EMDR for Grief and Loss

Grief can feel like carrying a weight that never lightens, where certain moments replay endlessly and the pain feels as fresh as it did at the beginning. If you’re struggling with loss, EMDR offers a compassionate way to help you process your grief so that you can hold your memories with love rather than overwhelming pain.

When we work together on grief, we’ll gently identify the moments that carry the most emotional weight for you. This might be the instant you received the news, being present when your loved one died, or that moment when the permanence of the loss truly hit you. I’ll guide process the emotions and physical sensations that come with it, whilst we use bilateral stimulation, this allows your brain to carefully reprocess that frozen fragment of memory that’s been keeping the grief so raw and present. What we’re doing is helping transform it into something you can accept and integrate emotionally, rather than something that continues to overwhelm you.

We’ll also work with the secondary memories that reinforce the pain; perhaps the last conversation you had, moments when you felt helpless, or any unresolved conflict with the person you’ve lost. We’ll bring each of these images gently into focus, process them, and allow them to settle until that sense of being emotionally flooded begins to subside. Through this work, your nervous system can stop reactivating the original pain every single time you’re reminded of your loss, gradually, overwhelming despair can give way to a calmer, more peaceful remembrance.

If your grief includes self-blame or a sense that you failed somehow; thoughts like “I should have done more” or “I let them down”, we’ll treat these as separate, specific targets to be processed. What often happens is beautiful: as the emotional charge dissolves, more adaptive beliefs naturally emerge on their own, thoughts like “I did what I could” or “I can keep their memory without this pain” begin to feel genuinely true, allowing for real acceptance rather than forced closure.

There’s also space in this work for the love and connection you shared, I might invite you to recall moments of joy, love, or meaningful connection with your loved one, and we’ll gently alternate between these and the more distressing scenes. This pairing helps restore emotional balance by reconnecting your attachment memories to feelings of safety rather than only to loss. Over time, you’ll find you can access memories of the person you’ve lost without being pulled back into that traumatic grief state.

We will always attend to how grief lives in your body, I’ll guide you to notice any tension, emptiness, or heaviness, perhaps in your chest or throat, where grief so often settles. We’ll process each of these sensations until your body’s response aligns with emotional acceptance. What we’re aiming for isn’t forgetting, never that! Instead, it’s developing the capacity to remember, to love, and to continue living without that intrusive, overwhelming pain.

Key Points:

• EMDR works with specific grief-related memories rather than trying to address sadness in general
• Bilateral stimulation helps reprocess those frozen moments of shock, disbelief, or guilt
• Secondary memories tied to helplessness or regret are gently worked through, one by one
• Your nervous system can learn to stop reactivating distress with every reminder of your loss
• Painful self-beliefs formed during the loss are identified and naturally replaced through processing
• More adaptive meanings emerge spontaneously as the emotional charge decreases
• We integrate positive memories to restore balance between connection and absence
• Emotional recall becomes bearable and no longer disrupts your daily life
• We ensure your body no longer stores grief as chronic tension or physical pain
• The outcome is emotional integration – the ability to remember with love rather than suffering

Grief is one of the most profound experiences we face as human beings. You deserve support in carrying it, and in finding a way to honour your loss whilst also reclaiming your capacity for peace and joy.