Is It Ever Too Late for EMDR? Trauma Therapy in Later Life

Trauma does not have an expiry date. People in their sixties, seventies and beyond may still be carrying memories from childhood, from working life, or from events many decades past, and those memories can continue to intrude, disturb sleep, and narrow daily life. Yet older adults are markedly less likely to be offered trauma-focused therapy than younger ones. The assumptions behind that are rarely said out loud. That the memories are too old and too settled to shift. That an older person is too frail for demanding therapy. That medication is the kinder route. Are any of them actually true? A study by Ellen Gielkens and colleagues, published in the *Journal of Clinical Medicine* (2021), tested the question directly. The researchers compared 62 older adults aged 60 to 78 with 62 younger adults aged 19 to 58, matched for gender, all of whom took part in the same intensive eight-day programme combining EMDR with prolonged exposure, physical activity, and group education about trauma. The results were clear. Both groups showed large reductions in PTSD symptom severity, and the difference in outcome between the age groups was negligible. Older adults did just as well as younger ones. The dropout figures are arguably more striking still. During treatment, only around 1% of older participants dropped out, compared with roughly 4% of younger ones. That directly contradicts the frailty assumption. An intensive, demanding programme was not only effective for older adults, it was tolerated slightly better by them. Some caution is warranted. Participants were matched rather than randomly allocated, so this is not a randomised trial. A large proportion of both groups did not complete the follow-up assessment, which limits what can be said about how long the gains lasted. And nobody in the study was over 78, so the very oldest remain unstudied. The authors say as much. The practical message still stands. If you are older and have been carrying something for decades, the evidence does not support the idea that it is too late or that you are too old for this kind of work. That belief is common, it is understandable, and on this evidence it is wrong. *Source: Gielkens, E. M. J., de Jongh, A., Sobczak, S., Rossi, G., van Minnen, A., Voorendonk, E. M., Rozendaal, L., & van Alphen, S. P. J. (2021). Comparing Intensive Trauma-Focused Treatment Outcome on PTSD Symptom Severity in Older and Younger Adults. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 10(6), 1246.*