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Discover how unresolved memories affect motivation and how EMDR therapy helps. Learn the neuroscience behind memory, trauma, and emotional healing.
Why do some people remain stuck in patterns they desperately want to change? Why do insight and intention so often fall short of actual transformation? One answer lies not in willpower, but in how the brain stores — and sometimes fails to resolve — painful or emotionally charged experiences.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) offers a different lens. This integrative psychotherapy, developed by Francine Shapiro, was initially designed to treat trauma. But at its core lies a theory about memory — and how unresolved experiences can quietly shape emotion, behaviour, and even motivation.
Motivation and Memory: Unlocking Change with EMDR
When Motivation Freezes
When Motivation Freezes
Sometimes the thing holding us back isn’t a lack of insight — it’s a memory.
When we experience something overwhelming, especially during development, the brain may store that experience in a way that’s disconnected from narrative or logic. These memories don’t fade with time. Instead, they linger just beneath awareness, waiting to be triggered — not by thought, but by emotion, sensation, or subtle cues. In those moments, a person might freeze, shut down, or spiral into self-doubt — not because they’re unwilling to change, but because their nervous system still believes it’s not safe.
This process is at the heart of Adaptive Information Processing theory (AIP) — the model behind EMDR therapy, which sees many psychological symptoms as the result of unprocessed, unresolved memories.
The AIP model conceptualises this as a biological disruption in the brain’s natural capacity to process and resolve experience. EMDR therapy offers a way to help the brain “finish what it couldn’t finish before” (Shapiro, 2007).
EMDR and the Architecture of Change
EMDR and the Architecture of Change
EMDR supports reprocessing by inviting unresolved memories into awareness — not for analysis or re-exposure, but for resolution and integration. These memories are often stored in fragmented, sensory form, outside the reach of language or logic. EMDR gently accesses them through bilateral stimulation — such as eye movements, tapping, or alternating tones — which helps activate both hemispheres of the brain. This fosters a state of “dual awareness,” where a person can remain safely anchored in the present while briefly visiting past experiences.
Rather than reliving the trauma, clients are guided to notice what arises — sensations, images, thoughts — and allow the brain’s natural healing mechanisms to resume. Distress often softens, adaptive associations surface, and the emotional charge of the memory begins to shift. In many cases, this occurs without the need for detailed narration or forced insight (Oren & Solomon, 2012).
As these changes take hold, the memory loses its grip. It becomes part of the past, no longer driving present-day reactions. Over time, this leads to meaningful shifts: less reactivity, more self-trust, and greater freedom to choose new responses.
Hardwired to Hesitate: How Emotional Memory Inhibits Action
Hardwired to Hesitate: How Emotional Memory Inhibits Action
Neuroscience & Learned Inhibition
Neuroscience & Learned Inhibition
Contemporary neuroscience supports the idea that emotionally encoded memories can directly inhibit motivated behaviour. Research on fear learning and memory consolidation shows that when the brain encodes an experience as threatening, it doesn’t just create a recollection — it conditions the nervous system to respond with defence. This is especially true in circuits linking the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex, which govern emotional memory, vigilance, and executive function (Johansen et al., 2011).
Over time, these fear-based memory traces can produce deeply learned avoidance responses — not only toward trauma cues, but toward opportunity, intimacy, or risk. Crucially, the same research highlights the brain’s capacity for reconsolidation — a window in which reactivated memories can be updated or even transformed. EMDR appears to harness this principle, offering a practical method to reactivate emotionally encoded memories and support their adaptive integration.
From a neurobiological standpoint, this explains why motivation doesn’t always emerge from insight alone. If action is tied to a memory trace marked as dangerous, the nervous system resists.
But if that trace can be safely reprocessed, the inhibition may finally lift.
Why This Matters for Growth
Why This Matters for Growth
EMDR’s evidence base in trauma recovery is well established, but its relevance to change, motivation, and agency is only beginning to gain recognition.
