Grief & Life Transitions: Gentle Support with BLS

Grief and big life changes (a death, divorce, move, job loss, or empty nest) both ask your nervous system to adjust to a new normal. Ground yourself first, then short rounds of bilateral stimulation (BLS), the left-right technique used in EMDR, can ease the sharpest waves. Go slow, and stop if distress climbs past 7 out of 10.

Maybe someone you love died. Maybe nobody died, but your marriage ended, your kids moved out, or you started a job that doesn’t feel like you yet. Either way, the ground under your daily life shifted, and some days you’re fine, and other days a wave of grief, disorientation, or plain exhaustion knocks you sideways for no obvious reason. Both experiences ask the same basic thing of you: adapt to a life that looks different than it did before.

Why does change feel like loss in your body?

Your nervous system doesn’t only react to bad news. A landmark line of research, updated in a 2023 PLOS ONE study, scores the psychological impact of major life events, and it finds that positive, chosen changes (a wedding, a move you wanted, a new job) can carry a readjustment load that’s genuinely comparable to a loss. The common ingredient isn’t whether an event is good or bad. It’s how much of your routine, identity, or sense of what’s normal has to reorganize around it.

That’s also why grief and transitions overlap so much. Grief researchers Stroebe and Schut describe healthy grieving in Death Studies as an oscillation, not a straight line: swinging between loss-oriented moments (facing the pain, missing what’s gone) and restoration-oriented moments (rebuilding routines, taking on new roles, sometimes setting the ache aside to function). The same back-and-forth shows up after any big transition, even a welcome one. One hour you’re grieving the old normal; the next you’re building the new one. Both are the work.

If you’ve been waiting to move through grief in tidy stages, you can let that go. A 2017 analysis in Omega found most bereaved people don’t move through Kübler-Ross’s five stages in a fixed order, and some never experience several of them at all. Patterns like this often connect to earlier losses and changes too, and settling today’s wave, one piece at a time, is genuine, connected work even when the deeper material behind it needs more time. Our grief and EMDR guide goes deeper on that research if loss is the larger thread for you; adjusting to change focuses more on the transition side.

A go-slow bilateral stimulation practice for a hard wave

Grief and transition moments deserve more care up front than routine stress. Read all three steps below before you start.

1. Stabilize first. Before touching anything painful, spend a minute somewhere calmer. Picture a real or imagined place where you feel safe, or run a quick grounding check: name five things you can see, feel your feet on the floor, slow your exhale. Staying inside your window of tolerance, the zone where a feeling is present but you can still think clearly, is what makes the rest of this useful. Don’t start already flooded.

2. Go slow, one small piece at a time. Pick one specific moment or feeling, a memory, a worry about the new normal, not the entire loss or change at once. Keep sessions short, just a few minutes. There’s no finish line to rush toward here.

3. Know your stop point. If distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and doesn’t settle, stop. Use grounding, and consider working with a professional rather than pushing through alone.

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

• Rate it. On a 0–10 scale, how intense is this wave right now? Note the number.
• Bring it gently to mind. The memory, the worry, the ache. Touch it lightly, don’t dive into the hardest version.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes smoothly left and right for 20 to 30 seconds, alternate tapping your knees or shoulders (the “butterfly hug”), or use alternating left-right audio tones.
• Pause and notice. Stop. Breathe. Notice whatever shifted, without forcing anything.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking in between each one.
• Re-rate. Check your number again. Many people notice it ease. If it climbs and won’t come back down, stop and ground yourself.

The mechanism behind this isn’t mysterious. EMDR’s own theory, the Adaptive Information Processing model, holds that intensely distressing moments can get stored in a raw, unprocessed way, so a related cue can reactivate the original feeling almost like the past is happening now, according to EMDRIA, the professional body for EMDR. A 2020 meta-analysis of 15 laboratory studies in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology found that eye movements meaningfully reduced how vivid and emotionally intense people rated a distressing memory held in mind, which is part of why a few rounds can take some heat out of a wave.

Counting rounds while you’re already emotional is one more task most people don’t want. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same left-right technique for you with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, paced however you like, in the web app. The beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation covers pacing in more detail if you’re new to it.

When this isn’t enough

This practice is built for everyday waves, the kind that knock you sideways for an hour, not for acute crisis or the deepest layer of a traumatic loss or change. Please consider working with a licensed therapist if:

• It’s been 12 months or more and intense grief or distress still disrupts most days.
• The loss or change involved something sudden, violent, or traumatic, like an accident, a sudden death, or a crisis you didn’t choose.
• During the practice above, your distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle back down.
• You notice dissociation, panic, or a sense of hopelessness that frightens you.

None of this means you’re grieving or adjusting wrong. It means the moment calls for more support than a self-guided practice can offer, and reaching for that support is exactly the right move.