What Does Adaptive Resolution Feel Like From the Client’s Side?
Source note: This reading note paraphrases Dekker (2026). Brief quoted terms identify concepts named in the article.
EMDR clinicians are trained to pay attention to process markers: SUD, VoC, body scan, target sequence, and the past-present-future structure of the standard protocol.
A new paper in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research asks a slightly different question: what does adaptive resolution feel like from the client’s side?
Danielle Dekker’s 2026 phenomenological study interviewed eight adult EMDR clients in outpatient settings in the United States. The paper adds another layer to familiar clinical markers by exploring how clients described the lived experience of adaptive resolution: what changed, how it changed, and how clients made sense of that change.
The paper describes adaptive resolution as a movement from “constriction to expansion.” Clients described pre-therapy experience in terms of stuckness, repetition, lack of freedom, and emotional pain. The movement toward adaptive resolution was not presented as a straight line. The paper describes a process of opening, widening, and expansion, with clients turning inward, noticing body sensations, following associations, revisiting the meaning of traumatic material, and emerging with something more organized, tolerable, or usable.
For EMDR clinicians, one useful feature of the paper is that it stays connected to familiar clinical territory. The article is not simply saying that EMDR creates a vague sense of transformation. It anchors adaptive resolution in the EMDR frame of memory, body, cognition, affect, and the broader past-present-future landscape.
This qualitative study gives clinicians a window into clients’ experiences of adaptive resolution. The sample is small. Participants were selected because they had been identified as having experienced adaptive resolution, and all were still in EMDR therapy at the time of interview.
Reference
Dekker, D. (2026). The lived experience of adaptive resolution in EMDR therapy: A phenomenological study. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 20, Article 0037. https://doi.org/10.34133/jemdr.0037