Several studies suggest that reprocessing disturbing memories may reopen communication between emotion and cognition — restoring coordination between the limbic system and prefrontal cortex. This reduces hypervigilance, enhances emotional flexibility, and reactivates internal resources necessary for initiative and self-direction (Solomon & Shapiro, 2008; Manfield, 2017).
In this way, the obstacle to growth isn’t just the presence of fear — it’s the imprint of unprocessed experience. When beliefs like “I will fail” or “I’m not safe” are tied to emotionally frozen memories, they resist verbal reasoning. But when those memories are integrated — when they no longer dominate the nervous system — the emotional space for action reopens.
Insight alone doesn’t always unlock behaviour. But transformation becomes possible when the brain no longer needs to protect against its own past.
When Biology Holds the Brake
When Biology Holds the Brake
We should also understand that....
Motivation isn’t just about willpower or mindset — it’s a neurobiological process. While unresolved memories can shape behaviour through emotional memory networks, other equally important pathways involve the brain’s chemical messengers and structural circuits.
Dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin all play crucial roles in reward processing, goal-directed behaviour, and effort-based decision-making. When these systems are underactive — whether due to developmental, genetic, or neurological factors — a person may struggle to initiate or sustain action. This isn’t about fear or avoidance. It’s about the brain lacking the “go” signal.
Research highlights how dopamine, especially in the mesolimbic pathway, underpins motivation by linking effort to reward. When dopamine is low, tasks feel unrewarding, even if the person wants to change. Norepinephrine supports focus and task persistence, and imbalances can impair the ability to follow through (Salamone et al., 2005; Robbins & Everitt, 2008).
This form of motivational difficulty can appear in conditions such as ADHD, depression, or post-viral fatigue — and may not respond to insight or emotional processing alone.
Careful assessment is key: clinical interviews, attention scales, and neurological screening can help differentiate whether someone is struggling due to trauma loops, cognitive fatigue, neurochemical imbalance — or a combination.
Understanding this expands the frame. Just as memory processing may “unfreeze” action for some, others may benefit from behavioural activation, structured supports, or targeted medical interventions to restore their baseline capacity.
Take Away
Take Away
Stuck doesn’t mean broken. Whether the barrier is emotional, neurological, or both, motivation can return when the brain feels safe, supported, and understood. There’s more than one path to change — and more than one reason we pause. With the right tools and insight, even long-standing patterns can shift, making space for energy, confidence, and action to grow again.
References
References
Johansen, J. P., Cain, C. K., Ostroff, L. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2011). Molecular mechanisms of fear learning and memory. Cell, 147(3), 509–524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2011.10.009
Manfield, P. (2017). Pathogenic memory and accelerated information processing: Clinical and theoretical implications. In P. Manfield, C. Maxfield, & M. Luber (Eds.), EMDR therapy: Foundations and applications (pp. xx–xx). Springer.
Oren, E., & Solomon, R. (2012). EMDR therapy: An overview of its development and mechanisms of action. European Review of Applied Psychology, 62(4), 197–203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erap.2012.05.003
Robbins, T. W., & Everitt, B. J. (2008). A role for mesencephalic dopaminergic projections in the control of movement and reward-related behaviour. In J. P. Huston (Ed.), Handbook of Behavioral Neuroscience: The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (Vol. 18, pp. 691–708). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1569-7339(07)00149-5
Salamone, J. D., Correa, M., Farrar, A., & Mingote, S. M. (2005). Effort-related functions of nucleus accumbens dopamine and associated forebrain circuits. Psychopharmacology, 182(3), 475–487. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-005-0089-9
Shapiro, F. (2007). EMDR and case conceptualization from an Adaptive Information Processing perspective. In M. Luber (Ed.), EMDR as an integrative psychotherapy approach: Experts of diverse orientations explore the paradigm prism (pp. 41–71). APA Books.
Solomon, R. M., & Shapiro, F. (2008). EMDR and the Adaptive Information Processing model: Potential mechanisms of change. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 2(4), 315–325. https://doi.org/10.1891/1933-3196.2.4.315
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