What EMDR Can & Can't Do for Grief
Takeaway: Curious if EMDR can help with grief? Understanding what EMDR is (and isn’t) can help you decide if it’s the right time to try it in your healing process. Here, I’ll break down the process.
After losing a loved one suddenly, my client found herself overwhelmed by waves of sadness that never seemed to ease. She replayed the moments leading up to the loss over and over, feeling stuck in pain and unable to imagine a future without that person. Despite trying different coping strategies, the intense grief kept interfering with her daily life. What this client needed was a way to gently process those memories so she could start to heal- and that's where EMDR therapy made a big difference (note: this is an example scenario and does not describe a specific client).
I'm Allison Barton, a certified EMDR therapist who has been helping clients for 10 years. Using EMDR to process a traumatic loss allows the client to go through the natural mourning process. EMDR grief therapy can help restore a sense of safety after a sudden death or loss. However, this modality has its limitations in treating painful memories.
Quick overview of EMDR therapy for grief
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of trauma therapy developed by Francine Shapiro that is grounded in the basic principles of how the brain processes and stores distressing memories. The modality can help you get unstuck from negative beliefs and supporting your ongoing healing. EMDR will not take away your emotional pain but it can help to resolve excessive grief and mourning. While EMDR for grief is a powerful tool, it is not a magic wand. Our attachment styles and experience with death can affect how each individual will manage grief after a death. Let's discuss how this approach can improve your grief experience:
| EMDR can help... | But it won’t... |
|---|---|
| process traumatic or sudden losses | erase the love or memories |
| reduce overwhelming emotions tied to the loss | speed up the natural timeline of grief |
| reduce negative core beliefs | provide immediate relief |
| ease intrusive thoughts, images, and flashbacks | work effectively if grief is fresh without stabilization |
| help you shift from pain to acceptance | replace support from family, friends, and community |
A deeper look at how EMDR can help with grief
EMDR therapy can help improve the grief process and can reduce symptoms of traumatic bereavement. EMDR can help individuals work through present triggers that are exacerbating their grief and treat complicated grief.
Process Traumatic or Sudden Losses
EMDR can help your brain reprocess the trauma related to sudden loses, including memories that cause you to continually relive the event. These painful memories can include the call you received explaining your loved one's fate, the memory of seeing your loved one for the last time, or replaying the way your loved one died.
Reduce Overwhelming Emotions Tied to Loss
Grief often comes with overwhelming emotions including guilt, anger, regret, and sadness. Using EMDR therapy to process grief can reduce the intensity of the emotions associated with grief, which makes it easier to recall times with your loved one without being flooded emotionally. Using EMDR can also help you feel more grounded by having access to coping skills when waves of grief hit.
Reduce Negative Core Beliefs
Often times, grief and mourning are intensified by negative core beliefs of those left behind like "I should have done something more" or "It's my fault that they're gone." EMDR will help you target negative memories associated with the negative core beliefs. EMDR will also integrate positive memories and adaptive information in order to create a balanced perspective for healing.
Ease Intrusive Thoughts/Images/Flashbacks
Bereaved people often have trauma symptoms, including intrusive thoughts, images, or flashbacks, related to the loss. EMDR can lessen the recurring mental images you may experience related to the difficult memories. The treatment framework of EMDR will guide you through creating adaptive coping mechanisms and help you work through potential intrusive images you continue to experience. EMDR will also help you identify potential future triggers by using a future template.
Help you Shift from Pain to Acceptance
EMDR therapy can help you shift from the complicated grief associated with bereavement. Through reprocessing therapy, you can learn to hold memories of loss and memories of joy together without guilt. You will also learn to remember your loved one while re-engaging with your life, which is integral to the acceptance process.
More on what EMDR can’t do for grief
As you can see, EMDR can be extremely helpful in resolving the mental health challenges that arise from complicated grief and live a fulfilling life. While EMDR can be a powerful tool, clinical guidelines recommend that it be used with a broader support plan, including stabilization, support systems, and client readiness to process the loss.
EMDR Wont Erase the Love and Memories
Using EMDR therapy will not erase the love and past experiences you have of your loved one. The goal is not to erase what you felt for the person who has passed but to help you find inner peace with the loss. The goal of EMDR is to reduce the intensity of the distress, which can help you move forward.
