Grief and EMDR: Processing the Loss of a Loved One

EMDR pairs bilateral stimulation (left-right eye movements, tones, or taps) with brief attention to a painful grief memory, softening its charge without erasing your bond with the person you lost. Small trials show real promise, especially alongside cognitive therapy. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers the technique as an everyday grief-support practice, not treatment for a grief disorder.

Some days the loss sits quietly in the background. Other days it ambushes you at the grocery store, in a song, in the second before you remember they’re gone. You might be waiting to feel “done” grieving, or wondering why a fresh wave still knocks you sideways a year later. Neither reaction means you’re doing this wrong. This page walks through what’s happening in your mind and body after a loss, what EMDR research on grief actually shows, and a careful, go-slow bilateral-stimulation practice for the heavy moments, along with clear guidance on when this kind of loss needs more support than a self-guided practice can offer.

Does grief follow a predictable script?

You’ve probably heard of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It’s one of the most quoted psychology frameworks in the world, and it’s also not how most people actually grieve.

A 2017 analysis in Omega by Stroebe, Schut, and Boerner found that most bereaved people don’t move through Kübler-Ross’s stages in a fixed order, and many never experience several of them at all. The authors note the stage model was originally built from interviews with dying patients, not grieving survivors, and warn that treating it as a checklist can leave people feeling like they’re “failing” at grief when their experience doesn’t match.

What does the research actually show instead? A landmark 2002 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology followed conjugally bereaved adults from before their spouse’s death through 18 months after. It found several distinct patterns, not one universal path: about 46% showed a resilient pattern with relatively brief, mild distress; others experienced chronic grief that stretched on for years; still others found long-standing depression eased after the loss. Grief researcher George Bonanno, a co-author on that study, has described these as different trajectories, not stages, and none of them is more “correct” than another.

The practical takeaway: there’s no timeline you’re supposed to hit, and no required sequence of feelings. What matters more is whether grief, however it shows up for you, gradually loosens its grip over time, or stays stuck.

What does it mean when grief gets “stuck”?

Grief becomes something clinicians pay closer attention to when it doesn’t loosen. Both major diagnostic systems now name this pattern. The DSM-5-TR defines prolonged grief disorder as intense longing for or preoccupation with the person who died, plus several accompanying symptoms (identity disturbance, disbelief, emotional numbness, difficulty reengaging with life) occurring most days, causing real impairment, and persisting at least 12 months after the death. The ICD-11, the World Health Organization’s diagnostic manual, uses a similar symptom picture but a shorter 6-month threshold.

This isn’t a common outcome of loss. A 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Affective Disorders pooling 14 studies and over 8,000 bereaved adults found a pooled prevalence of 9.8%, meaning roughly 1 in 10 bereaved adults develops this pattern. Risk climbs sharply after a sudden, violent, or traumatic death (an accident, suicide, homicide) compared with an anticipated loss from illness, since the mind is left processing both the loss itself and the shock of how it happened. Losing a spouse or a child, a very close relationship, and grieving without much social support also raise the odds, according to the same body of research.

If any of this sounds like where you are, that’s useful information, not a verdict. It means the kind of extra support described later on this page, ideally with a professional, may help more than trying to push through alone.

What’s happening in your mind and body after a loss?

Grief isn’t only sadness. It often shows up as a mix of longing, anger, guilt, relief, numbness, and a strange kind of disorientation, sometimes all in the same hour. That’s because losing someone close disrupts more than your emotions; it disrupts your sense of who you are in relation to them, your daily routines, and your beliefs about safety and fairness in the world.

A widely used framework for this, the Dual Process Model described in Death Studies by Stroebe and Schut, holds that healthy grieving isn’t steady, forward progress. It’s an oscillation between two kinds of work: loss-oriented coping (facing the pain directly, remembering, crying, missing them) and restoration-oriented coping (rebuilding daily life, taking on new roles, occasionally setting the grief aside to function). Swinging between the two, sometimes within the same day, is the pattern the research associates with adapting well, not a sign that you’re avoiding your feelings or not grieving “properly.”

