IEMT (Integral Eye Movement Therapy) is a short, light-touch eye movement therapy that aims to take the emotional intensity out of difficult memories, and to loosen the painful beliefs about who we are that grew out of them. It can offer shamanic work a quick way of making old hurts less overwhelming, which fits the shamanic insistence that healing goes at a person’s own pace.
What is IEMT? #
IEMT is a therapy developed in Britain by the psychotherapist Andrew T. Austin, who dates its founding to 2006. It grew out of several earlier ways of working with the eyes: eye movement integration, developed by Connirae and Steve Andreas in 1989; Francine Shapiro’s EMDR, which began in 1987; and an eye pattern used in some neuro-linguistic programming training.1
In a session, the person holds an experience in mind whilst following the practitioner’s finger or pen with their eyes. A session can be as short as five to twenty minutes, and longer where the work goes into a person’s sense of identity. IEMT is aimed at emotional problems that come from things that happened to a person, which they had little control over at the time. It works with traumatic memories, and also with what Austin calls “memories of emotion”. Its underlying idea is that we each learn an emotional map from experience, which shapes when we feel what, and how strongly. Lower the intensity of a key memory, and the map itself changes.1
How is IEMT different from EMDR? #
Both use eye movements, and IEMT grew partly out of EMDR’s discovery. IEMT pays close attention to the eye movements themselves. When a person’s eyes veer away from the path the practitioner is setting, this is taken as a sign that the mind has moved on to another part of the memory, or to another time, and the practitioner may follow it. IEMT also works with identity, with “who I am” as well as “how I feel”.2 EMDR follows a longer protocol in eight phases, built on Shapiro’s model of how memories are stored. See What can EMDR offer shamanic work?
What can IEMT offer shamanic work? #
Three things, chiefly.
The first is a way of lowering the charge of an old hurt without a long process. In Therapeutic Shamanism, people have to face particular issues at their own pace and in their own time. Part of a person may want to change whilst another part is fearful and resistant, and that resistance needs to be respected, not barged past.3 Something that makes a memory less overwhelming can help the pace stay bearable, so that a person can come to the deeper work when they are ready. See What can trauma therapy offer shamanic work?
The second is its work on identity. A great deal of suffering lives in beliefs such as “I am worthless” or “I am not safe”, laid down by what happened to us. In the shamanic map, the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer is made from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, whilst the Soul is our truest self, wild and free, and the blueprint for what we are meant to grow into.4 Loosening a painful story about who we are leaves more room for the Soul to come through. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
The third is a shared interest in the past that is still alive in us. When an old event still stirs us up years later, energy of ours that was left behind in it is still caught up there. Shamanism calls the work of gathering back that energy, and letting the past go, recapitulationRecapitulation. The practice of gathering ourselves back from earlier events, ‘dying to the past’, so that unresolved history no longer runs us. More about this, and has many techniques for it. IEMT approaches the same ground from another side, through the feelings that still fire when an old memory is touched. See What is recapitulation?
Is there evidence that IEMT works? #
Very little so far, and what there is is new. Until recently the support for IEMT came mainly from practitioners’ clinical reports. In 2026 a small study compared IEMT-style and EMDR-style eye movements in thirty-three adults recalling an upsetting memory. Both lowered distress more than a control condition, and the two did not differ from each other. The authors called their findings “exploratory and preliminary”, and wrote that IEMT “currently lacks a strong empirical foundation”.5 One of them is connected with IEMT training.
Austin, for his part, places IEMT in the wider family of eye movement methods, which have been used successfully with post-traumatic stress, and whose most consistent finding is that the emotional intensity of traumatic memories goes down.6 See What can EMDR offer shamanic work? for the much larger body of research on EMDR.
Can anything take the place of feeling our feelings? #
No. In Therapeutic Shamanism, feelings need to be felt. They need to be brought into consciousness and allowed to work their way through both the body and the psyche. Feelings that are bypassed do not go away; they become part of what Jung called the Shadow, which grows stronger the more it is denied.7 See What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Nor does lowering the charge of a memory bring home a part of us that has left. That is the work of soul retrieval, and it is where shamanism has something of its own to offer. See What can shamanism offer IEMT?
Where can someone find IEMT? #
IEMT is offered by practitioners trained in it. One of the practitioners listed on the college’s Resources page offers trauma-release work, including IEMT, as well as shamanic work. For trauma that is complex or long-standing, see What are PTSD and complex PTSD, and can shamanic work help?
