Rebecca Saunders (00:03.864)
Hello and welcome to the EMDR Doctor podcast. This is a podcast for clients where I share and explore information about all things EMDR.
My name is Dr Caroline Lloyd. I'm a mental health GP and an EMDR practitioner. And my goal is to demystify EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help you on your EMDR journey. EMDR is a powerful therapy which helps to reduce the distress from difficult memories. And my goal is to make it accessible to everyone. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. Before I
start this episode I'd just like to pay my respects to the elders of the Wurundjeri land which is the land upon which I live and work and I'd like to pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging. So today's subject of grief and loss is going to be a bit of a heavy one and I know from experience at Cabrini that the grief and loss sessions are never one of the most popular.
But after people have been to them, they're often surprised at how much they get out of the session. So hopefully this will be the same, but feel free to do what you need to do to stay safe and comfortable and okay while listening to the podcast. When we talk about grief and loss, the first thing that comes to mind is death. And this is what I will be mainly referring to today. But of course we can grieve lots of different things. We can grieve the loss of status, of innocence,
our future, of a lost relationship, of our childhood, of our dreams. And all of these are absolutely relevant and very much worth the work. Some of the most emotionally MDR sessions I've done have involved grief and loss. And when I work with childhood trauma, very, very commonly my clients often go through a grieving process, maybe for the family that they never had, for the loss of the
Rebecca Saunders (02:07.988)
idealized parent when the realization comes that the parent that they had was not the parent they hoped for and continued to wish for well into adulthood. And sometimes the realization that the parent was not and never will be able to provide what that child needed is the most difficult and powerful and transformative moment in therapy, but it comes with its share of grief.
Once we've uncovered it and named it and explored it, it's then free to be resolved and it doesn't need to be stored stuck with those memories any longer. I want to just share with you quite briefly my very first EMDR session. So years ago when I had just trained in EMDR, when I was a newbie, my very first session was on the loss of a loved one to suicide.
And I will never forget that moment when towards the end of the session, after we had done a lot of the hard work, my clients started laughing during the eye movement set. And I was really confused and bewildered. I didn't know if this was part of the normal process or what usually happens. I have to let you know it is quite unusual for that to happen. But I paused and I asked her about it. And she replied,
that she hadn't felt like laughing for nearly two decades. And now she didn't have to think of that loss in the same way and she was free to laugh again. And so we laughed a little bit together just at the absurdity of all of that. And it was really deeply touching to me and it really cemented my commitment to EMDR as a therapeutic tool because it had been so obviously powerful in that moment.
And that memory of my very first EMDR session has been a touchstone memory for me. When things occasionally get difficult as a therapist, I go back to that memory and it just reinforces to me how powerful the work is and how important. So when people come to me to work on complex grief, I often talk a little bit about expectations, what EMDR can and can't do for grief.
Rebecca Saunders (04:27.29)
EMDR can take the difficulty out of grief, but it doesn't take the grief away. Grief is about loss and I can't restore what is gone. I can't bring that person back. The grief will still be there because grief is often about love and we don't want to take the love away and nor should we want to. It is OK to love someone and to miss them and EMDR can make that process a little bit
or sometimes a lot easier. It can make it less complex, less murky, less difficult, less stuck. The grief doesn't go away, but you do learn to tolerate and live with it and your life grows around it. Grief is about love and if you loved that person then the loss is there, it is real. And to want that grief to go away might be somehow considered as a bit disrespectful even. But,
We do want the trauma to go away. We want the circumstances or the suddenness, the impact of the shock to go away. We can lessen the effect of that phone call or maybe the conflict over the care provided in those last weeks or days or minutes. We can mitigate the loss of the support that was missing.
or maybe the hurtful things that were said by other people. We can heal the trauma and then the grief becomes more pure and the real work of grieving can be done and life can settle in around the grief and move forward. So people are sometimes worried about what will happen if they're no longer stuck on the grief. If I'm no longer grieving this person, if I'm no longer in agony over this,
doesn't mean that I don't love them. Doesn't mean that I didn't love them enough. If I can forget to grieve, forget in inverted commas, then maybe I will forget them. In my experience, this absolutely doesn't happen. In fact, once the trauma of the loss is resolved, then more happy memories of the loved one can become more forward and more present. And then,
Rebecca Saunders (06:52.856)
there can be more enjoyment of the good memories of that person and they become more kind of alive in your memory and the love that was shared can become more accessible. So those memories become more precious and also more present once the trauma is removed from the memory.