EMDR’s underlying framework, the Adaptive Information Processing model, offers a complementary way to understand why certain moments from a loss (the phone call, the last conversation, the moment you found out) can stay sharp and painful long after the event itself has passed. According to EMDRIA, the theory holds that intensely distressing moments can get stored in a raw, poorly integrated way, so the memory keeps firing with something like its original intensity each time it’s triggered, instead of settling into the past the way most memories do.

This matters for grief specifically because loss often includes small pockets of trauma inside it: the hospital room, the accident scene, the way you heard the news. Those pockets can stay “hot” and re-triggered even while the broader grieving process is otherwise moving forward. Staying within your window of tolerance, the zone where a feeling is present but you can still think and function, matters here, because grief work that overwhelms rather than gently processes tends to backfire.

How does bilateral stimulation actually ease a grief memory?

The mechanism isn’t about weakening your bond with the person who died. It’s about what happens to a distressing memory when you hold it in mind while your attention is also occupied elsewhere.

Your working memory, the mental workspace you use to hold something “in mind” right now, has limited capacity. Recalling a painful moment while simultaneously doing a demanding second task, like tracking a moving target with your eyes, competes for that same limited space, and the memory tends to surface in a duller, less vivid, less charged form. A 2011 study in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders found participants rated a distressing image as significantly less vivid after doing eye movements than after simply recalling it, supporting this working-memory explanation for why bilateral stimulation can take some of the edge off a painful memory.

The honest summary: this is a real, measurable effect on how vivid and emotionally loaded a specific memory feels, not a way to erase grief or shortcut the process of adapting to a loss. Sprang’s 2001 finding that positive memories of the deceased actually increased during EMDR treatment fits this picture: the technique appears to soften the sharpest, most painful edges of specific moments, not the relationship itself.

What does the EMDR-for-grief research actually show?

The honest answer: promising, but still a young and fairly small evidence base compared to EMDR’s research on PTSD.

One of the earliest and most cited studies is a 2001 trial in Research on Social Work Practice by Ginny Sprang, comparing EMDR with guided mourning therapy in 50 people with complicated mourning. EMDR produced significantly greater improvement on four of five measures, including PTSD symptoms and anxiety, and did so in fewer sessions. Notably, positive memories of the person who died increased more in the EMDR group, suggesting the technique didn’t flatten the relationship, it seemed to make room for warmer memories alongside the pain.

A 2018 randomized controlled trial in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy tested an eight-session combined EMDR and cognitive behavioral therapy protocol with 85 Dutch adults bereaved by homicide, a group facing an especially traumatic form of loss. Compared with a waitlist, the treatment group showed meaningful reductions in both complicated grief and PTSD symptoms, and the effect held regardless of gender or how long ago the death occurred.

A 2016 trial in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research directly compared EMDR with an integrated cognitive behavioral approach in 19 grieving adults over 7 weeks and found the two approaches performed about equally well at reducing grief and trauma symptoms, a useful data point suggesting EMDR isn’t the only effective option, but is a comparably solid one.

Not every trial has been as clear-cut. A 2020 study in Traumatology tested combined cognitive therapy and EMDR with 39 people bereaved by the MH17 plane crash. The treatment group showed a notably stronger drop in depression than the waitlist group, but the study found no significant difference in grief or PTSD symptoms between groups, a reminder that mass-casualty, high-complexity grief doesn’t always respond as predictably as smaller studies suggest, and that more research is needed here.

Here’s the research at a glance:

Study	Sample	What it tested	Result
Sprang, 2001	50 adults, complicated mourning	EMDR vs. guided mourning	EMDR improved 4 of 5 measures faster, in fewer sessions
van Denderen et al., 2018	85 adults, homicide bereavement	Combined EMDR + CBT vs. waitlist	Reduced complicated grief and PTSD symptoms
Meysner, Cotter & Lee, 2016	19 grieving adults	EMDR vs. integrated CBT	Roughly equal improvement in both groups
Lenferink et al., 2020	39 adults, MH17 disaster bereavement	Combined EMDR + CT vs. waitlist	Depression improved; grief and PTSD did not differ

The pattern across these trials: EMDR shows real promise for grief, often performs comparably to established cognitive approaches, and tends to look strongest when it’s combined with other grief-focused techniques rather than used alone, especially for the more traumatic and complex forms of bereavement.

