What Science Knows About Grief

When I asked Shear about the biological aftermath of grief, she brought up two-person neuroscience, an emerging discipline that studies how our brains affect other brains. “Our closest relationships, especially when we’re living together—in particular, when we’re living together—have an impact on our immune system, our cardiovascular system, our sleep, our eating, probably the whole body,” she said. “I think we have to understand what happens, neurologically, when we’re with someone to really understand what happens when we lose them.” (In the three months immediately following the death of a spouse, particularly in older couples, the surviving partner’s risk of death can increase by as much as an extraordinary sixty-six per cent, a phenomenon known colloquially as the widowhood effect.)

E.M.D.R., an acronym for eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, combines elements of talk therapy, exposure therapy, and bilateral stimulation, or alternating activation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This is most often achieved via guided eye movements, though it can also occur through a number of benign physical sensations: a patient might tap her own shoulders, or hold a buzzer in each palm, or listen to a series of alternating tones on headphones. In the past decade, E.M.D.R. has moved from the fringes to the mainstream, both within the culture and among clinicians. In 2021, Prince Harry, who suffers from anxiety, underwent E.M.D.R. on camera for an episode of the Oprah Winfrey-produced docuseries “The Me You Can’t See”; in 2025, Miley Cyrus told the Times that the treatment had saved her life by helping her to process unresolved childhood trauma.

I was already seeing a therapist, who’d helped me navigate a series of routine yet formidable transitions: moving out of the city, changing jobs, becoming a parent. I found our sessions useful and edifying, but she didn’t practice E.M.D.R. (Practitioners are not legally mandated to be certified beyond their country’s basic therapy-license requirement, though the E.M.D.R. International Association requires at least forty hours of training, and ten hours of direct consultation, before offering its approval.) I eventually Googled my way to a local therapist who was certified in E.M.D.R. In my introductory e-mail, I described myself as “hopeless.”

He was intelligent and compassionate. Sessions were held in a little wood cabin on his property. Sometimes a small dog nosed in the door and curled up by the space heater. I was still in the roughest and least comprehensible stage of my grief. Most of the time, driving to his office felt like an insurmountable task, but I went anyway—twice a week at first. I held a little buzzing paddle in each palm. I narrated my memories of the event. There are eight formal stages to E.M.D.R., which typically unfold over eight to twelve weeks, though it’s the fourth and the fifth stages, desensitization and installation, that feel the strangest and most crucial. In desensitization, patients repeatedly recount a traumatic event while receiving bilateral stimulation (squeezing the buzzing paddles, in my case), ideally until they are close to unperturbed by the memory. Discomfort is measured via something called the Subjective Units of Distress Scale, or SUDS. In installation, the bilateral stimulation continues, and a positive belief is added to the narration—usually some version of “But I survived.” I cried a lot during both parts. I’m not sure how to describe the experience beyond some vague sense that my pain was coalescing. For me, it happened quickly, after three or four sessions. Grief started to seem less predatory—it was no longer lurking around a dark corner, eager to pounce. It was here. I could see its contours. That felt good.

The therapy was first formalized in the late eighties, when a psychologist named Francine Shapiro took a walk and found that the anguish she associated with traumatic memories was alleviated when she was also experiencing rapid and simultaneous eye movement. According to Shapiro, E.M.D.R. is designed to target specific “unprocessed” or “pathogenic” memories—which contain negative emotions, sensations, or beliefs—allowing them to be integrated and therefore defanged. In “EMDR: The Breakthrough Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma,” first published in 1997, Shapiro suggests that E.M.D.R. works “on a physiological level.” Sometimes, she writes, “the system becomes ‘stuck’—as if it was choking on trauma—and often requires assistance in order to get moving smoothly again.”