“Where do you feel it in your body?” my therapist often asks during EMDR, when I say I feel something or was feeling something during the beeping/buzzing. Francine Shapiro, the inventor of EMDR, says that trauma gets trapped in our mind/body, and I know that my therapist, Alison, is trying to help me find the places in myself where the trauma is trapped.
Sometimes I feel something in my body and sometimes I don’t. Usually when I feel something it’s tension, energy, discomfort in the area of my solar plexus, as if a hand is squeezing something inside of me there, as if a fist made of energy is closing or bursting open like a star. Sometimes all I feel is some emotion that I don’t feel in my body. My most common feeling is anxiety but sometimes I feel anger or shame or disgust or some generalized bad feeling I can’t identify. Whatever the feeling is I experience it more strongly, clearly, I recognize the shape and weight and energy of it, much more than I ever do when I’m in ordinary life in the upper air, as I sometimes think of regular consciousness when I’m down in the emdr place.
I once read in some spiritual book that the e in the word emotion is for energy, that emotions are energy in motion. And if I pay attention during EMDR I become aware of the energy in my emotions: what it’s like, where it is, what it’s doing in and to my body. Once early on in EMDR it came to me that all my cells were like little circles that were twisted just a little to the side, like clocks wound too tightly. That seemed like an important thing to know. My cells have straightened out since then, thanks to all the EMDR; maybe they straightened out in the moment I recognized their unstraight-ness or maybe it happened over time – all I know is that it has happened, I can feel it, even here in the upper air, how my cells are more relaxed, calmer, how they’re all lining up inside me like regular relaxed rows of knitted stitches instead of being wound too tightly, with areas of messy snarls, like they were before.
It often takes me a while to travel down through the ether of myself to get to the memories. When I start off, when I’m leaving the surface – when I’m sitting there in my therapist’s office with the headphones on and the disks in my hands and I’m beginning to hear/get the beeping/ buzzing -- I can’t feel or remember much of anything. Then as a bit of time passes and the beeping/buzzing goes on, I settle down and start to go deeper. Sometimes I pass things on the way down through the catacombs of myself, images, memories, often ones that have come to me before in other EMDR sessions. When I get to – not the bottom, because there’s always somewhere deeper to go, you never get to the bottom -- but when I get to, let’s call it the floor, I spend as much time there as I can let myself, feeling the feelings, experiencing what there is to experience and learning what there is to learn – or sometimes the learning comes later, when I’m back on the surface. When I’m down there in that deep place somewhere near the bottom of myself, I can feel the energy, the trapped energy, of my e-motions; I can feel the ways that energy has been hurting me, making me tense, uncomfortable, even sick. And in the moment of recognizing all that -- I believe it -- the energy shifts and everything gets better.
I feel something else too, when I’m down in that deep place, some light, beautiful, expansive, enlightened something, which might be my true unfragmented self. When it’s time to come back up to the surface and stay there – not just temporarily stop hearing/feeling the buzzing/beeping and report what I got to my therapist before going back down, but come completely up and out to end the session – right before that point I ask that beautiful something to show me an image that tells me what to do with all this – the trapped e-motions that I’ve been feeling; the frozen traumas I’ve been exploring, experiencing, breaking up in the basement of the house of my mind; all the pain, rage, shame, whatever, that I’ve defrosted and set in motion and now it’s traveling through me on its way to dissipating into the air.
Last time I did this, the last time I did EMDR, I got something really interesting. Two things, actually. The first one was an image of a box – a beautiful airy box made of light and color and pictures of animals and plants and shells. I have more to say about that box but I’m going to say that elsewhere. What I want to talk about here was the second image that came to me after I asked my question what should I do with all this? It came to me, clear and direct, like a true response from another party – it doesn’t matter who, maybe nobody, maybe God, maybe that light airy being inside myself – that I didn’t have to do anything with any of it. That something would be done for me: that the fragmented shreds of the clothing of myself, the bits of frayed yarn that had gotten broken off from the rest, the particular ones that I had found and recognized and worked with on that day -- those would be knitted and woven into the rest of the fabric of myself, all the regular rows of stitches that already exist – during the night while I slept. Restoring me, bit by bit, stitch by stitch, making me more, always more, never less, into my true unfragmented self.
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