate public speaking with danger—even years later.
If a raised voice felt threatening in childhood, hearing someone cheer loudly might still trigger that fear response today.
Because your brain is always trying to keep you safe, it often thinks to itself: “Better safe than sorry.” That’s why anxiety can show up before you’ve had a chance to think about the safety of a situation.
This process starts to become automatic, the more frequently your brain reacts with anxiety, the more entrenched that neural pathway becomes. This means that even when you logically know you’re safe, your nervous system may still react as if you’re not.
EMDR Helps You Update the Playbook
EMDR helps by reprocessing those original moments—the ones that taught your brain to be afraid. By accessing and essentially ‘updating’ these experiences, EMDR allows your system to respond to the present moment, rather than the past. Sometimes, your brain is responding to today’s stress as if it’s still in yesterday’s trauma. EMDR helps reprocess outdated threat responses and bring them up to date.
For example:
“That was then. This is now. I’m safe.”
This shift reduces the emotional charge of old memories and helps calm your body’s anxiety response.
What an EMDR Session for Anxiety Looks Like
EMDR therapy follows a structured, eight-phase protocol, but when used to treat anxiety, the process is carefully tailored to meet your unique symptoms, patterns, and nervous system responses.
Step 1 – Mapping How Anxiety Shows Up for You
We begin by exploring your personal experience of anxiety. For some, it shows up as panic attacks or health-related worries. For others, it may look like chronic overthinking, social anxiety, or intrusive “what if” thoughts. Once we identify the current symptoms, we trace them back to earlier moments that may be feeding these reactions—whether obvious or subtle.
Step 2 – Building a Foundation of Safety
Before reprocessing begins, we focus on stabilization. This ensures you feel secure, grounded, and in control throughout the EMDR process. Common tools we use include:
DES II Assessment to screen for dissociation
Safe place visualizations and guided imagery
Breathing and grounding techniques
A gentle introduction to EMDR tools, like bilateral stimulation equipment
This phase helps your nervous system understand: “We’re not diving into anything alone—we’re going in with tools and support.”
Step 3 – Reprocessing the Root Cause of Anxiety
Once you feel ready, we select a memory or belief connected to your anxiety—something that taught your brain the world isn’t safe, or that you aren’t enough. This could be:
A moment of deep shame or criticism
An experience where you felt abandoned, overwhelmed, or unsupported
A situation that left you feeling out of control
Using bilateral stimulation (such as eye movements, tapping, or sound), your brain begins to reprocess the event. You don’t need to retell the story in detail—your body and brain already know what needs healing. And if something feels too private, we can work with it silently as a “private memory.”
Step 4 – Feeling the Shift in Mind and Body
As the memory integrates, something powerful happens. You may notice:
Your body feels lighter, calmer, or more grounded
The anxiety tied to the memory begins to fade
New, empowering beliefs start to take hold: “I’m safe.” “I’m okay.” “That’s over.”
This shift isn’t just cognitive—it’s physiological. EMDR helps your entire system respond to the present, not the past.
EMDR Doesn’t Erase Anxiety—It Resets Your System
If you’ve tried logic, coping strategies, or even traditional anxiety talk therapy and still feel overwhelmed by anxiety, EMDR offers a different path forward. It helps your brain and body release outdated fear responses, so you can return to a sense of calm and control.
if your seeking support in tampa or st. petersburg call today to learn more & schedule a free consultation with our COMPASSIONATE & SPECIALIZED THERAPISTS.
Anxiety Treatment That Goes Deeper
EMDR Therapy in Tampa
I offer EMDR therapy in a compassionate, client-centered space—where healing happens at your pace. I offer 60-90 minute EMDR sessions as well as EMDR intensives for individuals who want a faster approach to healing.
