Can EMDR help people process grief? Here’s What Scientific Studies Show
When you miss someone or something you’ve lost, grief is a natural part of processing your feelings. It can be a helpful part of healing.
At the same time, grief can be overwhelming or persistent. This kind of grief can affect your ability to sleep, work, connect with others, or feel present in your own life
So, does EMDR help with grief?
Research suggests that EMDR can help reduce the kinds of distress, trauma, or overwhelm that can lead to grief. The research is still limited, though, and no therapy can make grief totally disappear.
What the research shows is that EMDR can help you move through the parts of the loss that continue to affect you. Over time, this therapy can relieve the ways where it’s a struggle to get through your daily life.
Real Quick: What is EMDR?
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a structured therapy that helps people process distressing memories, experiences, and thoughts.
The goal is to help the memory or thought feel less overwhelming when you think about it. You will still remember what happened, but the memory will have less power to pull you back into the experience.
What Scientific Studies Show: Evidence for EMDR as Grief Support
Research on EMDR for grief is an area that’s still growing, so we’ll look at what researchers know so far.
Small studies suggest that EMDR can be helpful when some part of the grief is persistent and causes significant distress (Journal of EMDR Practice and Research 2016). EMDR offers a way to work with the pain connected to the loss itself.
When Loss Also Involves Trauma
When there is trauma connected to the loss, EMDR can be helpful. EMDR has a large research base for trauma specifically, so therapists work with this modality to help clients move through emotionally intense experiences.
A research paper saw that people benefitted from EMDR when they were mourning a death tied to traumatic experiences (European Review of Applied Psychology 2012).
For example, you might be grieving someone whose death was sudden. Or you might replay one moment from the situation over in your mind.
An important point: Grief with trauma can also be part of losses that don’t involve death at all.
For example, you might have ended a painful relationship, and feel both relief and grief together. You logically know that leaving was the right thing to do, but you can also feel a kind of mourning for what happened. You might replay moments of rejection, or think about what the future could have been, if things were different.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by grief, EMDR can offer you a way to work directly with the trauma connected to the loss.
EMDR can help distressing memories feel less intense
Sometimes, the most challenging part of grief is a memory. Even when you know that the event is over, the memory can still bring up the same emotions or sensations as when it was actually happening to you.
EMDR’s Adaptive Information Processing model gives us a way to understand this. It says that some distressing experiences stay insufficiently processed. When this happens, memories can stay connected to intense emotions, sensations, or beliefs (European Review of Applied Psychology 2012).
Research on the eye-movement part of EMDR found that it can reduce the vividness of disturbing memories. Scientists think that this happens in therapy because you’re doing two things at once: holding the memory and moving the eyes from side to side. This might overload the brain’s working memory abilities. So while the memory is still there, the presence of it is reduced (Frontiers in Psychology 2018).
This is important with grief processing. Healing doesn’t mean we forget the person, or make the loss feel unimportant. True grief processing allows you to remember what happened, while you stay grounded in the present.
EMDR for Socially Unacknowledged Losses
Some grief is a struggle to process because the people around you might not fully recognize your experience as a “true loss.”
The loss of a pet, cutting ties with a family member, or the loss of health can all cause their own forms of bereavement. These losses can bring up grief that’s just as valid as when you lose someone you love.
Because they aren’t as acknowledged by others, your loss might also be paired with feelings of inadequacy, rejection, or other complicated emotions. This is called disenfranchised grief. When these painful emotions are connected to the loss, EMDR can directly target and reprocess the negative self-beliefs keeping you stuck.
There are EMDR adaptations that focus on this broader range of grief experiences. One example is the Break-Up Aid Procedure, an adaptation of EMDR for people who are struggling to recover after a romantic relationship ends. The approach looks at grief, emotional responses connected to the breakup , and unresolved experiences that could impact future relationships (Frontiers in Psychology 2022).
EMDR for Prolonged Grief
For some people, grief continues to be intense and disruptive for a long time after a loss. Prolonged Grief is a mental health condition that involves an ongoing yearning or hyperfocus on the loss. It’s associated with intense emotional pain and a difficulty returning to daily life. This can cause a significant disruption to relationships, work, and health.
EMDR is being studied as a treatment for prolonged grief when hurtful memories, trauma, or other experiences block the grieving process.
A 2024 review looked at EMDR therapy for this type of unresolved grief and concluded that EMDR holds promise. The authors offer suggestions that include working with memories of the loss, present-day triggers, and fears about the future (Frontiers in Psychiatry 2024).
Therapy for Grief in Los Angeles
When we look at these studies together, they suggest EMDR can be supportive around grief. Specifically, it can help if you struggle with specific memories, emotions, or experiences that impair your daily life.
Grief extends beyond sadness. Depending on the loss, you might also feel anger, anxiety, exhaustion, intrusive memories, difficulty focusing, or feel like you’re still emotionally present with what happened.
Therapy can give you a way to ease what you’re going through, so you can find ways to live with the loss while making room for the rest of your life, too.
I’m Michele Ross, a Licensed Therapist in California. I offer grief therapy and EMDR in my Los Angeles office and online for California residents.
I understand that grief can come from a wide spectrum of loss, and that how you navigate through it will be different from person to person.
If you’re struggling with grief, you may be uncertain if therapy can help, especially if talk therapy hasn’t given you the kind of progress you’d hoped for in the past.
I believe that good things are possible for you, and that you can get back to your life. When we work together, we’ll both honor the loss. At the same time, we’ll work toward it not holding you back any longer.
Contact me by filling out this brief form to get started. I offer free 15-minute consultations. We’ll talk briefly to see if we’re a good fit for each other, and I’ll answer questions you might have about EMDR and grief.
