EMDR Doesn’t Take Away Sadness. Here’s What it Can Do.
Grief and loss can be navigated through many types of therapy, including EMDR. In my practice, I’ve had the honor of helping individuals who’ve lost a loved one and to witness their growth from the time they first came in to see me to their last session. I used EMDR with these clients to help them cope with the trauma of their loss and the transformation I saw with them has made me want to further hone in on working with traumatic grief and loss. While EMDR can be helpful for this population, there are distinctions that should be made about what it can help with and what it can’t do in terms of grief and loss.
What EMDR Can’t Do:
Take away sadness
Make you forget
Fix what has happened
What EMDR Can Help With:
Lessen the frequency and intensity of disturbing images
Reduce guilt and regret
Help you to picture your loved one in peace
What EMDR Can’t Do
1. Take away sadness
Any therapy, including EMDR, can’t take away natural emotions. As painful as it is to feel sad during the grief process, that sadness is a natural reaction to loss. We want to be able to feel all emotions, because all emotions are healthy. It just depends on how you act on those emotions that can cause an unhealthy pattern. EMDR therapy helps you to process through feelings of sadness, but it won’t turn sadness into happiness or take away feeling sad when you think about what you’ve lost. It’s normal and healthy to feel sad after losing something or someone important and meaningful to you.
2. Make you forget
I’ve had clients express worry and have resistance to EMDR because they fear that reprocessing what happened will cause them to forget about the person or they won’t be able to to think about them as much. This isn’t what EMDR does, and I’m not sure if there’s any therapy or technique that can actually erase a memory or force you to forget something or someone. For example, someone who experienced a sexual assault and goes through EMDR therapy will still remember the assault and what happended. Before reprocessing the assault through EMDR, the client may be having sharp and vivid images or flashbacks of the assault, almost as if they were reliving it. After reprocessing the assault, it acts more like a memory instead of a present day incident that replays as if it just happened.
EMDR takes traumatic and distressing events, no matter how recent or long ago, and helps them be a memory instead of an active event in the present. That means the event won’t show up in your mind or body so intensely in the present moment. It just becomes a memory, where you remember it as something upsetting that happened, but you’re able to leave it be instead of lingering on it. The same thing happens with traumatic grief. You may always feel sadness when thinking of the person and what happened, but the intense replay of vivid thoughts and images from when they passed will start to feel more like a memory where you’ll be able to think about it with less intense physical and mental reactions in the present day.
3. Fix what has happened
The purpose of EMDR Therapy (or any therapy) for grief isn’t to fix what has happened. It’s not going to take away pain, sadness, or anger. It more so helps lessen the sharpness of some of these emotions and thoughts. It can help make the pain a little more bearable by decreasing how often you think of the worst moments and it can make those images a little fuzzy instead of so vivid, therefore having a less intense reaction to them.
What EMDR Can Help With
1. Lessen the frequency and intensity of disturbing images
EMDR can work well for incidents that are upsetting or distressing and too overwhelming for your nervous system to handle. When we see something disturbing like a gruesome image, it can get stuck in our heads. When we replay this image or thought, it can give us uncomfortable physical symptoms too, like an upset stomach, racing heart, or heavy chest. When thinking about the gruesome image while adding in BLS, this makes the image act more as a memory. When something is just a memory, it stays in the past instead of replaying so intensely in your head.
Traumatic grief happens when you lose someone or something and the way you lost them involved intense distress. Losing someone is distressing alone, but when you lose someone in a traumatic incident, like an accident, or from a sudden health impairment, this adds in symptoms of PTSD on top of your grief. You may be replaying those images and having flashbacks to it that you can’t control. EMDR helps to lessen or stop the flashbacks so they stay in the past as a memory.
2. Address guilt and regret
Regular grief and traumatic grief both tend to be accompanied by feelings of guilt or regret. After we lose someone, it's common to think about the what ifs.
What if I had seen the signs earlier?
What if I had been with them? Then I could’ve stopped it.
If only I hadn’t done “xyz” then maybe they’d still be here.
These thoughts can eat away at you and make you feel responsible and shameful for something that happened when it may have never been in your control to begin with, or really you did the best you could in the moment. But it doesn’t usually feel that way. EMDR can help those thoughts become real beliefs. It doesn’t just help to reduce intense images, it also helps to adapt your brain towards rational and true thoughts. Imagine what you would tell a friend if they were in this situation. You’d tell them it wasn’t their fault, or that it's normal to make mistakes and that mistakes don’t define your worth. Or that it’s impossible to do everything right and protect everyone all the time because you’re human and you weren’t made to read people’s minds or see the future. How were you supposed to know what was going to happen?
You may know these statements are true to a degree, but they can feel completely false. EMDR helps to integrate these thoughts so you can fully know their truth in your mind but also your body. This can help you feel a sense of peace so you can properly grieve your loved one instead of spending time plaguing yourself with these self shaming thoughts, which is ultimately causing the grieving process to feel even more difficult.
3. Help you to picture your loved one in peace
After someone passes, especially in a distressing way, it’s easy for your mind to be stuck on picturing the worst. It may be the loved one in pain or in a vulnerable state. EMDR can help to put those images of the worst into the back of your mind and instead put happier moments with them near the front. This ultimately helps the intense negative emotions lessen, since you may be picturing happier moments with them before they passed as opposed to the painful moments of their loss.
Knowing what to expect when treating traumatic grief can be helpful for you before starting the process.
Looking to reprocess traumatic grief or a recent trauma?
I’m Kate, and I offer online EMDR therapy. All sessions are virtual for clients located in DC, VA, MD, IN, and MI. Reach out at rrcounseling.info@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.
Regnier Restorative Counseling, LLC
