When You Can't Remember What You Need to Heal: EMDR and the ADHD Brain
- Bucks Family Network
- Nov 19, 2025
- 3 min read
Discover how EMDR helps the ADHD brain connects memories and helps sort through mental clutter.
If you live with ADHD, you know that your memory can be a tricky thing. You might struggle to remember where you put your keys five minutes ago, yet hold onto a vivid emotional snapshot from twenty years ago.
But there is another side to ADHD memory that we don't talk about enough. Because our brains move so fast, and because we are often so sensitive to rejection or pain, we are experts at burying things. We push difficult experiences down deep, filing them away in messy, overflowing "boxes" in the back of our minds, just so we can keep moving forward.
Talk therapy is a wonderful tool for exploring what we know and what we can articulate. But what happens when the root of your anxiety is something you have forgotten?
What happens when the key to your healing is hidden in a box you can't find?
Connecting the Memories You Didn't Know Were There
One of the most common experiences I see when working with women with ADHD is the 'aha' moment of connection.
With ADHD, our brains are naturally associative—we think in webs, not straight lines. Trauma often works the same way. A difficult relationship today might be fuelled by a forgotten incident from decades ago. In traditional therapy, we might not make that link because, on the surface, they seem completely unrelated.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) works differently. It acts like a search engine for your internal filing system.
It bypasses the "thinking" brain—the part of you that tries to rationalise or explain away your feelings—and allows your brain to follow the feeling back to its source.
The Surprise of What Comes Up with EMDR
Clients are often amazed by what surfaces during an EMDR session. You might start focusing on a current feeling of anxiety at work, and suddenly, a memory you haven't thought about in thirty years pops into your mind.
You might think, "I had buried that completely," or "I had no idea these two things were connected."
This is the power of the process. It brings up the root causes that we have buried or forgotten—the active experiences that are quietly keeping our trauma alive in the background. It allows us to see the full picture, not just the puzzle piece we are holding right now.
Sorting Through the Boxes - ADHD
I like to think of the ADHD brain as a room full of open, overflowing boxes. When we have unprocessed trauma or buried memories, it’s like those boxes are spilling out everywhere. Everything feels scattered, chaotic, and overwhelming. We trip over old hurts constantly without knowing why.
EMDR doesn't delete your files. It doesn't erase your memories.
Instead, it allows us to pick up each file, look at it properly, process what it means, and file it away where it belongs.
It takes the "sting" out of the memory. You can still remember what happened, but it no longer makes you cry, feel a spike of anger, or shut down. It becomes just a story from your past, rather than a live wire in your present.
From Scattered to Sorted - How EMDR helps people with ADHD
The result isn't a new personality; it's a sense of order. It feels like the boxes in your brain have finally been sorted through, emptied of the rubbish, and organised properly.
Instead of feeling scattered—with past hurts leaking into your present day—things feel like they are finally where they should be.
If you feel like you have "done the work" in talk therapy but still feel that something deeper is driving your anxiety, EMDR might be the way to finally sort through those boxes - especially if you have ADHD.
Guest blog written by Bucks Family Network
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