I’ve been doing EMDR with my therapist pretty much every two weeks for more than ten years. A lot of what’s out there about EMDR talks about how fast it works – there’s even a book called Emotional Healing at Warp Speed: The Power of EMDR – but that hasn’t been my experience with it. I suppose it could work that way if you had only one, discreet trauma to heal from – if you’d had a basically happy, peaceful life and then were exposed, say, to the Oklahoma City bombing – if that was the case you could probably get better in one ninety-minute session. But my life, like a lot of people’s, I suspect, has been made up of many layers of small on-going traumas that were so all-encompassing, and which happened over the course of so many years, it took me a long time in EMDR to even figure out exactly what they were: For example, I always knew I had an unusual fear of abandonment, a fear of abandonment that had me by the throat and wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let me let other people, mostly bad boyfriends, go. But I didn’t really know what in my childhood was at the bottom of my fear of abandonment.
And because my traumas weren’t discreet, they all sort of merged with and mirrored and overlapped with each other and it’s taken me a long time not only to sort out and identify all the various threads – to remember, really, while doing EMDR with my therapist, what actually happened to me when I was a kid and how I felt when it happened, both of which I’d more or less suppressed – but also to stick with each thread long enough in EMDR to heal from it.
It never ceases to amaze me what I find deep inside myself, in my unconscious, when I go down there and look around during EMDR. I’ll start out with something that’s bothering me here on the surface, usually something that’s bothering me a lot, frightening me out of my wits, making me feel uncomfortable, agitated, awful, so bad I feel like I can’t stand to live with it another minute. But I don’t exactly know why. It doesn’t make sense that I would be so upset about something like this, it isn’t big enough, important enough in the scheme of things, to warrant a reaction like this. I take whatever it is to EMDR and start with it, start off just having the feeling while I listen to the beeps and feel the buzzes in alternating ears/hands. (When you do EMDR your therapist uses a gizmo, a set of ear phones you wear and two flat disks you hold, one in each hand, all attached to a little machine that she controls, creating bi-later stimulation – that is, beeping/buzzing in one ear/hand, then beeping/buzzing on the other side, and back and forth, back and forth, for about twenty to thirty beeps/buzzes.)
As I listen to the beeps, images, memories, and emotions come to me. Often I make a connection between what I’m feeling now -- that feeling I’ve been having in response to whatever, which seems out of proportion to whatever – and some earlier part of my life when I felt that feeling. And sometimes a particular memory comes to me. The feeling I had during that old painful moment is exactly the same feeling I’m having now, in regular life, outside of EMDR, without knowing I’m having some old feeling. It wasn’t until I started doing EMDR that I even remembered the particular event in my childhood that seems to be the source of my hysterical fear of abandonment, let alone made the connection between the current fear and the old forgotten trauma. And that’s just one of many such discoveries I’ve made.
The implications of this, to me, are staggering. It means that what we’re experiencing, what we think we’re experiencing, isn’t even close to the mark of the truth, that all these feelings we’re having are really about some old thing that still lives in our unconscious, they’re not at all about the current, everyday problem we think we’re reacting to, except for in the way that the current thing is recreating, reminding the unconscious of the old thing. And it means that we can’t control our feelings just because we want to or think that we should or because someone else tells us that we should; we can’t make our feelings go away by talking ourselves out of them, by thinking new thoughts via cognitive retraining (I for one have never been able to change the way I think anyway and now I know why). It means that in some areas of the world, such as the Middle East, where people are regularly stamped with deep traumas, not by the dysfunctional actions of their families although that may happen too, but through the violent actions of the other side, the bad guys, the opposing forces – that trauma is building uncontrollably on itself without anyone understanding why, with increasingly catastrophic consequences.
But it also means that we’ve been given an enormous gift, a gift of potential change, of true and lasting healing. I believe that as more and more of us come to understand, accept, and use this gift, the better things will get. For each of us, individually, in our own lives, and maybe even eventually, who knows if enough people do it, in some critical-mass way that affects us all. The gift isn’t just EMDR, the procedure, which I believe will continue evolving, it’s the information that goes with it: That our traumas are running the show without our knowing it, that in order to create true and lasting change in ourselves we need to find our traumas in the unconscious where they live and heal them. That true and lasting change is possible, but not without the proper tools.
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