I’m going to be doing EMDR tomorrow and I want to write a little about what’s going on with me. I’m really in the trauma (the way someone I used to know who was a recovering compulsive overeater used to say, I’m really in the food). I’m not in the food or the obsessive thoughts or any other addictive anything today but I’m in the trauma. That is, I can really feel those old childhood feelings in a way I hardly ever do and I can barely write or think or do any other ordinary things because my feelings as so strong – it’s like they’re a presence inside me, some volatile wind or energy blowing around in my body. My arms feel tired and my hands feel so shaky it’s hard to type. And I haven’t even done the EMDR yet. But I have been doing it a lot lately, entering farther and farther into those old traumas inside myself and breaking them up. And now, today, it feels like they’re all swirling around in me demanding attention, wanting to be re-processed, wanting to get out. There’s something “triggering” them, of course. That’s the way it works, something will happen in the present day that feels like the old thing that happened when I was a kid. Feels like it to my unconscious, to my wounded inner child, who it turns out is still living inside me, just like John Bradshaw said she was, back in 1990. I’ve always been a little skeptical, a little resistant to the idea of the inner child. But now here she is. I can feel her in there.
The strange thing is, the more I feel her anxiety, her sadness, her abject terror, the more I can also feel – during odd random moments of the day, and often while I’m meditating – some other strangely exciting, mysterious, good feelings I had when I was a kid, feelings I had completely forgotten and am remembering now along with those other horrible feelings. It’s as if my child self has gotten unfrozen, woken up, and now I can feel everything she used to feel. It’s odd and unsettling but not entirely unpleasant. The feelings of terror, the trauma feelings – those are unpleasant, of course – but I keep telling myself to try to hold onto them so I can use them in EMDR. Because you never know when some matching circumstances -- some present day events that are enough like the old ones to activate the old feelings – will come around again. And you definitely don’t want to go through any more matching circumstances than you have to.
My current “triggering event” is something that’s actually happening to my partner, not to me. My boyfriend’s a landlord, and one of his tenants has falsely accused him of sexually harassing her – kissing her on the cheek, asking her out. She filed a complaint with the state civil rights commission and now my partner’s being investigated. I don’t know what’ll happen to him if he’s found “guilty” – he thinks the woman is laying the groundwork to sue him. We thought her claims were so weak they’d be dismissed right away but they haven’t been, an investigator is asking questions, wanting to contact my boyfriend’s other tenants, my boyfriend’s racking up lawyer bills, et cetera. Whatever the outcome ends up being, and chances are it’ll be nothing, because my partner’s innocent, and it’s all such small potatoes anyway – who cares if he did kiss this woman on the cheek? – it won’t affect me. But no matter how many times I or someone else tells me that, it does nothing to change the way I feel. This whole on-going event is a nightmare way out of proportion to the actual thing.
If it’s hysterical it’s historical, someone I know says, and that definitely seems to be the case in this case. For me, because it’s reminding me of something in my childhood. For my partner, because it’s reminding him of growing up in a Soviet-occupied eastern block country – somehow he keeps managing to manifest a creepy police state in America
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