After pregnancy or infant loss, it feels cruel that the Earth keeps spinning. Your world has shattered. Yet, people wonder why you haven’t moved on. You even find that people minimize your pain with statements like, “You never even met her,” “At least you know you can get pregnant,” or “He wasn’t even a full person yet.” These comments are hurtful, adding to the loneliness of your experience.
There isn’t a single treatment that can change your experience or the love you feel for your baby. However, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy can support you with past experiences that impact your current grief and with internalizing positive beliefs about yourself. Rather than coming to the trite, “Everything happens for a reason” that you have received in countless, well-meaning cards, you can integrate true, core beliefs like, “I’m a good parent, even if my baby didn’t survive.” (Read about what it’s like to engage in EMDR with me here).
Common Fears
Before explaining EMDR, I want to address worries I often hear from parents who are deeply grieving the loss of their baby and their envisioned future. I commonly hear worries that moving through grief does a disservice to the baby that was lost. This results from negative beliefs that grieving is finite and completing grieving would mean you didn’t love your baby fully. EMDR facilitates the grief process, but there is no finish line and EMDR cannot bypass your grief. EMDR allows your brain to consider and reprocess negative beliefs so that you can remember your baby without the guilt associated with those thoughts.
Another fear that often arises is that EMDR will reduce the strength of your positive memories of pregnancy or with your baby. The goal of EMDR is to desensitize, or reduce the level of disturbance associated with negative memories. This process typically leads to strengthening the valence of positive memories, allowing you brain to more easily recall good events without the tug of grief associated with your loss.
What Is EMDR?
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It involves bilateral stimulation, which traditionally has meant eye movements but can involve tapping or auditory bilateral stimulation. EMDR is an 8-phase modality that was developed for trauma and is effective in processing grief. This is an effective intervention for treating both the trauma and grief associated with pregnancy loss and infant loss.
EMDR Phases
- History taking
- Preparation
- Assessment (targeting specific memories)
- Desensitization & Reprocessing
- Installation (of a positive belief)
- Body scan
- Closure
- Re-evaluation
This process supports your brain with its innate process of integrating memories and a positive self-concept. Some people come to EMDR therapy wishing for a magical treatment that will erase negative experiences from memory. Instead, EMDR reprocesses memories associated with negative beliefs about oneself to integrate adaptive material and a more positive self-concept. Even someone who is deeply depressed and stuck in a grief cycle has memories that connect to their inner strength. Through EMDR reprocessing, your brain builds connections to positive memories that fortify a more positive self-concept. EMDR is effective for past, present, and future concerns. Typically during reprocessing, we will start in the past and move our way toward the future.
EMDR For Grief
During history taking, we will explore where you learned to conceptualize parenthood and your beliefs about good parenting. Likewise, I will want to know about your personal and cultural beliefs around death and grieving. We will identify and consider the systems impacting your family’s journey and the baby you lost. I will invite you to share your experiences of pregnancy, your partner, and your baby. During history taking and assessment phases, I always ask about your early life experiences and this is true following pregnancy and infant loss, too. Often, the ways we grieve are shaped by our attachment experiences. While there is nothing that compares to your attachment to your child, attachment style develops in childhood and informs our grieving process. In a typical grieving process, there are months or years of positive memories with the loved one who has passed on. With the loss of a pregnancy or child, your time together may only consist of minutes, days, weeks or months.
History taking informs our preparation. Before we begin fleshing out the traumatic memories that we will reprocess, you will feel resourced. This means we will use some of the positive experiences we identified during our history taking and uncover the associated positive beliefs about yourself. There are also additional grounding and somatic practices we will lean on to support you throughout therapy.
Adaptive processing may uncover unexpected, positive connections to early attachment figures, caregivers, and other early life experiences. As processing continues, we build connections to more positive experiences you had with your baby or with other memories affirming your identities as a parent and person that allow you to move through your grief process.
In the months and years following traumatic loss, it is easy to lose sight of the future. If you are finding you are not progressing in your grief journey or that you’re having difficulty showing up for your other kids, EMDR can help. After desensitizing and reprocessing your traumatic loss, we can work towards addressing ways your grief hinders you from being the best parent or partner you can be.