In this episeode we explore the the role of grandparents in clients’ lives, within the EMDR framework. Sometimes, intergenerational trauma can span generations, with clients aiming to break the cycle for their own children. While, for many clients, grandparents represent love, kindness, protection, and stability, often contrasting with a parent’s traumatic experiences. Grandparents may provide a different kind of support—less immediate responsibility, more unconditional love, and a sense of safety in the present moment. Factors beyond age and life stage (e.g. financial stress and life transitions) influence parenting quality, but the grandparent-grandchild bond can be a powerful source of positive attachment.
Main Theme:
The negative impacts of social media addiction and how EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy can help overcome it.
Key Points:
• For many clients, grandparents represent love, kindness, protection, and stability, often contrasting with a parent’s traumatic experiences.
• Intergenerational trauma can span generations, with clients aiming to break the cycle for their own children. • Grandparents may provide a different kind of support—less immediate responsibility, more unconditional love, and a sense of safety in the present moment.
• Factors beyond age and life stage (e.g., financial stress, life transitions) influence parenting quality, but the grandparent-grandchild bond can be a powerful source of positive attachment.
How EMDR Can Help:
• Resourcing: Use positive life experiences and relationships, especially with grandparents, to bolster clients’ self-worth and safety before addressing trauma.
• Reinforcing existing bonds: Highlight memories of being loved and protected by grandparents to enhance a client’s sense of self (worthy, capable, safe).
• In-session work: When processing distressing memories, incorporate imagined grandparent support (e.g., “What would your grandma say?”) to create a sense of immediate support, even though it’s imaginative.
Upcoming webinars for clinicians on treating Shame (June 4th), Dissociation (July), and Dissociative Identity Disorder (August).
Resources Mentioned:
• EMDR Therapy for Trauma: If you're in Australia and want personalized support, Dr. Lloyd’s individual or group therapy sessions may be right for you.
• EMDR Doctor Membership: If you’ve worked with Dr. Lloyd before and need ongoing support, check out the EMDR Doctor Membership page for monthly opportunities to continue EMDR therapy.
Contact and Feedback:
If you’ve been affected by trauma, or if you want to discuss how EMDR can help you heal from past wounds, get in touch with Dr. Lloyd at emdrdoctor.com.au
Appointments for consultation or supervision, with Dr. Lloyd, can be made via Halaxy . Remember, healing from trauma is a journey — you don’t have to do it alone.
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Join me, Dr. Caroline Lloyd, as we unpack trauma, explore the science of EMDR, and share real stories of recovery and resilience.
Episode Transcript
Ep 66 - Grandparents in EMDR therapy
Welcome back to the EMDR doctor podcast. It’s been a few weeks since I last podcasted - and looking back, I can't actually quite figure out where the time has gone. Easter gave me a bit of a slab of time to work on a couple of projects. I didn't get a podcast done then and very much kicking myself that I didn't because of course the days go by and they get busier and this week I'm preparing to go away to the EMDR conference next week so that's a really exciting thing but it just means that I have to squash two weeks work into one week and of course where does the time go? So I did manage however to get a day off this weekend to go and see Bessel Van der Kolk at his talk at the Saint Kilda Townhall in Melbourne which was really exciting. Bessel Vanderkolk is one of the trauma worlds poster boys- he's quite late career at present. He's a professor of psychiatry in the US and his huge contribution to the field of psycho traumatology was his book. The body keeps the score so I was very excited to go along and have a look at what his presenting currently. The first half of the day was all about trauma the body his interpretation of things and just really wanted took away from the first half of the day was that the work that I do in incorporating the body in EMDR is really valuable and kind of gave me a bit of a boost of confidence in knowing that what I do is helpful so that was really lovely. He also did talk about EMDR a little bit and also shared his amusement which is really common. When people hear about EMDR for the first time you know you don't actually talk through your trauma. You identify the picture and the belief and where you feel it in the emergency feeling and then you watch this stick go backwards and forwards in front of you for 20 minutes and then you feel better of course it's a lot more detail than that but listening to him talk did remind me of how weird it feels when you first do EMDR when all you've done is talk therapy before and you move out of that thinking cognitive brain and into the feeling body and you use the bilateral stimulation to resolve the trauma. It really is quite a magic and magnificent so that was the first half of the day the second half of the day was an experiencing body awareness with Bethel Vander cox's beautiful wife and whose name I can't remember just at the moment and a bit of a discussion about psychedelic therapy. I'm not gonna talk about psychedelic therapy except to say that I know very little about it but it is one of those really exciting emerging fields and Mind Medicine in Melbourne is really at the cutting edge of psychedelic therapy in Australia (and I have to say in the world) so that was kind of exciting.
