Can You Really Heal from Trauma in Just a Few Sessions?

Carol,* 40, was attending a parade when she spotted a few helicopters, triggering instant tears and a tightness in her chest. Helicopters were a painful reminder of the day she watched her son being transported for emergency heart surgery at 2 days old. Oh no, she remembers thinking. Maybe the session didn’t work. The day before the parade, Carol had undergone Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART), a type of trauma therapy that promises to heal quickly and effectively—in as little as one to five sessions.But five days later, another helicopter flew overhead while Carol was relaxing at the beach with friends. And this time, she watched it with about as much emotional investment as she would a cloud drifting by.Carol eventually completed four ART sessions, but she says something had already shifted after the first one. Though it wasn’t immediate, in the days between the parade and the beach, Carol says ART “changed [her] reaction to the memory.”Since it was developed by Laney Rosenzweig, LMFT, in 2008, ART has drawn plenty of skepticism—but also curiosity. Google Trends data shows that relative search interest started climbing around 2020, roughly quadrupling from its baseline a decade ago, and reaching an all-time high between 2023 and 2026.The appeal of rapid healing is easy to understand, particularly at a time when access to mental health care remains challenging for many. A recent survey found that 30 percent of U.S. adults who needed mental health care in the previous year weren’t able to get it due to costs or other barriers. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), trauma-focused psychotherapies with the strongest evidence typically take eight to 16 weekly sessions.What is ART? And who is it for? Rosenzweig developed ART partly from Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Both therapies use eye movements during processing, but ART incorporates a distinctive technique that swaps traumatic imagery for new images of the patient’s choosing. ART is also a proprietary therapy: Medical providers undergo specialized training before incorporating it into their practice and must sign a nondisclosure agreement, which limits what they can share about the technique. Some of these specially trained providers take insurance, while others are self-pay only. And while costs vary, out-of-pocket rates tend to range from around $175 to $400 per session.Letting your mind wander isn’t part of ART; instead, you stay focused on one specific traumatic memory. The therapy itself involves guiding clients through distressing memories while using bilateral eye movements, says Becca Gregory, LICSW, an ART-trained therapist in private practice. Bilateral stimulation is a hallmark of EMDR and can also be practiced with rhythmic alternating sensory input, taps, or vibrations. Research suggests this technique may make traumatic memories feel less emotionally intense.Neither EMDR nor ART requires verbally recounting your trauma in detail. However, in EMDR, patients are often asked to identify a core memory to target and share the highlights with their therapist—along with the physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions that arise while processing it. With ART, the therapist can guide you through the memory without needing to know the specifics of what you’re working on. EMDR also involves free association: While noticing what comes up during processing, you might find the original memory triggers a different but related image, sensation, or thought that can lead you to processing something else. Letting your mind wander isn’t part of ART; instead, you stay focused on one specific traumatic memory.What sets ART apart is what happens after the initial processing: Voluntary Image Replacement (VIR), a technique that involves rescripting the traumatic scene with the imagery of your choice. According to the ART site, the goal is to “delete” or “diminish” negative images in your mind and replace them with positive ones.For Carol, this meant replaying the scene of her son’s emergency transport under the guidance of her therapist, Laurel Wiers, LMFT, and noticing the emotions and physical sensations it brought up. When certain parts of the memory still felt upsetting, Carol imagined painting over the scene—first in white, then sage green, and eventually with a cartoon snail leaving a trail of silver glitter—to make the images feel less vivid and threatening and to give her a sense of control over a situation she’d previously felt powerless in.ART is mainly designed to treat PTSD and other trauma-related conditions, but it’s also been used to help patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Some women who used ART were trying to recover from a single incident, like a traumatic birth, a loss, or healing from shame. Others were targeting a collection of memories. Complex trauma, or trauma that doesn’t always fit neatly into a single memory, can stem from repeated or prolonged traumatic experiences. This kind of trauma can be trickier to untangle.“In my clinical experience, ART tends to work best for people who have at least one explicit memory to begin with: a memory that has a beginning, middle, and end, still feels emotionally activating when they recall it, and is affecting the person’s life today,” says Gregory. “Survivors of single-incident trauma are much more likely to benefit from specific-trauma therapies such as ART, EMDR, CPT, and many others, in a shorter period of time, than survivors of complex trauma,” says Emily Haas, MD, a psychiatrist and director of the Triumph Program for complex trauma and dissociative disorders at Silver Hill Hospital.Still, patients with complex trauma can use ART to target one emotionally charged memory that’s part of a much larger history, and according to Gregory, this can still be helpful, having a “ripple effect” on similar memories.For Julie,* 52, ART helped her untangle more than a singular memory. She sought out the therapy after struggling with feelings of rejection and abandonment related to being put up for adoption as a child, as well as memories from her adoptive home. During her first two sessions, she worked on painful imagery surrounding how she pictured the separation from her birth mother and a recurring childhood dream in which she desperately searched for her to no avail.