(The New Yorker) – After my husband’s death, I had never been more pliable, tender, open, or raw. It was then that I tried E.M.D.R. therapy.

My husband had been dead for six weeks when I asked my primary-care doctor about a form of psychotherapy called E.M.D.R. I’d read that it was useful for coping with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. She was encouraging, though she also reminded me that I wasn’t post-anything yet. I was grieving—active verb. A month earlier, I’d reached out to the photographer Tabitha Soren; in 2021, she and her husband, the writer Michael Lewis, lost their nineteen-year-old daughter, Dixie, who was a passenger in a car that crashed in Northern California. Soren suggested that it might be helpful to think about my grief as a brain injury—to be awake, at least, to the ways in which it might manifest physically. There was a reason that the phrase “grief-stricken” had entered the lexicon. The experience was not entirely dissimilar to getting whacked in the skull. (Read More)