A few days ago I had my EMDR session with my therapist. For a long time I was meeting with her twice a month, with each session lasting forty-five minutes, but I figured out that longer EMDR sessions are better than shorter ones, so now I’m piggybacking the two sessions on top of each other, with one 90-minute session once a month. During that time I probably spend about an hour doing EMDR.
When I went to Alison a few days ago I was feeling almost unbearably nervous, really badly in the trauma. So it was easy to get down into the place I needed to go, after I had told Alison what was going on with me and I had donned the little headphones and was holding the little disks and we had gotten started. I blasted off into inner space, as my friend Anne and I like to say, and went down down down through the catacombs of myself till I got to the bottom and what I found down there, not surprisingly, was a whole lot of fear. Old fear, childhood fear, fear that still haunts me every day without my knowing exactly what I’m feeling. Some snatches of memories. A new piece of the story of my childhood: It wasn’t just that I was afraid of my mother when I was a kid, it was that I was afraid of being taken away by my mother, given away to my mother by the authorities in the court, stolen away by my mother like a child being kidnapped in a fairy tale. More feelings: terror of being taken away by my mother; deep, bone-wrenching sadness at the possibility of losing my safety and my home at the hands of my mother.
And, maybe even more significantly than all of that, what I also found down there, what I’ve been finding more and more when I do EMDR these days, was my childhood self. It’s as if there truly is no time on the psycic/spiritual plane, as if through the miracle of EMDR I can step ever so briefly into my earlier self, like putting on a set of clothing. At different times, sometimes different times within the same therapy session, I experience her at different ages: Two years old, three years old, seven, fourteen, sometimes, maybe, when I was a baby. The last time I did EMDR I seemed to be feeling like myself when I was about, maybe, five.
All that I got, in my last session, because some woman – here in daily life, here in the upper air – was mad at my boyfriend. Really, really mad, in a way that reminded me of my mother, mad enough to lie about something my boyfriend did, initiating an official investigation of him. Or maybe she wasn’t mad, maybe she wanted something, money from a law suit, or just to get out of her lease. Or maybe she was mentally ill, like my mother was. Whatever. None of what she is or did had anything to do with me, but it couldn’t have felt more threatening to me. And now I know why. And not only that, I’ve gotten a big chunk of healing out of it. It wasn’t any fun, that’s for sure, I hope nothing like this ever has to happen again. Still, I have to be grateful for the healing. I am grateful for the healing.
Yesterday my boyfriend got a letter from the government agency that investigated the woman’s case against him. Not surprisingly, the case has been dismissed.
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