So that's been my week and today being Sunday is a bit of a day for organising cleaning getting ready to go away so that's fun but I wanted to share this week on the podcast. Just a few ruminations. I've been reflecting on the importance of grandparents in peoples lives. Now of course some people have awful grandparents. That is a fact, or no experience of grandparents, but most of the time what I hear people relate to me is how important their grandparents have been in their lives. I hear a lot of the time is how important their grandparents have been in their lives it seems that even though grandparents are the people who perhaps messed up the job of bringing up the mum or the Dad and didn't give that reprieve from perhaps intergenerational trauma that what we see often is intergenerational trauma the great great great great grandparents pass on their trauma to the great great great grandparents they pass it down the line down the line and so on it goes until the person coming to see me in my office has the weight of generations of trauma societal trauma, individual trauma. Then often what I see is that person coming to therapy is trying desperately not to pass that intergenerational trauma on down the next generation to their own children. Quite often I see women who are in the early stages of child wearing. They have small children and you know just having children around you when you've experienced trauma in your childhood can be quite triggering so when your child gets to the age when your trauma happened that's often a time that people find it really difficult and what they say to me often is I look at my daughter and I think she is so innocent. How could somebody do such an awful thing to her? And so they get a little bit of compassion perhaps for themselves as a child and this is wonderful but what I'm getting away a little bit from my original intention so I just wanted to talk about grandparents. So very often the grandparents that my clients experience of the grandparents was that of love that of kindness fun Care protection and that was not the same experience that my clients parent had with that same grandparent. What makes the difference? I've been mulling this over: How does a person bring up their own children and their own children have an experience of that parenting being traumatic and then when they grow older and their grandparent they might be in their 60s or maybe 70s. They are able to grandparent so beautifully and give the grandchild and experience of safety connection love and stability. I'm saying all this with a full knowledge that of course it doesn't always happen like that but what is it that changes a not good enough parent into a more than good enough grandparent? Maybe it's just simply time maybe it's the difference between being in your 20s or early 30s and having children and being in your 50s, 60s or 70s and having grandchildren, maybe it's just time maybe the precious on young families are really are really enormous and that causes a whole lot of stress perhaps the financial pressure of having young children of being either in a career or out of a career having to work hard pay the bills look after everybody maybe the parent is still studying or trying to get settled in a new town on new country even and this creates a lot of pressure on appearance so they aren't able to parent adequately and then by the time that's done and they then you know 20 or 30 years goes by and then then grandparents perhaps I've paid the house off. Perhaps they're more stable in their life. Maybe they've retired and then no longer working to perhaps they don't have the stress of an ongoing job in and the time pressure. But I think there's another factor here aside from just lifestyle stresses and aside from just maturity there is something very special often between a grandparent and a grandchild. People who I talk to who relay their experiences to me of grandparenting is often that of just being blown away by an avalanche of unconditional love - that they just feel swallowed up by the love of the grandchild when they first hold them in their hands in their arms. Of course parents feel this as well but the grandparent experience is different and perhaps it's about that old adage you know ‘I can love them with my whole heart and then at the end of the day, I can give them back’ … maybe it's around having responsibility but not full responsibility or not 24/seven responsibility or maybe it's responsibility with a different focus so the responsibility is just on the hearing now just loving them and adoring them and giving them safe in this moment in this hour on this day so perhaps it's not tied up with concerns about the future. Where will they go to school? How will they turn out? I need to make sure I'm raising a responsible adult. Maybe there's a a different responsibility in grandparent Ing that it is just more immediate unless future based. So the love is not tainted by fears of the outcome of parenting.
