Grief is not a disorder. It is the natural human response to losing someone or something that mattered deeply to you. It hurts, it takes time, and it does not follow a neat sequence of stages. But for most people, grief moves. It shifts in intensity. It gradually becomes something you carry rather than something that carries you. The loss remains real, but your capacity to live alongside it grows.
Traumatic grief is what happens when that movement stalls. The loss was sudden, violent, unexpected, or occurred under circumstances that overwhelmed your ability to process it. Instead of gradually integrating the loss into your life, you remain stuck in the acute phase: the shock, the intrusive images, the feeling that the world is no longer safe, the inability to think about the person you lost without being flooded by the circumstances of how you lost them. Months or years pass, and the grief has not softened. It has calcified.
When grief becomes entangled with trauma in this way, standard grief counseling often is not enough, because the issue is not that you have not grieved. The issue is that your brain has not been able to complete the processing of the traumatic element of the loss. That is where EMDR therapy becomes particularly valuable.
Why Some Grief Gets Stuck
The brain processes loss the same way it processes other difficult experiences: by integrating the memories, the emotions, and the meaning of the event into your broader life narrative. Under normal circumstances, this processing happens gradually through the natural grief process. You remember, you feel, you cry, you talk about it, you reflect, and over time the sharpest edges of the pain begin to round.
Trauma interrupts this process. When the circumstances of the loss were overwhelming, the brain’s processing system gets jammed. The memory of the loss does not get filed as something that happened. It stays active, carrying its full sensory and emotional charge, as though the event is still unfolding. This is why traumatic grief produces symptoms that look more like PTSD than like normal mourning: flashbacks to the moment of death or the moment you received the news, intrusive images that appear without warning, hypervigilance, emotional numbness, difficulty sleeping, and the inability to access the loving memories of the person because the traumatic memory eclipses everything else.
The cruelest aspect of traumatic grief is that it blocks the very process it needs. You cannot grieve fully while your nervous system is stuck in trauma mode, because grief requires the capacity to feel, to be present with the pain, to let the memories move through you. When the trauma response is active, your brain’s priority is survival, not processing. It keeps you locked in a state of emergency that leaves no room for the gentler, slower work of mourning.
How EMDR Helps
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) was developed to help the brain complete processing that trauma interrupted. It uses bilateral stimulation, typically guided eye movements, alternating taps, or auditory tones, to activate the brain’s natural processing system under controlled, safe conditions. The bilateral stimulation appears to mimic the neurological conditions of REM sleep, the state in which the brain normally consolidates and integrates emotional experiences.
In the context of traumatic grief, EMDR targets the specific memories and sensory experiences that are keeping the grief stuck. You do not have to narrate the entire story of your loss. You focus on the memory, the image, the body sensation, or the belief that carries the most distress, while the bilateral stimulation helps your brain do what it could not do at the time of the loss: process the experience fully and file it as something that happened rather than something that is still happening.
As the traumatic material is processed, something important happens. The traumatic memory loses its dominance. The intrusive images quiet. The hypervigilance softens. And for the first time, you may find that you can think about the person you lost and access the love, the gratitude, and the full complexity of your relationship with them, rather than being trapped in the horror of how you lost them. EMDR does not erase the grief. It clears the trauma that has been blocking the grief from doing its natural work.
What EMDR Treatment Involves
EMDR follows an eight-phase structure. The first two phases focus on history-taking, treatment planning, and building the stabilization skills you will need to manage emotional activation during the processing work. This preparation phase is especially important for traumatic grief, because the material you will be working with is both traumatic and deeply personal. Your therapist needs to understand your history, the nature of the loss, and what aspects of the experience are causing the most distress. You need to feel safe, grounded, and equipped with self-regulation tools before the processing begins.
The third phase identifies the specific target: the memory, image, or belief that is most tightly connected to the stuck grief. In the fourth phase, desensitization, you hold the target in awareness while receiving bilateral stimulation. This is where the core processing happens. The emotional charge of the memory begins to decrease, often noticeably within a single session, though complex losses may require multiple processing sessions.
The fifth phase installs positive beliefs to replace the negative ones that trauma attached to the loss. Where the trauma may have installed beliefs like “I should have done something” or “The world is not safe” or “I will never be okay,” the processing creates space for more accurate beliefs: “I did everything I could,” “I can survive this,” “The love I felt was real and it still matters.” The sixth phase uses a body scan to identify and release any residual physical tension associated with the memory. The seventh and eighth phases focus on closure and ongoing evaluation of progress.
The full course of treatment typically ranges from six to twenty sessions, depending on the complexity of the loss and whether additional traumatic material is connected to it. Many clients experience meaningful relief within the first several processing sessions, though the depth of the change continues to develop over the course of treatment.
What EMDR Can and Cannot Do for Grief
EMDR does not eliminate grief. That is important to understand, because it would be inappropriate to try. Grief is the price of love. It is not a disorder to be treated. It is a process to be lived through.
What EMDR does is remove the trauma that has been preventing the grief process from unfolding naturally. Once the traumatic material is processed, the mourning that was blocked can finally begin, or resume, in a way that is painful but no longer paralyzing. You can remember the person fully, not just the worst moments. You can feel sadness without being overwhelmed by terror. You can begin to integrate the loss into your life in a way that honors both the person you lost and the life you are still living.
EMDR is also effective for the conditions that frequently accompany traumatic grief, including anxiety, depression, panic, sleep disruption, and difficulty with emotional regulation. Because these conditions are often downstream effects of the unprocessed trauma, they frequently improve as the trauma is resolved, sometimes without being directly targeted.
The Department of Veterans Affairs, the World Health Organization, and the American Psychological Association all recognize EMDR as an effective treatment for trauma and PTSD. Its track record with traumatic grief specifically continues to grow as clinicians apply the method to an increasing range of loss-related presentations.
EMDR Therapy in Lakewood and Longmont, Colorado
At Self Care Impact Counseling, our team includes EMDRIA-trained EMDR therapists who work with clients processing traumatic grief, complicated bereavement, and the intersection of loss and trauma that standard grief counseling often cannot reach. We offer EMDR therapy and trauma therapy at our offices in Lakewood and Longmont, as well as online sessions for anyone in Colorado.
We invite you to call us at 720-551-4553 for a free 20-minute phone consultation, or try our Find-Your-Therapist tool to get matched with an EMDR therapist who fits your needs. You can also reach us through the contact page on our website.
Self Care Impact Counseling envisions a new age of counseling for adolescents, adults, couples and groups that makes a REAL difference with core values of GROWTH | BALANCE | COMPASSION | INNER HARMONY.
About the Author
Alayna Baillod, LCSW, is a Clinical Supervisor and the Owner of Self Care Impact Counseling. She is an EMDRIA Approved EMDR Consultant and EMDR Therapist, extensively trained in Gottman Couples Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), DBT, Somatic Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Attachment Theory. Alayna specializes in couples counseling, EMDR trauma therapy, and codependency recovery. Find your therapist here.
