Grief and IEMT
Grief is an emotion lots of people experience in different ways, with different severities based on the context of the loss. Throughout the past 3 years, this has been maximized by the loss of jobs, loss of the ability to experience things without limitations, and loss of the lives of loved ones, and as usual, people tend to ignore their feelings by finding coping mechanisms that distract them from thinking of the things that they have lost.
A few weeks ago, a client reached out for a grief problem that arose around the time of Mother's day (21 March in the Middle East), that every year around the same time she crashes and can't control her emotions since her mother passed away. Her mother had passed away more than 10 years ago, and she had undergone many sessions of psychoanalysis, EMDR, and CBT. The thing she kept mentioning, "I keep going to the same moment when I was told that she passed away, it's a location I pass through every day next to my house. I can see the person's face, and remember all the details of the place, and this emotion lingers for the next 3 months." From there all we did was the introductory pattern, where she held that specific memory and moved her eyes.
Since that moment, she passes every day through that location no memories are triggered and has no access to the original memory. When IEMT matches the structure of the problem, the results are very measurable. So for different individuals, there might be different aspects or elements, like the Lynchpin, or Identity elements.
Some considerations for grief are:
- Is it memory-based?
- How recent is the loss?
- Is it a change work issue or do they need counseling to express and talk about what happened?
- Do they need any form of training to be to deal with the gap the loss ensued?
Have you worked with grief using IEMT? What are other considerations you might suggest?
Comment below!
I’ve worked with grief quite a bit with clients, including grief around suicide. My experience is that it’s not uncommon for a person grieving to see a few specific scenes through out the dying process of a loved one and have those memories be problematic. With my clients most of these were isolated memories and have a feeling of helplessness or guilt attached. The client either felt they were not listened to, by a doctor or family member and didn’t or couldn’t honor the dying persons wishes, or they felt personally responsible for the persons death in some way. There seems to be a Lynch Pin big or small. While working with the memories using the kinesthetic pattern I have a conversation about how would the dying person want us to honor them and how would they like us to feel in their absences. Talking about this helps the client start to understand that hanging on the story of difficult memories of a dying loved one is so very painful and unnecessary. With a normal dying process it seems much easier for the person to let go of a problematic memory but in the case of suicide, it’s more complex and there is Identity work to think of – “Why did they do this to me?” “I couldn’t stop it” “I can’t live with myself”.
I worked with a client who experienced severe food allergies after her brothers suicide and working on identity reduced many of the allergy reactions. The suicide of a person close to us changes how we see ourselves and who we are to the world. Another client who’s husband committed suicide had more severe reactions. Panic attacks when seeing similar cars to her husband’s. A whole situation with how the police dismissed her prior to the event and the rage she felt was paralyzing her. This client was very complex because of how many parts there were to the situation. After about 6 sessions of IEMT she is now free of rage and panic and happily living life. It creates so much pain repeating the story over and over again, so when working with theses clients they were so grateful for the fact that we can do IEMT content free.