Last Thursday I had my first ever eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) session. And while I’m feeling hopeful about it, the session has done a real number on me these past few days. Simply put, I feel like my insides are on the outside. But I know that it’s temporary.
EMDR is a scientifically-backed therapeutic modality specifically designed to help people living with trauma to be desensitized from triggers or memories. It involves moving your eyes in a specific way, as directed by your therapist, while processing a traumatic memory. I am super not a woman of science so I know the good people at the Cleveland Clinic can explain it better. But the gist is that the eye movements allows us to get our whole brain functioning while processing a traumatic memory and in doing so we sort of re-wire our brain around that memory.
EMDR can have really fast transformative results. It also can be really unpleasant, bring up more triggering shit and just not work for some people. Like with all healing tools, different tools will work differently on each of us. And sometimes the tools we need can change as our relationship to our healing grows and changes.
By now you’ve heard me say this a million times: there’s no right way to heal. Some of us, like me, fuck with CBT. Some of us fuck with ketamine treatment or microdosing. Some of us fuck with hydrotherapy. And some of us fuck with EMDR.
I waited 10 years from when I first heard about EMDR to give it a try. I’m glad I waited until it felt right for me.
What I hope to get out of EMDR
I went into EMDR with clear goals. I was not trying to recover any old memories. In my efforts to practice acceptance with myself, I no longer seek to remember any more than I currently do about my CSA. I accept that I have sensory memories and will never have clear narrative memories. Acceptance of my limited memories of abuse ebbs and flows depending on the day. But, as I said before, it’s a practice.
Instead, I am hoping that EMDR can help me become desensitized to some very specific triggers. The triggers takes me back to a memory that does not contain abuse, but rather, in the memory I was a young teenager and knew in my gut that my abuser was an unsafe person. In that teenage moment, I remember feeling so confused by my dark and scary feelings and turning that confusion inward to blame myself and feel immense shame.
This trigger is impacting me in a day-to-day way right now. And it absolutely sucks.
I am confident that so much of this is coming up right now because of my experiences parenting and trying to understand how to protect my child from a harm that I experienced that I still don’t understand. We will get into that parenting part more in future stories.
I’m hoping that EMDR can help this memory have less control over me and when I think of it that I have more affirming and compassionate things to say to myself.
What happened during my first EMDR session (don’t worry, nothing scary or bad happened!)
We did our EMDR session virtually, as is the case with all my therapy sessions. There are different strategies therapists use in order to get your eyes moving and both sides of your brain stimulated. My therapist uses a website that has a bouncy ball in the middle and she controls how fast the ball goes side to side, kind of like watching a ping-pong ball. She changes the rhythm of the ball and its colors too.
While following the ball, I think about the triggering memory and whatever else comes up. Every 1-5 minutes or so (I lost all sense of time) she would stop the ball and ask me what’s coming up for me and ask me what I am feeling in my body. Once I was connected back to my body she’d continue with the ball again. We did this back and forth for I think like 30ish minutes.
I spent so much of my mental energy worrying that I was “doing it wrong.” Even though I knew there was no right or wrong way to do it. I still wanted to somehow be good at it, have the “right” responses, prove to me or to her or anyone that somehow it was miraculously working.
25 minutes in I could feel my body leaving me or me leaving my body. I was struggling to stay present, but I felt like a switch was going off inside me that said, “Okay, this is enough. Now you rest, numb out, and recover.” I felt like my head floated off my body and was somewhere in the air above me.
The session only continues as long as we can stay present in the body and not disassociate. I think I pushed it a little because I was curious, because I had more to say and because I wanted to be the best patient at EMDR who had ever lived.
What comes next for me and EMDR
Our first session ended up bringing up some hard feelings that I had been aware of but unwilling to say aloud. I don’t think I learned anything new, but rather, I had to come to terms with the amount of shame I was still holding onto. It baffled me to realize that even after all these years of healing, and writing a book about it too (!!!!) that I still could feel ashamed of the impact of my abuse. I still wanted to keep my shameful thoughts in the dark even though I know the only thing that helps is bringing them to the light.
So we still have work to do. I know we will be doing a few more sessions of EMDR and I am hopeful that this can lead to some relief.
In the meantime, I kind of feel like garbagio. We are in the, “it can get worse before it gets better” stage and while I knew this could happen I am not like actively enjoying myself right now.
Yesterday I felt way too overstimulated by most things, and I needed to take my emergency meds, crawl into bed, and escape into my best friend, television, until my nervous system got back in line.
Today is better. I’ve been outside all day. I’ve properly fed and hydrated myself and moved my body and I no longer feel like at any point I could burst into tears and/or burst into flames. Progress. And I remain hopeful for more.