EMDR Won't Speed Up the Natural Timeline of Grief
Grief is a natural response to losing someone you love and EMDR will not take these feelings away. It is important that you work your way through the natural process of sadness, which will hep you navigate the greater risk of depression or PTSD related to unprocessed grief. The timeline for working through pain after death varies for everyone and is shaped by the relationship you had, the circumstances of the loss, and your own nervous system's ability to process the loss.
EMDR Won't Provide Immediate Relief
EMDR is powerful but it does not provide immediate relief. What it does is to reprocess the maladaptively stored information so the information is stored in a way that is more helpful in reducing feelings of grief. EMDr is also supportive in working through grief that often includes multiple layers.
EMDR Won't Work Effectively Without Stabilization
In order to maintain emotional safety during EMDR therapy, it is critical to have tools to manage emotional dysregulation effectively. Stabilization means building more coping skills and safety in your nervous system, which are necessary to work through the painful experiences associated with grief.
EMDR Won't Replace Support of Family, Friends, and Community
No matter what treatment approach you utilize in your healing process, support from family, friends, and community are important tools to help. Healing is strengthened when therapy works alongside social support, which allows healing to happen both inside and outside the therapy room.
When to consider EMDR therapy for grief
There are many ways to work through the distressing memories associated with grief. Clinical considerations can make it challenging to determine which type of therapy—such as talk therapy, integrated cognitive behavioral therapy, or EMDR—would best support your needs. Studies by the EMDR Institute have shown that EMDR can help the brain heal from trauma just as the body heals from physical wounds. Another study found that while EMDR and Integrated Cognitive Behavior Therapy are both effective ways to treat grief, EMDR was found to bring about faster healing. Choosing an EMDR practice can be especially helpful for grief when you're experiencing the following signs:
you feel stuck in the grieving process
if the loss was sudden, violent, or traumatic
when recalling memories of your loved one feels unbearable
if you have intrusive images or thoughts that are interrupting your life
when grief reactivates childhood trauma or earlier unresolved losses
if anxiety or hyper-vigilance has increased since the loss
when you want to integrate the loss into your life story
When EMDR may not be the best fit (yet)
EMDR therapy can be extremely helpful in processing stuck emotions from a death. However, there are conceptual considerations that would make this modality not a good fit, at least to begin with:
when you're in a crisis or the early stages of grieving
when you don't have emotional safety or stability
when others mental health disorders would need to be resolved before processing the grief begins
if you're avoiding reminders of the death of your loved one and are not ready to re-visit the experience
if you have a limited support system and need to feel more safe prior to beginning processing the death
What to expect from EMDR sessions
The standard EMDR protocol includes 8 phases of treatment- history taking, preparation, assessment, desensitization, installation, body scan, closure, and re-evaulation. In the history taking phase, you'll work with your therapist to identify your history with grief. You'll be able to discuss things like if your loved one experienced a long illness, unresolved conflicts you have with the death, whether your loved one received palliative care, etc. You'll also identify negative beliefs that are keeping you stuck in grief. Next, you will move to the preparation phase where you will learn coping mechanisms that will keep you grounded and able to emotionally regulate while doing the difficult work of reprocessing during EMDR. In the assessment phase, you and your therapist will identify a specific experience to target during that session. The EMDR process will then include desensitization of negative feelings and installation of adaptive beliefs before moving toward doing a body scan and closure for the session. In future sessions, your therapist will re-evaluate whether you need to continue working on the target using eye movements based on ongoing emotional activation or whether you can continue on to other targets. Finally, your therapist will likely use a future template to allow you to imagine how you'd handle future situations related to the death.
Final thoughts
EMDR therapy is a highly effective therapy modality to aid in the process of healing after a death and can bring a new sense of clarity about the loss. EMDR can help you when you're feeling stuck in grief and when your experiences feel unbearable to work through. However, there are reasons why a person wouldn't choose to use EMDR therapy for grief including not having adequate support, being in crisis due to the death, or not being ready to process the memories related to the death. Understanding the relationship between EMDR and grief can help you decide whether this therapy is right for the healing journey.
If you're wondering whether this type of therapy would be a good fit for your specific situation with grief, reach out to schedule a free consultation with me. I can answer questions you have about the process and help you decide whether you want to engage in EMDR therapy. I look forward to supporting you!
