Can EMDR Therapy be Helpful for Kids Who are Triggered by Anything and Everything?
Kids with big dysregulation problems really can be triggered by almost anything and everything. Parents of highly dysregulated kids become exhausted trying to manage the meltdowns and arguments. The list of triggers includes normal, everyday events like homework, the word "no," dinnertime, morning time, a fun event, bedtime, a direction or correction, a chore, parents paying attention to another child, praise, running errands, showering, or brushing teeth. Parents ask, "How will we ever lead a normal life?"
What causes this type of dysregulation? There are a number of possibilities. One cause can be trauma—especially early trauma that interfered with critical moments of nervous system development and attachment security. Brain development is impacted by early trauma so that the higher regions of the brain are left underdeveloped and the lower regions are wired for vigilance and reactivity. When there is generational trauma or mental health problems, parents may not be able to provide the mirroring and co-regulation needed to support brain growth, settle the nervous system, or support the ability to think, reason, and problem-solve in the older child.
Neurodivergence that is inborn can also leave kids with brain differences and high sensitivity to internal discomfort, sensory experiences, moods in other people, or changes in routine. Mood disorders may be present in response to a difficult environment and/or as part of an inherited condition. Exposure to alcohol or other substances in utero leaves infants with underdeveloped critical brain regions for managing emotions and impulses.
The EMDR Trigger Tolerance Protocol can help. Our colleagues in the Netherlands who translated our book and are training EMDR therapists in the Integrative Attachment Trauma Protocol for Children (Wesselmann, 2025a; 2025b; Wesselmann, Hein, & Schlattmann, in press) came up with the term because we are not focused on the unreachable goal of eliminating triggers. We are instead focused on improving the child's capacity to ride out the disturbance, reason, think, and discover new insights—followed by a playful future template role-play.
As most EMDR therapists discover, one of the beautiful things about EMDR therapy is the way it jump-starts the natural adaptive information processing system, resulting in associations to new insights and discovering new meaning related to events. Struggling kids do need a little assistance through cognitive interweaves, because developmentally, there is much they don't know. But with just a little rudimentary trust, we can drop in "seeds" of information that direct them toward new ideas while bilateral stimulation is lighting up the regions of the brain needed for processing. As more triggers are processed along with future template role-plays, healthy functioning of the brain and nervous system improves.
Wesselmann, D. (2025a). EMDR and family therapy: Integrative treatment for attachment trauma in children, 2nd edition. W.W. Norton.
Wesselmann, D., Hein, I., & Schlattmann, N. (in press). Integrative attachment trauma protocol for children. In Beer, R. & Roos, C. De (Eds.), Handbook EMDR: Children and adolescents, second edition. Houten: LannooCampus.
