Accelerated Resolution Therapy
ART is a newer eye-movement approach to trauma, and one very few therapists in California are trained in. I’m one of them.
Accelerated Resolution Therapy was developed in 2008 by Laney Rosenzweig, herself a licensed marriage and family therapist.
Like EMDR, it uses eye movements while you hold a difficult memory in mind. Unlike EMDR, it works directly and deliberately with the images memory holds.
That difference is the whole thing, and it’s worth understanding before you decide whether you want it.
Voluntary Image Replacement
Traumatic memory tends to be visual. What comes back isn’t usually a narrative — it’s a picture, arriving whole and unbidden.
ART works with that directly. After processing the physical sensations attached to a memory, you’re guided to replace the distressing image with one you choose. Not to pretend the event didn’t happen — the facts stay exactly as they are — but to change what your mind reaches for when the memory surfaces.
The distinction people find hard to believe until they’ve done it: you keep the knowledge and lose the picture. What happened is still what happened. What arrives unbidden is something you selected.
This is voluntary and directed by you. Nothing is imposed.
What the research says
ART has its own body of peer-reviewed research, not borrowed evidence from EMDR.
A randomized controlled trial of combat-related PTSD published in Military Medicine (Kip et al., 2013, N=57) found significant reductions in PTSD symptoms after an average of 3.7 sessions, with reductions in depression, anxiety and trauma-related guilt sustained at three-month follow-up. An earlier civilian trial in Behavioral Sciences (Kip et al., 2012, N=80) reported substantial symptom reduction within one to five sessions. A randomized trial of ART for complicated grief in the Journal of Aging & Health (Buck et al., 2020, N=54) found improvements across grief, PTSD and depressive symptoms, with follow-up work in OMEGA (2022) documenting that gains held over time.
A systematic review of ART for PTSD in adults was published in PLOS Mental Health in 2024.
What this evidence does and doesn’t establish. The literature is real and peer-reviewed, but it is younger and smaller than EMDR’s, and a substantial share of it comes from one research group. Trials are ongoing at Mayo Clinic, Yale and with the Canadian Armed Forces. If the sheer weight of accumulated evidence is what matters most to you, EMDR is the better-studied option — and I’ll say so.
What a session looks like
Like EMDR, ART can use alternating taps or tones instead of eye movements. Eye movements are what the research is built on, but they aren’t required.
ART follows a defined protocol, and sessions are typically more structured than open-ended therapy.
We identify what we’re working on. You bring it to mind while I guide sets of eye movements. I’ll ask about physical sensations — what’s happening in your chest, your stomach, your throat — and we work through them.
Then the image work. You choose what replaces what.
You are not asked to describe the event. ART is built so that the details can stay with you. I don’t need them, and for many people that’s the reason they walk in the door at all.
Why you may not have heard of it
It’s newer than EMDR by about twenty years, and the population of trained clinicians is much smaller. In California, particularly outside a few metro areas, finding someone trained in it is genuinely difficult.
That’s not a mark against it. It’s a fact about how slowly clinical training spreads.
Who it suits
People who don’t want to talk about it. People for whom the intrusive part is visual. People who’ve done talk therapy, understand their history, and still feel it.
My training
I’m trained in Accelerated Resolution Therapy. I’m not certified through the International Society of ART — that’s a separate progression beyond basic training.