A practical guide to telling blocking beliefs apart from negative cognitions and feeder memories, and to handling them without pushing.
EMDR clinicians know the moment. A target has been selected. The client is willing. The memory is live enough to work with. Then something stops moving.
Sometimes the client loops, coming back to the same distressing conclusion set after set. Sometimes the positive cognition makes sense on paper but stays emotionally out of reach. Sometimes the client can say “I know it was not my fault” while something else inside answers, “But if I believe that, something bad will happen.”
That last sentence is the tell. This is where blocking beliefs enter EMDR practice.
What a Blocking Belief Is
EMDRIA’s glossary describes blocking beliefs as dysfunctional client perspectives that appear to block reprocessing. In plain terms: a belief that keeps the system from taking in the adaptive information that processing would normally deliver.
The most useful thing to know about blocking beliefs is their shape. They are usually conditional. They sound like “if, then.”
“If I stop blaming myself, I will let my guard down.”
“If I feel compassion for myself, I am excusing what happened.”
“If this gets better, I will lose who I am.”
“If I hurt less, I am betraying the person I lost.”
Notice what those sentences are about. They are not about the memory. They are about change. The client is not arguing with the past. The client is predicting the cost of getting better. That is the signature of a blocking belief: it wraps around the change itself, around safety, loyalty, identity, deservingness, or the feared consequences of relief.
One more thing it is not. A blocking belief is not proof the client is resistant, and it is not a license to push harder. It is information. Usually it is information about what the belief has been protecting: vigilance that kept the client safe, self-blame that preserved a feeling of control, guilt that kept them connected to their values or to someone they lost. The belief may be inaccurate and still be doing a real job.
Blocking Belief, Negative Cognition, or Feeder Memory?
These three get mixed up constantly, and each one points to a different clinical response, so the distinction is worth slowing down for.
A negative cognition belongs to the target. It is the client’s present-tense appraisal of the memory: “I am powerless.” “I am bad.” “I am in danger.” You identify it during assessment, it pairs with a positive cognition, and it names what the memory says about the self right now. It is about the past event as it lives in the present.
A blocking belief sits one layer out. It is not about what the memory means. It is about what would happen if that meaning changed. The negative cognition says “I am powerless.” The blocking belief says “If I stop feeling powerless, I will get blindsided again.” One is the wound. The other is the guard standing over it.
A feeder memory is not a belief at all. It is an earlier experience feeding emotional force into the current target. The clue is disproportion: the stuck point carries more charge, or an older flavor, than the target can account for. A client processing a car accident who hits an immovable “I can’t trust anyone” may be sitting on material from twenty years before the accident. The target is not wrong. It is too narrow. The network is bigger than the memory you selected.
A quick way to hold the difference in session: the negative cognition is what the memory says. The blocking belief is what the change threatens. The feeder memory is where the extra charge comes from.
One more possibility belongs in the sort, because missing it does real harm. Sometimes the positive cognition will not install because it is not true yet. “I am safe now” will not take for a client who is still living with a violent partner, still being stalked, still in real danger. That is not a blocking belief and not a feeder memory. That is ecological reality, and the answer is not more processing. It is safety planning, real-world support, and sometimes a different adaptive belief that can be true in the life the client actually has.
When Processing Stalls: Working with the Block
When processing stalls and a block may be present, the following points are not a protocol or worksheet; they are questions to hold inside trained EMDR practice.
First, notice the stall. Repeated sets with little or no movement in image, affect, body, or belief may be a signal to pause and formulate rather than keep repeating the same intervention. More sets into a loop rarely clarifies the loop, and trying to out-argue the belief can harden it.
Second, check the floor. Start with the basics: dual attention, window of tolerance, and target size. Is the client with you and with the memory, or lost in one of them? If dual attention is gone, reorient before continuing. If the client is flooded or shut down, regulation comes first. If the target is too much for today, resize or step back to preparation. If one of these is driving the stuckness, the issue may be readiness rather than a blocking belief.
Also check present-day safety. If the proposed adaptive belief is not true in the client’s current life because danger, coercion, stalking, unsafe housing, legal threat, or another active risk is still present, the clinical task is safety, support, and a truer adaptive belief, not pressure for more processing.
Third, listen for the block. If readiness and present-day safety are not the primary issue, the clinician can explore what keeps the positive cognition from feeling true, or what the client fears might happen if distress dropped. The answer may arrive in an if-then shape. Keep the client’s exact words when possible. Do not translate it into clinical language; the client’s version is often the most useful.
Fourth, sort what you heard. Use the distinction from the previous section. If the belief is currently accurate, treat it as ecological reality: safety planning and a truer adaptive belief, not more sets. If the charge feels older than the target, a feeder memory may need assessment within the clinician’s EMDR training and consultation frame. If neither is the issue, the belief may be functioning as a protection. Name the job it is doing, at least to yourself, before you touch it. A respected protection loosens sooner than an attacked one.
Fifth, keep intervention small. A cognitive interweave, when clinically appropriate, should offer or evoke one piece of adaptive information and then return to processing. If the block absorbs the interweave and comes back, pause before offering more lines. Persistent blocking beliefs may need assessment as clinically meaningful material in their own right, often connected to earlier learning, rather than being treated as an obstacle to overpower.
Sixth, know when the answer is not in this session. Some blocks resolve with a well-timed interweave. Others are telling you the case needs something else: more preparation, a resized or resequenced target, attention to dissociation or parts when that is genuinely part of the picture, or another clinical mind in the room. Complex stuckness is one of the best reasons to use consultation that exists. And watch your own urgency. If you feel pulled to get past the block, force EMDR to work, or rescue the client from their shame, that pull belongs in supervision/consultation.
Through all of it, one posture: be curious. The working question is never “how do I get past this.” It is “what is this telling me.”
Before the Client Leaves
A client who just spent part of a session stuck may leave believing they failed at therapy. Clinicians can name the process without turning it into a script: the work revealed a protective pattern, and that pattern can be understood without blame. That is not consolation. It is accurate clinical framing. A named block can become useful formulation data for future work.
The block is not always in the way of the work. Sometimes, the block is pointing to the work.
EMDR, including work with blocking beliefs, belongs in the hands of trained clinicians. This brief is professional education, not a self-help protocol.
What the Evidence Says, Briefly
Two claims, different sizes. EMDR as a treatment for PTSD is well supported and sits in the major guidelines, including the 2023 VA/DoD guideline and NICE. Blocking beliefs, as a specific concept, are practice language: recognized in EMDR professional literature, taught for decades, clinically useful, but not backed by a body of trials testing blocking-belief interventions directly. Newer process research, such as the Processing Difficulties Scale, is starting to measure stuck processing more carefully, which may sharpen the concept over time.
Selected Sources
- EMDR International Association. Glossary of EMDR Terms.
- EMDR International Association. Therapeutic Relationship and Cognitive Interweaves in EMDR Therapy.
- EMDR International Association. Blocked Processing archive.
- Shapiro, F. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, 3rd ed. Guilford Press, 2018.
- Hase, M. The Structure of EMDR Therapy: A Guide for the Therapist. Frontiers in Psychology, 2021.
- National Center for PTSD, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) for PTSD.
- VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guideline for the Management of PTSD and Acute Stress Disorder, 2023.
- NICE Guideline NG116. Post-traumatic stress disorder: recommendations.
- Ramallo-Machin, A., Martinez-Borba, V., & Moreno-Alcazar, A. The Processing Difficulties Scale: development and validation. Frontiers in Psychology, 2024.
- de Jongh, A., et al. State of the science: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 2024.
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