Does EMDR Help with Grief?

Yes, with real but still-developing evidence. Small clinical trials show EMDR can ease complicated grief and grief-related PTSD symptoms, sometimes faster than comparison treatments. It won’t erase the loss itself, and self-guided practice fits everyday grief waves best, not a diagnosed grief disorder, which deserves a trained professional’s support.

Maybe it’s been a year, and a certain song or a smell in the grocery aisle still drops you straight back into the worst day. Or it’s more recent, and you’re tired of hearing “just give it time.” EMDR keeps coming up either way. Here’s what the actual research says, and where a self-guided practice realistically fits.

What does the research say about EMDR for grief?

A small but real body of research backs EMDR for grief, especially once grief gets “stuck.”

One of the earliest studies, a 2001 trial in Research on Social Work Practice, compared EMDR with guided mourning therapy in 50 adults with complicated mourning. EMDR clients showed significantly greater improvement on four of five measures, including PTSD symptoms, anxiety, and self-esteem, and reached those gains with fewer sessions. Positive memories of the person who died also increased during EMDR treatment, but not during guided mourning, suggesting the technique softened the pain without dulling the bond.

A more rigorous 2018 randomized controlled trial in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy tested an eight-session combined EMDR and cognitive behavioral therapy program with 85 Dutch adults bereaved by homicide, one of the most traumatic forms of loss. Compared with a waitlist, the treatment group showed meaningful drops in complicated grief and PTSD symptoms, regardless of gender or how long ago the death occurred.

Not every trial has been this clean. A 2020 study testing combined cognitive therapy and EMDR after the MH17 plane crash found improved depression, but no significant edge over a waitlist on grief or PTSD symptoms specifically. Mass-casualty grief, it turns out, doesn’t always respond as predictably as smaller studies suggest.

Why do certain grief memories stay so sharp?

EMDR’s underlying theory, the Adaptive Information Processing model, holds that intensely distressing moments can get stored in a raw, poorly settled way. Think of the phone call, the hospital room, the moment you found out. According to EMDRIA, EMDR’s professional association, that’s part of why one specific memory can stay “hot” years after the wider grief has otherwise eased.

A 2024 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry frames EMDR as a fitting treatment for prolonged grief for exactly this reason. It’s built to work through past memories, present triggers, and future fears in sequence, the same structure clinicians use for trauma.

This isn’t a rare edge case. A 2017 meta-analysis pooling over 8,000 bereaved adults in the Journal of Affective Disorders found roughly 1 in 10 people develop what’s now called prolonged grief disorder. The DSM-5-TR defines it as intense longing or preoccupation that still shows up most days, a year or more after the death, and disrupts daily life.

How can you practice this safely for a grief wave?

Grief deserves more care up front than routine stress. Before anything else, stabilize. Spend a minute somewhere calm: picture a real or imagined calm place, or use simple grounding. The goal is to start from steady ground, not already flooded.

Then go slow. Pick one small, specific moment, not the whole loss at once, and keep the session brief. There’s no finish line to rush toward. And know your stop point: if distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle, stop and use grounding, and consider working with a professional instead.

With that in place, here’s a short practice for one grief wave:

• Rate it. On a 0–10 scale, how strong is this feeling right now?
• Bring one moment to mind gently, not the whole loss, just this one piece of it.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes slowly left and right for 20–30 seconds, or tap alternating knees or shoulders.
• Pause and notice what shifted, without forcing anything.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking the number again after each one.

EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers this same technique in a guided, paced format if you’d rather not track the timing yourself; you can try it at app.emease.com. For the fuller mechanism and a deeper, go-slow practice, see grief and EMDR: processing the loss of a loved one, and grief & life transitions for more everyday moments like this one.

When does grief need more than self-guided practice?

This fits the everyday texture of grief: an anniversary wave, a trigger song, a hard afternoon. It’s not enough on its own if:

• It’s been a year or more and daily life is still hard to manage
• The death was sudden, violent, or witnessed directly
• Distress spikes rather than settles when you try to calm down
• Grief feels tangled up with dissociation or hopelessness

Is self-guided EMDR safe? covers that line in more detail. If what you’re grieving is a relationship rather than a death, can EMDR help you get over heartbreak? is the closer fit. And if things feel like more than grief right now, our crisis resources page is here.

So, does EMDR help with grief?

Cautiously, yes. Multiple small trials, going back over two decades, show EMDR can ease complicated grief and grief-related PTSD faster than some comparison treatments, and a 2024 clinical framework explains why the underlying theory fits prolonged grief specifically. What’s still missing is a large, well-controlled trial at the scale EMDR has for PTSD. Self-guided bilateral stimulation borrows the same technique for the ordinary, heavy days grief brings: worth trying for a wave of longing or a hard anniversary, not a stand-in for professional care with a diagnosed grief disorder.