If you have gone through some traumatic event (be it a traffic accident, abuse or something seemingly less important, such as having been humiliated), the memory of your experience may come back to your mind, forcing you to relive the original event with the same intensity and feeling, as if it were happening in the present moment. These experiences that arise in your consciousness can occur either as flashbacks or as nightmares, and are thought to be because the mind was too overwhelmed during the event to process what was happening. As a result, these unprocessed memories and everything that accompanied them, sounds, thoughts and feelings, are stored in the brain so that they can be accessed every time we experience something that triggers the memory of the original event. While it is not possible to erase these memories, the process of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) can alter the way in which these traumatic memories are stored in the brain, making them easier to handle and causing less pain.