What Science Knows About Grief
July 7, 2026 at 06:30PMPop music critic Amanda Petrusich lost her husband suddenly in 2022. For The New Yorker, she attempts to outline the shapes of her grief and recounts the one thing that helped her move forward: E.M.D.R. (eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy, which involves repeatedly reliving the events of the trauma in order to become desensitized to it.
The primary thing I recall from E.M.D.R. is unrelated to the therapy itself. Often, at the beginning or the end of our session, my therapist would remind me, firmly and repeatedly, to grieve—to suffer. I can’t remember how he phrased it; possibly, it was as simple as him saying, “Let’s make sure you’re really grieving.” It felt bizarre, even sort of grating: all I was doing was grieving! Yet, in retrospect, I understand it as a remarkable kindness. Humans are instinctively averse to pain, conditioned instead to solve and strengthen and maximize, to inure ourselves to hurt. The idea of willingly spending some indeterminate amount of time feeling bad is unthinkable. But that was how I understood his counsel: feel bad. A bad thing happened, and it is reasonable to feel bad. Thrashing against it was both exhausting and fruitless. The experience reminded me of the woven bamboo finger traps I played with as a kid—the harder you tried to free your hands, the tighter and more frightening the whole thing got. To feel better, I had to find a way to value and nurture my grief. To understand it as some invisible but essential system inside me.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/07/07/grief-science-new-yorker/
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