My right shoulder has been hurting in a chronic sort of way. I guess it’s been hurting for years, but I’ve been noticing it more lately because I’ve begun doing a little bit of yoga every day, and one of the stretches involves my shoulders. A few days ago I went to my chiropractor for something else, and at the end of the adjustment I told her that my shoulder had been hurting. She made me lie back down on the table face up, and she extended my arm and manipulated and stretched the upper muscles in it, and then she shoved my shoulder down to adjust it, several times. At the end of all that I noticed, standing up and walking around a little, that my shoulder felt better. Much better.
Last week I also did EMDR. I didn’t have any really painful, big-bad-trauma-triggering issues to work on, so I picked something chronic, something that hurts in a dull sort of way all the time and that affects my freedom of movement, affects the ways I see myself and the choices I make and believe I can make, without my even noticing it most of the time. I have a number of issues like that -- most of us do, I think. Mine involve how I see myself, what I think I deserve in life, what I expect to happen to me in the short and long run. I could have picked any of those things to work on in EMDR, and probably will at some point. But what I picked to work on the last time I did EMDR was happiness. Somehow I feel like it’s not quite safe to be happy.
I’d don’t get that feeling when I’m filled with ecstasy or joy or some other over-the-top manic feeling because I’ve got a new boyfriend or I’ve sold my book to a publisher for six figures or something else like that has occurred -- it’s not those times when I’m afraid to feel happy. It’s when things are just going well in my life; there are no big problems, no big reasons to feel super-happy, but everything is okay and I feel peaceful and content -- that’s when I feel like it’s not quite safe to be happy. Some part of me is like a dog that gets a little nervous when it’s let off the leash to run free; it keeps looking back at its master with an anxious look on its face, as if to say, Are you sure this is this really okay? I’m not sure what part of me is the master and what part is the dog on a leash or how that dog got to be there inside of me, but I can feel their presence, vaguely, whenever I’m happy. Whenever, especially, I say that I’m happy, say it to someone else or even to myself. There’s a superstitious element to it too -- I feel like I need to knock on wood if I say I’m happy, like if the gods catch me saying or even thinking that I’m happy they’re going to jump up and punish me by giving me some bad thing. Something that will make me really unhappy.
I have been pretty happy lately (uh oh, there, I’ve said it). I’ve probably been happy (knock on wood) as a result of all the EMDR I’ve done over the years – I’ve broken up a lot of the old traumas (do I dare say most of the traumas?) that were underlying most of the unhappiness and depression I’ve always felt. And maybe because I’ve done so much work on the big traumas, what’s left is the chronic harder-to-notice stuff. In any case, last week I did EMDR on the I’m-afraid-to-be- happy feeling. I told my therapist what I wanted to work on, put on the headphones and held the little vibrating disks in my hands (gray disk, left hand, black disk right) and descended down into my deepest self to try to make some progress with that feeling.
I didn’t get any spectacular breakthroughs. A few images came to me. (My mother yelling at me for making the same joke too many times and also for asking for toys – my harsh angry borderline-personality-disorder mother seems to be behind 99 percent of my childhood traumas and therefore my everyday bad feelings, but just knowing that isn’t enough; I have to feel, process, the exact way she’s behind this particular thing). I also made a connection between my overall circumstances when I was a kid and the feeling that it wasn’t okay to be happy. (I was only happy living in my foster parents’ house but someone, both my mother and father in their different ways, was always pressuring me to give up my happiness and go and live at home, which I guess trained me that it was never safe to relax with any kind of happiness.)
I have to say I haven’t felt any big difference since then in my feeling that it isn’t quite safe to be happy. And my right shoulder has started to hurt again, although not as much as it did before. From which I can only conclude that more work needs to be done, that it takes more than one session, one adjustment, to heal old chronic habitual discomfort.
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