EMDR stands for eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. You hold a short piece of the memory in mind while following your psychologist’s hand, a light bar or alternating taps. Splitting your attention this way appears to reduce how vivid and emotionally loaded the memory feels, so it can be stored as an ordinary past event. Sessions are structured, and you are not asked to narrate the whole story.

Yes, with a Mental Health Treatment Plan from your GP. That plan gives you a set number of subsidised psychology sessions each calendar year, and Medicare pays a rebate on each one. You pay the gap. NDIS and private health extras are also accepted. Without a plan, you can still book privately and see a psychologist without waiting for a GP appointment.

Counselling gives you a supportive space to talk things through. Trauma therapy uses a defined protocol aimed at reprocessing a specific memory or set of memories, with symptom measures tracked between sessions and a planned end point. Many people use both at different stages. Your psychologist may begin with supportive work while you build stability, then move into a trauma protocol.

Some people feel more tired, emotional or dream-heavy in the days after a processing session. This usually settles within 48 hours and tends to ease as treatment continues. Your psychologist plans for it: you agree on grounding strategies first, sessions end with time to settle, and processing is paced so you leave the room regulated rather than raw.

Yes. Many people who benefit from trauma therapy do not meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma responses also show up as anxiety, low mood, anger, chronic pain, disturbed sleep or difficulty trusting people. Treatment targets the symptoms and the memories driving them, not a label. You do not need a diagnosis to book, and you do not need one to claim a Medicare rebate with a Mental Health Treatment Plan.

Patchy or absent memory is a normal trauma response, particularly for events in early childhood or events involving dissociation. Trauma therapy does not require a complete account. Your psychologist can work with fragments, body sensations, images or the beliefs the experience left behind. Recovering more detail is never the goal of treatment, and no approach here sets out to retrieve memories.