Grief and Sudden Loss

Grief is not a disorder and it does not need treating. The picture that came with a sudden death is a different thing, and that can be worked with.

The Distinction This Page Rests On

Missing someone is not a symptom. Love does not resolve and I would not want it to. Grief has its own shape and its own timing, it belongs to you, and nothing here is aimed at it.

What is different is the image. The phone ringing at 4 a.m. and the exact words the person used. The hallway outside the room. What you saw when you opened the door, or arrived at the scene, or watched the monitors while someone counted. The last hours, replayed with the detail intact.

That picture keeps its own schedule. It shows up in the grocery store, and it can sit directly on top of grief, so that every attempt to remember the person delivers the worst ten minutes of your life instead of the thirty years before them.

Why the Image, and Only the Image, Is the Target

ART works on the intrusive scene, not on your relationship with the person who died. We do not touch the love, the anger, the guilt about the last conversation, or anything else that is yours to carry in your own time. Those may come up, and we can talk about them, but they are not what we are targeting with the eye movements.

What people often describe afterward is access. Being able to bring the person to mind without landing immediately in the moment of finding out. The loss is exactly as large. What tends to come back is the rest of the memory.

What a Session on This Involves

We agree first on what stays untouched. That conversation matters more here than anywhere else in my practice, and I will not move past it quickly.

Then we identify the specific intrusive image, one scene rather than the whole loss, and work with it while I guide the eye movements at whatever pace you set. You are never required to describe the death in detail. You can stop at any point in the session and we simply stop.

Sessions are 60 minutes by secure video. Some people do one piece and sit with it for a while before deciding about anything further, and that is a reasonable way to work.

What This Is Not, and When It Is Not the Fit

• Not an attempt to shorten grief, take it away, or move you along anyone's timeline.
• Not a bereavement group, and not family or couples work. Many people want both, and a group can sit alongside this.
• Not appropriate in the immediate aftermath if you are in acute crisis. We would talk about support and timing first.
• Not a promise about how the anniversary, the holidays or the birthday will feel.
• Adults only, by secure video in Kentucky and Ohio.

A free fifteen-minute consultation, at your pace.

Fifteen minutes by video or phone. You do not have to tell me how they died. We would talk about whether there is an image doing this to you, and whether now is the time you want to work with it.