“As an adoptee who had lived with missing information about my own history, truth mattered enormously to me,” she says. “I questioned how creating imaginary scenes could help with real pain.” But she says she found the experience “valuable.” When asked to rescript her triggering memories, she chose to project images of waterfalls and forests onto these scenes, explaining that nature had always been a source of comfort to her. Ultimately, the agency ART provided helped Julie feel better. “I could decide what comfort looked like and create something meaningful over experiences I had never had control over.”One exercise that felt particularly profound involved imagining the mother she had needed but never got to know. “ART did not undo my separation from my birth mother or change what happened in my childhood,” she says. “It helped me engage with some of that pain and trauma in a way that felt empowering.”What the data shows—and doesn’t showEvidence around ART appears to be limited but promising. A 2024 systematic review published in PLOS Mental Health, which examined five primary studies with 337 enrolled participants, found significant improvements in PTSD symptoms, as well as significant reductions with depression, anxiety, mental distress, and sleep dysfunction, across the board. In a 2013 landmark randomized controlled trial published in Military Medicine, U.S. service members and veterans with combat-related PTSD who received ART experienced significantly greater improvements in symptoms than the comparison group, and those benefits continued three months later.“These results are encouraging,” says David Storey, lead author of the 2024 systematic review of ART and a clinical psychology doctoral researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Still, he notes that larger, independent, high-quality studies are needed—especially head-to-head trials comparing it with first-line treatments (such as EMDR and CBT). Another critique of existing ART literature is that many of the published studies come from a small pool of researchers, often in collaboration with ART’s creator (including the landmark 2013 trial), Storey notes.ART’s proprietary nature can also pose challenges for independent research, but that isn’t really a concern to Dr. Haas as a clinician. “I’m less focused on the business model of the intervention than on its ability to offer our patients relief from their suffering and improved health moving forward,” she says.But properly gauging what “success” looks like in therapy can be tricky. The question isn’t just whether people get better after ART—it’s how we define “better,” says MaryCatherine McDonald, PhD, a research professor at College of the Holy Cross who studies trauma and resilience. Immediate relief is not the same as lasting healing, which is also why studies on ART need longer-term follow-ups. McDonald says that most people focus on symptom reduction, since it means people are experiencing less suffering—but the quality of life after trauma also matters. “You can have symptom reduction and still just be coping rather than thriving,” she says. This might look like sleepless nights, laughing less, and not feeling present with people you love.For Frank Anderson, MD, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, another concern about ART is whether creating new images from past trauma could actually be a form of “bypassing” trauma rather than healing. Dr. Anderson believes it’s possible to experience relief in a few sessions—but it depends on the type of trauma and what you’re seeking to heal. “If you’ve been living in a dysfunctional family for your whole life, there’s no way three sessions are going to heal that,” he says. “Will it help a particular part or dimension of it? Sure, possibly.”Why ‘accelerated’ isn’t necessarily better—or worseSo, is faster treatment better? Or the same? The answer is complicated.Maybe we’ve created two competing myths, says McDonald. “One says healing has to take years of painful work and your job is to power through it,” she adds. “The other says if you’re doing the right therapy, you’ll be transformed almost immediately and with total ease. Obviously, neither is true.” Healing isn’t a marathon or a sprint: There is no award for suffering longer, nor is there one for crossing the finish line quicker. “Trauma treatment doesn’t have to be long to be legitimate, and it doesn’t have to be difficult to be effective,” McDonald says.Gregory feels that Americans tend to believe that anything worth having must be slow, painful, and hard-earned—an assumption that could deter some people from seeking help. “If someone believes healing means months or years of reliving painful memories in brutal detail, it’s understandable they’d put it off,” she adds. Someone might avoid starting therapy because they’ve heard it takes years, and they don’t have the bandwidth for that right now. Someone else might quit early because they expected fast relief and didn’t get it, and they interpret that as proof it won’t work for them.The best trauma treatment might not be the one that works the fastest but the one that people are able and willing to finish. Up to one-third of people who pursue therapy don’t return within 45 days after their first visit, according to one study. For some, it may be a cost or scheduling issue. And not seeing results early enough can play a role as well: Research shows that people who fail to improve early in therapy are more likely to drop out. Compared to other established treatments, ART’s early studies show relatively high completion rates—perhaps because so few sessions are required. But it’s not yet clear how much of that difference can be attributed to the therapy itself (versus other factors, like study settings or populations).“We have to think outside the box.”Although ART felt transformative for Carol and Julie, it may not work for everyone—and that’s okay. “The important thing to remember is that therapies don’t fail because people fail,” says McDonald. “Sometimes a treatment simply isn’t the right fit for a particular nervous system, history, or moment in someone’s life. Some things will shift quickly. Some things will need to be revisited more than once. That’s just how healing works.”Healing doesn’t mean someone stops experiencing fear or recalling painful memories—experts all agreed that would be unrealistic. But according to Gregory, it means their reactions become proportionate to what’s happening in the present instead of being amplified by unresolved experiences from the past.“Can it get better? Yes,” says Dr. Anderson. “Are there ways that healing can be more efficient? Yes. Do we have a good handle on that yet? No. Is it possible that we’re not gonna need everybody to be in 30 years of therapy? I hope so. We have to think outside the box.”The trauma field used to ask: How do we “get rid” of symptoms? Now, McDonald says, we’ve shifted toward, How do we help someone build a life with more freedom in it? “That’s a much better question, and I think it’s going to keep shaping where this field goes next,” she adds.*Patients’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.