“It’s all happening now.”

That might sound like a line from a meditation retreat brochure—or something someone says right before trying breathwork for the first time. But for many of us in the therapy world, it resonates in a different way. Especially when we’ve watched clients process years of memories that seem to collapse into a single session.

This entry in Founder’s Corner explores a deceptively simple insight: EMDR removes time from the equation.

A Life in Themes

Let’s start here: most of us don’t live our lives as a string of unrelated events. We live them in themes.

Maybe yours is “I’m not good enough.” Or “I always get left behind.” Or “Authority figures are dangerous.” These aren’t conscious mantras—they’re embodied patterns. What I’ve seen in clients, and in my own work, is that these themes show up over and over again across time: in childhood, in school, in relationships, in careers.

The stories change. The cast changes. But the feeling, the dynamic, the role you play? It’s familiar.

Cringe Moments: Mini-Traumas That Stick

I once made a list of 30 memories—moments I’d normally dismiss as “nothing big,” but that still felt uncomfortable. Cringe-worthy. Locked in time.

They weren’t massive traumas. Just small, unresolved moments that still carried emotional charge. I never got to them in regular therapy, so I hired someone and we worked through the list over two years using standard EMDR processing. Every session, another thread got pulled. Eventually, something shifted—not just in the memories, but in how they related to each other.

They stopped feeling like separate events. It was like pulling the right string and watching the whole knot unravel.

From Linear to Vertical: When Memories Collapse

Here’s what I realized: when enough memories within a theme are processed—especially when they become linked during EMDR sessions—something unusual happens.

The memories stop being sequential.

They collapse.

Instead of sitting on a timeline—“this happened, then that happened”—they converge. They’re no longer “this happened when I was 8, then again at 15, then again at 35.” Instead, they become one experience, happening now.

We move from linear time to vertical time.
That’s when time collapses, and so does the physical sensation, emotional charge, and identity built around it.

The Brain Is Always a Half-Second Behind

Neuropsychologist Mark Solms notes that the brain is constantly playing catch-up. We think we’re experiencing life in real time, but neurologically, we’re always half a millisecond late.

That means actual life experiences are happening just before we know they’re happening. Conscious awareness lags behind.

Add to that the layers of unprocessed memory—of psychological time—and it’s easy to see why we feel stuck in the past or anxious about the future.

But what EMDR does, at its best, is help people catch up to themselves. It lets the brain and body reprocess what’s frozen—so we can meet life in the moment again.

Finding the Loadstone 

In EMDR, therapists often talk about identifying the first, worst, or most recent memory related to a belief or issue. But there’s another kind of memory I’ve come to appreciate: the loadstone, the place where the neural networks for a theme converge. 

It might not be dramatic or obvious. It may even seem irrelevant. But it’s the one that, when processed, causes time to collapse and the rest to fall away. Like pulling the thread that undoes the whole tapestry.

Finding the loadstone can be a turning point—not because it’s “the original wound,” but because it sits at the center of how the theme is structured and links together in the nervous system.

The Takeaway

EMDR doesn’t just help people “feel better.” It doesn’t just reduce symptoms. When most effective, it dismantles the illusion of psychological time altogether.

When that happens, the theme loses its power.
The identity built around it starts to loosen.
And life becomes something different—not perfect, not pain-free, but Present.

By JV Shafer