So how does this play out in the EMDR therapy room? Very often with EMDR we do some what's called resourcing. We enhance the good things about somebody's life so we bring their attention to things that are good in their life - experiences of being loved or productive or achievements or freedom or fun. We will look for those experiences and we enhance them so people get a more full felt sense of themselves as wonderful proud accomplished, clever, intelligent, productive, feelings about themselves in their life. One of the ways that we do this is to enhance someone's awareness about the good relationships in their lives so we might go towards those experiences of times when people have felt safe and loved and protected and nurtured and valuable and often that is with a grandparent. It might be tinged with a little bit of sadness if the grandparent has since passed away but the feeling is there that knowledge about themselves is there so they know I am a good person. My grandma loved me or I'm a capable person. My grandma taught me how to do some skills or I'm a safe. I'm safe. My grandpa would hold my hand and take me places and protect me take me on the bus and he'd make sure that I was safe and having a good time. So we might first of all utilise those beautiful pure loving experiences with grandparents. If that's if that exists and we might enhance that and help someone feel more stable more loved more secure.
So that can help when we do some some of the really difficult work - when we going towards those memories that are really distressing really difficult. Sometimes we will pause in the middle of of a session in the middle of the drama processing and we will bring the grandparent into that situation… so we might say when you were five years old and that bad thing was happening. Who do you wish you had had with them and then sometimes if I know that they've had a good relationship with a grandparent I would say what would your grandma say to you? That would help you in that moment. What would your grandpa do for you if they were there in that moment? And of course this is imagination work - Of course the grandparent wasn't in that moment and we can't redo that memory but what we're changing here is the relationship to the memory we know that that bad thing happened but if we can insert some felt sense of safety or wisdom or love into that remembered experience then that changes the relationship to the memory of the experience. That is a little bit better I hope you're following along with me there but this is what we do in EMDR. We don't change what happened but we change the relationship with the memory. We allow the memory to become less painful and we allow the person in their current life to know with certainty that it's over that they're safe now that they are lovable that that wasn't their fault all of those good positive beliefs.
So just recently in my therapy room I have had a couple of really powerful experiences with people involving their grandparents and as I'm getting a bit older darling I'm not old yet but I'm in my late 50s and so at some stage maybe in the next maybe 10 years from now I hope to have that experience of being a grandparent. I may not and that's fine too but I am looking forward to that time when maybe I can provide that beautiful extended family to a precious little being and all the grandparents out there who are listening now to this podcast I just want to extend a thank you because you are valuable. It is recognised that sense of love that you bring to that relationship with that precious little being is so important and may actually one day save their lives. You never know or it may just save a therapy session alright? I hope this has been helpful. If you haven't had that felt sense of love from my grandparent you can actually created so if you you can create this from an imaginary grandparent so imagination is so incredibly powerful you can take an image of a grandparent from a television show or a magazine or a picture you've seen or just purely create one yourself and in hearts that picture with all the qualities that you'd want in a wonderful grandparent.
Now just in case you are not sick of the sound of my voice by now, I will let you know that in June I am going to be doing a bit of a webinar about Shame, so if you are a clinician and would like other about how to treat Shame in clinical practice, then soon on my website I will have a link to book in for the webinar. 4th June, 7 pm. Then later in July I will be speaking about Dissociation, and in August, I will be hosting a webinar with my friend Cate Bearsley-Smith all about DID , which is such a fascinating topic, I can’t wait to bring you that one too.
I hope this has been helpful to you, please feel free to reach out to me via my website emdrdoctor.com.au or my email address [email protected] and if you have enjoyed this podcast, please do like, review and subscribe, or leave a comment or a request for a podcast topic, I love to hear from you all, and I will talk to you again next week, in the meantime take good care, bye for now.