Where does EmEase fit, and where doesn’t it?

The studies above involve trained therapists working with people who often have a diagnosed grief disorder, sometimes following a violent or traumatic death. EmEase is something different: EmEase is a self-guided EMDR emotional wellness app that helps you process everyday stress, soften difficult emotions, and build resilience on your own time.

It doesn’t diagnose prolonged grief disorder, treat complicated mourning, or replace the structured, multi-session protocols used in the research above. What it does offer is a private, paced way to practice bilateral stimulation, on-screen visual movement or alternating audio tones, when an everyday wave of grief hits and you want a gentle way to sit with it rather than be swept under. Think of it as the guided version of a technique you can also try manually, outlined next.

A gentle bilateral-stimulation practice for a grief wave

Grief deserves more care up front than routine stress, so please read all three steps below before beginning.

1. Stabilize first. Before touching anything painful, spend a minute somewhere calm. Picture a real or imagined place where you feel safe, or use simple grounding: notice five things you can see, feel your feet on the floor, slow your exhale. Don’t start already flooded.

2. Go slow, one small piece at a time. Choose one specific, containable moment, a particular memory or feeling, not the entire loss at once. Keep sessions brief. This isn’t a race to “finish” grieving; there’s no finish line to rush toward.

3. Know your stop point. If distress climbs above a 7 out of 10 and doesn’t settle back down, stop. Ground yourself, and consider reaching out to a grief-informed therapist rather than continuing alone.

With that in place, here’s the practice itself:

• Rate the feeling. On a 0–10 scale, how intense is this wave right now? Note the number before you start.
• Bring the moment gently to mind. A memory, an image, a specific ache, touch it lightly rather than immersing fully in the hardest version of it.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes smoothly left and right for about 20–30 seconds, alternate tapping your knees or shoulders left-right, or use an app with alternating audio tones.
• Pause and notice. Stop. Breathe. Notice whatever shifted, a thought, a memory, a softening, without forcing anything to happen.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking in with yourself gently between each.
• Re-rate. Check your 0–10 number again. Many people notice the intensity easing slightly, sometimes alongside a warmer memory surfacing. If the number climbed and won’t settle, stop, ground yourself, and treat that as useful information.

Which kinds of grief moments fit self-guided practice?

Self-guided bilateral stimulation is best suited to the everyday, ongoing texture of grief, not to acute crisis or deeply traumatic loss:

• Anniversary or trigger waves: a birthday, a holiday, a song that brings the ache back up unexpectedly.
• Mild, recurring longing that doesn’t come with flashbacks, dissociation, or thoughts of harming yourself.
• A loss that’s more than a year out and generally easing, with occasional harder days rather than constant, unrelenting distress.

If your loss involved something sudden, violent, or traumatic, an accident, suicide, homicide, or a death you witnessed, that kind of grief carries a real trauma component on top of the loss itself. Our childhood trauma page speaks to this same pattern: distressing experiences from any point in life often have roots that reach further back, and settling today’s triggers is genuine, connected work, but the deepest, most traumatic material is safest reprocessed with a trained professional’s support. If the loss you’re grieving is the end of a relationship rather than a death, our breakup and heartbreak page addresses that specific kind of loss, and attachment wounds covers how early relationship patterns can shape how any loss lands.

When this isn’t enough

Being upfront about limits is the whole point of this page.

Please consider working with a licensed, grief-informed therapist if:

• It’s been 12 months or more since the loss and intense longing, preoccupation, or numbness still disrupts most days.
• The death was sudden, violent, or traumatic (an accident, suicide, homicide, or a death you witnessed directly).
• During the practice above, your distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle back down. Stop, ground yourself, and reach out for support.
• You notice dissociation, intrusive images you can’t shake, or grief tangled up with hopelessness.

If you’re in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, this practice isn’t the right resource right now. Please visit our crisis resources page or call or text 988 (in the US) to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.