Consider EMDR when talk therapy hasn't worked

Talking therapies and CBT rest on a person being able to report and reflect on how they feel, and that assumption is a poor fit where alexithymia makes ‘how do you feel about that?’ genuinely unanswerable — the format asks for exactly the thing that’s hardest to produce. They also tend not to reach the kind of trauma many autistic people carry, which is often complex PTSD built from consistent smaller traumas accumulated over time rather than one identifiable event. When talk-based approaches have been tried and haven’t worked, EMDR (eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing) is worth considering as a more direct, less-verbal, body-oriented route — sometimes described as a heavier-duty option for when talking hasn’t shifted things. This is a signposting point rather than a prescription: the takeaway is that a bad fit with talk therapy isn’t evidence that therapy can’t help, and that a different modality — one that doesn’t depend on articulating feelings — may reach what conversation couldn’t. Matching the therapy to how the brain actually works, rather than concluding you’re untreatable, is the move.