Integrating in EMDR

            A couple of days ago the most amazing thing happened when I was doing in EMDR.  I’ve been doing EMDR for longer than I’d care to say, and most of that time I’ve been working on the fact that I don’t feel safe – I didn’t feel safe around my mother when I was a little girl, and I haven’t felt safe – really safe, in the deepest part of me -- ever since.   I was afraid of everything when I was a little girl; I was one of those kids with thin skin who’s frightened of loud noises, strangers, eating food, and just about everything else, including things other kids love like going on ferris wheels and riding down little hills on sleds.  Add to that the fact that my mother had post-partum depression when I was a baby – she screamed in the night, tried to make me drink Phisohex when I had a cold – and I was terrified of her then and terrified of her later and I’m still terrified of her, in the form of anyone who even vaguely reminds me of her, not looks-wise but behavior-wise – even though she herself has been dead since 1981.  That’s what I’ve been working on all this time in EMDR.

            And I was working on it again the other day with my therapist Alison.  I’d gotten a really bad night’s sleep the night before.  I wasn’t sure how that was going to affect the EMDR experience but it didn’t seem to have any effect, at least not any negative one – it might’ve actually made it easier to get down to the place I needed to go inside myself.  In a strange way EMDR is sort of akin to sleep; sometimes I think dreams are actually nature’s EMDR, nature’s way of helping you desensitize from trauma – that when you’re having bad feelings during dreams and your eyes are moving back and forth in REM, that’s actually helping you in the same way EMDR helps you.  Nowadays therapists perform the bilateral stimulation part of EMDR with a headset and hand things attached to a little gizmo that creates beeps and buzzes first on one side and then the other, but in the early days of EMDR the therapist waved her fingers back and forth in front of your face and you followed them back and forth with your eyes, simulating the rapid eye movements of dreams. 

            Anyway, the other day I descended down into my EMDR trance really easily and started working on the I’m-not-safe feeling, feeling how I didn’t feel safe around my mother, didn’t feel safe crying in front of her, didn’t feel safe being seen by her.  Then, toward the end of the session, I had a totally clear sense of myself as a child – I felt exactly like I felt when I was a kid.  It was like I was myself as a kid.  I could feel my awkwardness, my self-consciousness, how I felt about my body and in my body; I remembered how much I loved my father, how much I was afraid of my mother.  I observed it all with the grown-up observer part of myself and reported it to my therapist.  Then – during another set of buzzes and beeps – I felt like myself as an adult, my best self, or at least one of my better selves.  I had to conjure up that feeling, the way I conjured up the child feeling in the earlier set of buzzes and beeps.

It used to be that I had no adult self that I could find in EMDR.  When I got down to that deep place inside myself I was all child.  It was as if my child self – what they used to call my inner child – was all there really was of me as I experienced reality.  Of course, anyone looking at me would have thought I was an adult and I was going around in the world acting like adult, but inside where I was feeling things, which is where it really counts – I truly believe it – I was a child.  Since then, as a result of all the EMDR I’ve done, I’ve grown an adult self inside myself.  Most of the time, these days, as I go about my life, I feel like an adult and it’s only when something pushes my buttons that I turn into the child inside – this is one of the big gifts of EMDR for me.  Still, there are a lot of times when my buttons are pushed, more times than I would like -- a lot of times when I’m doing normal everyday things and I don’t feel safe, when I feel unpleasantly unsafe.

            So I was sitting there going back and forth – between one set of buzzes and beeps and another – between my child self and my adult self.  And then suddenly, I could feel them integrating into one self.  Suddenly I no longer felt like the child self, separate from the adult self.  I felt like an adult, another larger version of my adult self – I like to think of it as sort of like those Russian nests of dolls, with the little doll inside the slightly bigger doll inside another bigger doll and so forth.   It was like all of a sudden there I was the big doll with all the other dolls inside – I couldn’t even feel them any more but I knew they were there – instead of having all the dolls spread out across the table, with the little doll experiencing things some of the time, the slightly larger doll experiencing them another time and so forth. 

This adult integrated big-doll self felt very solid and very real.  Not scared at all.  And I had a sense of her.  Normally I have no sense of myself at all – I can’t feel myself the way you can’t see yourself, in any objective way at least, in the mirror.  But I could feel this adult, integrated self – I had a sense of her as a real person in the world.  The strangest part was that she – I -- felt like other members of my family, my father’s family: I felt like an Allen in a way I never have before.   

            I described it all to my therapist, and then it was time to quit and go home.  Normally when I leave my therapist’s office I feel shattered, irritable, nervous, or some other bad thing and it takes a while to put myself back together.  But the other day, as I left – went back out into the hot bright day and got in my car and drove home among other cars – I felt great.  I felt solid, real, happy.  Maybe happier than I’ve ever felt before.  I don’t know if this is going to last, I don’t know where this is going to take me.  But even if it was just one experience that leads to other experiences, other pieces of healing in EMDR, it was amazing.