75. EMDR for chronic illness

August 25, 2026

In this episode, Dr. Caroline Lloyd discusses using EMDR to address the trauma associated with chronic and degenerative illness; including loss of control, anticipatory grief, anger, guilt, and self-blame, among both patients and caregivers. She explains how EMDR can be used to process specific painful memories tied to the illness journey; helping people release fear, shame, and distress, although not the grief itself, which remains a natural expression of love and loss.

Key Points:

1. Chronic/degenerative illness causes deep trauma – as a progressive terminal illness can create fear, disempowerment, and stress for both patients and their families.

2. Complex emotions arise for both patients and carers – These include anticipatory grief, loss of control, anger (at the illness or the medical system), and grief over lost function and identity, and feelings of unfairness.

3. Guilt and self-blame are common – Parents may feel responsible (e.g. passing on a genetic condition), while carers often blame themselves for perceived failures in caregiving, leading to overwhelming guilt.

4. EMDR targets specific painful memories, not grief itself. By processing distressing "stand-out" moments (e.g., a difficult medical update, a caregiving crisis), EMDR can remove fear, shame, and anger—helping carers recognize they "did their best" and helping patients reach greater acceptance, while preserving the natural, love-based process of grief.

Resources Mentioned:

• Upcoming webinar on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) along with Dr Cate Bearsley-Smith

• 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.

• Consultation & Supervision: Book a supervision session with Dr. Lloyd.

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.

Subscribe & Stay Connected:

• Be sure to follow or subscribe so you never miss an episode. Each week, we dive into the powerful ways EMDR therapy can help you heal, grow, and reclaim your life. If you’ve found today’s episode helpful, share it with someone who could benefit from this information.

• See me in person over on my YouTube channel — it’s a great way to connect face-to-face, learn more about EMDR, and get a sense of how we might work together in therapy.

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 75 - EMDR for chronic illness

Hello, and welcome back to the EMDR doctor podcast. I'm Dr. Caroline Lloyd, And if you are new to this channel, you are welcome here, and please don't forget to like and subscribe because it really does make the podcast a little bit easier for other people to find it.

Before I start today I'm just gonna give myself a little plug - on 17 September I'm going to be presenting a webinar about DID which is dissociative identity disorder which is just such a fascinating topic for me and I'll be teaming up with a wonderful psychologist, Dr Cate Bearsley-Smith who is a has a wealth of knowledge in this area and will be talking about DD for 90 minutes so if you’re Therapist and you would like to enhance your skills and get a deeper understanding of what it is how, to recognise it, it is one of the most unrecognised mental illnesses that we I think having in our society at the moment and it's also one of the most misunderstood. Anyone who's watched United States of Tara or Sybil has a very distorted and unrealistic view of DID! Cate and I are going to dismantle some of those wrong beliefs about DID and really dig into how to treat it effectively with a bit of a focus on EMDR (because we are both EMDR therapists and consultants) so come join us on 17 September. You can go to my website EMDR doctor.com.au. Go to the training page and you'll find us there.
Today I'm not talking about DID. What a shame but I am going to talk about EMDR for chronic illness. Medical trauma is another one of my little special interests- so I have worked with quite a few people who have had some medical trauma now that might be simply going through a mastectomy or chemotherapy or an unexpected diagnosis of some sort. Maybe it's trauma around an operation that didn't go well or didn't go as expected or some other misadventure in the Medical world. I also love to talk about medical trauma associated with Doctors because Doctors sit on both sides of that fence they are both instigators of medical trauma and they are also victims of medical trauma working in the medical system. They may well be have a sense that they've been chewed up and spat out the other end, so but I'm I'm digressing a little bit from where I wanted to go today… so I have just read a an article. It's a little bit of an old article now it's 2009 but it's about EMDR use in helping people resolve the trauma of degenerative neuromuscular conditions. They presented a case study of three different families all of whom had had a family member die from a neuromuscular Condition. They explored some of the different ways that Medical trauma can happen for people with a neuromuscular condition - they have this kind of inevitable march towards death which is extremely frightening, very disempowering and really causes such a lot of stress and tension in the whole family not just the person who has the illness. What we might find with someone with a condition like this enormous sense of a lack of control, alongside incredible despair and in a grief in anticipating their own death. I think anyone with a terminal illness goes through a grief process where they grieve - either death or the death of their loved one, well in advance of the actual event and living with this process can be extraordinarily hard and really disabling and can really impede someone's enjoyment of the life that they do have left. There can be a lot of frustration a lot of anger both at the disease at the medical powers that be, at staff, at Family at the government. In Australia we have the NDIS, so they can be a lot of anger about resources that are not available or resources that may have been taken away. There's grief and loss around the loss of function, the body image and the whole identity of a person. There may be feelings around the unfairness of not being able to live a whole life. Sometimes in families or even in the individual there's a sense of failure - failure to prevent against the illness. Failure as in ‘it was my gene that I passed on to my child that caused this problem’. And sometimes there can be episodes of Care where the carer feels like they failed the loved one - maybe they didn't turn them enough and they developed bedsores or maybe they didn't aspirate well enough or maybe they didn't take ‘enough’ care. so you know there's a lot of self blame, maybe a huge sense overwhelming responsibility, that they feel having been kind of thrust into being a carer for their loved one which may well not be a role that they ever wanted to embody. So with the EMDR I often find when we delve into the situation, there is often a scenario, or a situation, or a memory that feels incredibly heavy and very very distressing. on the carers part it might be for example looking after someone with muscular dystrophy and not being able to suction their airway properly and seeing them really struggling for oxygen. It might be coming out of the anaesthetic and seeing the doctor's face all worried and concerned and saying we weren't able to remove the cancer today. It might be a moment in rehab where it became really obvious that previous function was not gonna be regained. There are often these moments along the journey that stand out as being horrendously painful and if we choose those to process with EMDR if we can remove the pain, the distress, the bewilderment and the frustration, the anger. If we can remove all of those heavy heavy emotions from that moment often what we can get to is: I believe I did a good job. I am a capable carer. I did my best in extraordinary circumstances. And for people with the illness we can often find a way to reach a greater acceptance of the situation and if we can remove some of the fear and distress that come out of those particularly awful experiences and those moments of extreme difficulty then people are much more able to live their best life for the time that they have them much more able to find a position of function in the family, to be able to accept care, to be able to grieve properly without anger of fear. I'm not saying that the grief goes away. I've done an episode of grief before on traumatic grief and what I tell people is that we can't EMDR away the grief - we can use EMDR to resolve the trauma but we can't take the grief out of grief because it's just about loss and grief is about Love and so we can't remove the grief, but we can certainly remove the fear, that anger, that resentment, the shame whatever it may be that's getting in the way of either the person with the illness or the family members if it's getting in the way of them living the best life that they can for the time that they have together that's the goal. I've seen many many instances of EMDR having been exceedingly helpful for people in these circumstances so if you find yourself in this circumstance or if you know someone who is going through this please do suggest EMDR for them. Everybody deserves to live a happy life even if it's a short life, even if you have heavy responsibilities, you deserve to be free of those difficult emotions, you deserve to feel better about yourself. So please do reach out to your local EMDR therapist or feel free to contact me or in Australia we have the website EMDRAA which has to find a Therapist button, and everyone on that website is properly trained and accredited so do have a look for somebody in your local area.
If you're interested in my next webinar on DID, what it is, how to spot it and how to treat it, then come and join myself and Dr Cate Bearsley-Smith on 17 September and I will look forward to seeing you then. I hope this has been helpful. I'll talk to you again soon in the meantime take good care bye for now.

75. EMDR for chronic illness

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