Sometimes as we process the trauma of the loss and we move through it, people can have almost spiritual experiences of the person they've lost. And this is some of the most beautiful work that I've experienced as a therapist. So people can feel the presence of their loved one very intimately and in a very real way. And that's a really beautiful thing to witness and be a part of.
So in terms of the literature, studies do show the effectiveness of EMDR for grief and the most relief seems to be experienced by those who are most distressed, which is really terrific. We want that and it's understandable. Sometimes the work involves starting the grieving process. So nowadays in our modern world, we have such an amount of time pressure.
There is little tolerance for grief in our employment world, in our work world. And I find that often people might take a couple of days off, say for example, they lose a parent, they take a couple of days off, but it's just so inadequate for that grieving process to be in any way complete or even entered into. But there are so many expectations upon us now to just get on with things, to organize.
funeral or the house or to sell the property, whatever it might be that we need to do. There's a lot of pressure to get on with these things in a kind of prompt manner that sometimes we have to just package up our grief and loss and just put it away. And this can complicate the grief process and make it stuck just due to avoidance. And avoidance, I don't mean to use that term in a judgmental way. There's just a lot of pressure upon us to
Rebecca Saunders (09:05.762)
to not look inside and not do that grief work and just keep on functioning and keep on coping. And if we put it off for later, then we're able to concentrate on getting the work done. We can concentrate on looking after the rest of the family or whatever it may be that we need to do, but our needs are not taken care of. Our grief gets covered up and ignored and it gets stuck in not being allowed to be processed and felt.
In this circumstance, the work of the EMDR is probably to uncover the grief and to actually start the process of grieving and allow it to happen. So sometimes we need to start the process of grief. Other times we need to conclude it. So sometimes we enter into the process of grieving really
thoroughly and really well but we can get stuck in our grief and it becomes interminable. It becomes a kind of a round and around process of loss and self-recrimination for example. It becomes contaminated with guilt or remorse or people can get stuck between grief and disbelief say or grief and righteous anger or they can get caught in the injustice of the situation.
Injustice is a tricky one. That kind of it's not fair hook can make that grief process get really stuck. And that sticking point is really amenable to EMDR and can move quite quickly once we start to explore utilizing EMDR. So sometimes we need to start the grief process. Sometimes we need to
get it out of a stuck loop. And sometimes we just might need to clear away the murkiness of the trauma surrounding it. Sometimes we need to take the trauma away so as to leave the most pure grief and that enables the grief to proceed. Sometimes occasionally the work to be done with EMDR is around unfinished business. If there wasn't a chance to say goodbye or offer apologies or
Rebecca Saunders (11:28.472)
right, some wrongs, if there's been an estrangement or if it's just a very sudden loss, we can use EMDR in an imaginative way. And we can help to finish those conversations that never happened. And this can help to be really restorative and really helpful. So just in the same way that the bilateral stimulation of EMDR can help remove the emotion from a memory.
It can also help remove the emotion from the things that were not memories, the missing things, the gaps, the unsaid things or the unfinished business. So the way we might do that is perhaps to be telling a loved one the things that you never got to say whilst doing the eye movements or using another bilateral stimulation and
that technique can be really, really cathartic and really helpful, very healing. So I've outlined a little bit about how EMDR can help some aspects of grief. I know I haven't covered everything as grief can be a very personal and unique process to every individual, but I hope this has been a little bit helpful.
Just before I leave you with that, I will just mention that I have opened the doors to my November intake to my online course. So my online course is not just about grief, although if that is the trauma that you want to work on, we can certainly do that. But my online course is a six week EMDR course online for people who maybe can't come in to see me or who live too far away. So it's open to
really everyone in Australia or anyone who can access the right time zone. So if you would like to hear more about it, just pop over to my website, emdrdoctor.com.au forward slash heel. And it is a fairly small group. I do tend to limit it to six people. So if you would like to be part of that or if you want to talk to me about it, feel free to contact me.
Rebecca Saunders (13:45.998)
through my website. That's probably the best way. All right, I hope this has been helpful. Until next week, bye for now.
