I have a friend who’s a therapist who does EMDR with her clients, and lately we’ve been doing some EMDR together, usually at her house – she does it on me and I do it on her. (This is one of those do-not-try-this at home things. I can do EMDR on someone and have it done on me in a private setting because I’ve been doing it with my own therapist for such a long time; anyone who’s starting out with EMDR should definitely do it only in a professional setting.)
Anyway, my friend is into another kind of therapy too, called Internal Family Systems therapy. The idea there is that we all have a little family of inner children living inside of us, each member of which has their own set of feelings and traumas, their own little agenda. I read a book about this theory a while ago and afterwards I tried to take stock of all the different conflicting parts of me: a terrified child and a girl who feels like an outsider and a happy girl who ignores everything bad and so forth. Afterwards I felt like I knew myself a lot better and like I had a pretty good idea of why I have some of the issues, especially the irrational fears, that I do.
So lately I’ve been doing EMDR with my friend, as well as continuing to do it with my therapist. When I do it with my friend she asks me questions like, Is there any younger part of you coming forward? How old is she? What does she want? Et cetera. Her own inner girls are always showing up when I do EMDR on her and I ask them questions and they answer them in often startling ways. (All of this sounds really surreal, I know. Trying to describe it is like trying to describe a dream; there aren’t words to capture the exact experience of it and if there were there wouldn’t be time to put them all down on paper. All you can do is approximate what it is with language and hope you capture enough to make it sound intriguing instead of dumb. It is intriguing, and magical and mysterious and about the most interesting thing I do these days, but I’m not sure if I can describe it well enough to capture why it’s all those things.)
The time before last that I did EMDR with my friend I stumbled onto a part of myself I didn’t expect to find: a girl I call Daddy’s helper. I was fishing around inside myself, the EMDR was in a lull, it wasn’t really going anywhere, and suddenly I saw, like something in a dream, an image of a girl inside a washing machine, wrapped around the fat central spoke that turns when the washing machine is running. It came to me that this was Daddy’s helper (I had identified her when I did my written inventory of my internal family, but I’d never encountered her before in EMDR), and as soon as I saw her in the washing machine I immediately started to cry.
I’ve been doing a lot of crying lately in EMDR. I’ve been crying because I’ve lost a relationship – my boyfriend got together with another woman before Christmas. EMDR, doing it with both with my therapist and my friend, has helped me deal with the break-up enormously; it has helped me hugely, miraculously, more than I can say (more about that lately). And finding that girl inside me and getting her out of the washing machine has been a big part of it. More about that later too.
No comments:
Post a Comment