Hi dwhoooooooo (I hope that's the right number of oo's!),
Sorry if my first post didn't quite hit the mark, and please accept my sympathy and deep condolences for your losses.
I have had EMDR but I wouldn't use 'short, sharp, shock' to describe it - rapid and incredibly powerful, perhaps, but not shocking.
Basically it involved me thinking about the events and then following the practitioner's finger with my eyes to change the pattern which held my memory of the events, and my response to them. The events/memories I was dealing with were not recent but, in a way, were ever present for me - I functioned just fine but lived with an on-going sense of doom and anxiety and there were particular situations that I found difficult because I'd be responding to the 'events' (sometimes vivid flashbacks) rather than what was happening in the here and now, and so I'd over react (or react bizarrely and completely out of context). Does this make any sense?
Over a number of years I did have conventional counselling and, at the time, it was helpful, but the underlying anxiety never went away and I got fed up with talking about it over and over again, and really quite frustrated. I started to read up about the impact of shock and trauma and how events are held in the whole mind/body system, which is what led me into EMDR. Doing the EMDR was astonishing - I experienced a profound sense of release - emotionally and physically - and an equally profound sense of relief, and the emotional charge of the events/memories sort of fell away, together with a whole load of associated baggage.
Anyway, I hope this is more useful to you than my previous posting. You might try talking to an EMDR practitioner about whether it would be useful for your circumstances, and about what you can expect.