IEMT — Integral Eye Movement Technique — is a brief intervention method that uses guided eye movements to work on sensory-emotional charge and identity patterns. It was developed by Andrew T. Austin (UK) around 2005–2006 and is a complement to treatment, not a replacement.
What is the IEMT method overview?
The IEMT method overview is the method hub on iemttrainingen.nl about Integral Eye Movement Technique: six elaborated pieces that together answer one question — what the method is, how it works, what it does and does not fit, how it relates to trauma and to other methods, and what happens in a session.
Intended for coaches, therapists, counsellors and trainers who want to understand the method professionally. The numbering 1 → 6 follows the most didactically fluent reading order; each piece also stands on its own.
Prefer something concrete? See 17 examples from practice — the client patterns IEMT is used for.
LINEAGE AND SOURCE
Where the method comes from
Andrew T. Austin (UK) developed IEMT around 2005–2006. His background: A&E and neurosurgery nurse, hypnosis training at the Royal Masonic Hospital (1994), years of NLP and Erickson formation. The direct inspiration for the identity work comes from David Grove (Clean Language, 1950–2008); for the eye-movement work from Connirae and Steve Andreas (Eye Movement Integration, 1989). International accreditation of trainers and practitioners runs through The Association for IEMT Practitioners (UK, founded 2015 by Austin himself).
Alongside IEMT, Austin developed Metaphors of Movement (MoM) in parallel — originally a component within IEMT, later worked out into a standalone model. Where IEMT works with eye movements on sensory-emotional charge, MoM works with the spontaneous spatial metaphors the client uses themselves. Two parallel streams from the same clinical basis — and well deployed alongside each other in practice.
Methodically, IEMT stands at a crossroads of broader traditions. Via Austin's own formation it touches the NLP school and the Ericksonian hypnosis tradition; contemporary neuroscience around memory reconsolidation and the Default Mode Network gives the work a mechanistic bedding; and in the nursing adaptation tradition — Callista Roy's adaptation model — the chronicity patterns read as adaptation-failure modes: stalled adaptation of the client as an interconnected bio-psycho-social system. What IEMT itself adds is its own diagnostic model for the feelings the method works with — Austin's Three Pillars, which distinguishes three clusters of emotions each addressed on its own working layer within IEMT. How each cluster is worked is practice material for the Practitioner training.
RESEARCH
What the science measures
In 2026 Van Heugten – van der Kloet, Boonstra, Trouk and Ten Brinke published the first peer-reviewed lab study directly comparing IEMT and EMDR (Journal of Evidence-Based Psychotherapies, 26(1)). Both methods gave a “very large” effect on SUD reduction and were statistically no different from each other; 60.6 % of the blinded participants preferred IEMT — partly because of fewer side effects, and because the client does not have to share their story. The research context is exploratory and non-clinical. Read the worked-out reading →
For the client and HR perspective on the same research (two tabs, including implications for employers): see the parallel piece at iemtcoaching.com/onderzoek .
IEMT IN PICTURES
Visual summaries
Visual overviews per audience — handy to forward or take along to an orientation call.
- IEMT for coaches — in pictures A three-part leaflet on what IEMT is for coaches, who it fits, how I train.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Read on, section by section
The six blocks at the top of this page are clickable — each leads to its own page. Prefer a list? Here they are again, with the practice examples.
Want to learn this yourself?
You do not learn the method by reading about it. A Practitioner training works on skill in your own practice — with the time, practice and feedback that go with it.
Look at the trainings