Several years ago, during one of my lunch breaks, I was listening to The Diane Reams Show on NPR. She was interviewing a woman named Maggie Scarf who had recently published a book called “
Secrets, Lies, Betrayals: How the Body Holds the Secrets of a Life, and How to Unlock Them”. The book explores how the body holds on to painful episodes from the past—including secrets we may be keeping even from ourselves—and how we can release them to live freer, healthier lives. She talked about how the body has a unique memory system and how the body processes those memories and at times, how it doesn’t process certain memories. While I listened to her interview, I knew in my heart that I had to go and get her book immediately. I felt a wave of enthusiasm and excitement wash over me at the prospect of being able to heal specific issues that had haunted me for many years. Then she said the acronym that would change my life, EMDR.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a therapy used to heal the symptoms of trauma, as well as other emotional conditions. The EMDR therapy uses bilateral stimulation, right/left eye movement, or tactile stimulation, or sound, which repeatedly activates the opposite sides of the brain releasing emotional experiences that are "trapped" in the nervous system. This assists the neurophysiology system, the basis of the mind/body connection, to free itself of blockages and reconnect itself. EMDR allows a person to process an emotional experience. Most importantly, it can eliminate stress surrounding the traumatic event, with the purpose of allowing new life into the once traumatized and emotionally difficult memory.
I had been in therapy with Victims Outreach in Dallas for close to two years at that point and my therapist and I both felt that we had hit a plateau in my recovery process. I needed some emotional Draino to break through the remaining blockages. I couldn't wait to tell my therapist about Maggie’s book that I had just inhaled and at the mention of EMDR, she told me one of the other therapists there was a trained EMDR practitioner. That was one of the purest moments of synchronicity I have ever experienced. The tools always reveal themselves when you are ready to use them.
I felt I was pretty knowledgeable about the process from all the reading I had done before we started my sessions. I learned when disturbing experiences occur, they are stored in the brain with all the sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings that accompany it. When you are very upset, the brain seems to be unable to process the experience as it would normally. Therefore, the negative thoughts and feelings of the traumatic event are "trapped" in the nervous system. Since the brain cannot process these emotions, the experience and its accompanying feelings are often suppressed from consciousness. However, the distress lives on in the nervous system where it causes disturbances in the emotional functioning of the person. The EMDR Technique does two very important things. First, it "unlocks" the negative memories and emotions stored in the nervous system, and second, it helps the brain to successfully process the experience. EMDR sessions work amazingly fast. Processing even the most difficult memories can be achieved in a fraction of the time it would have taken with traditional therapy.
Before we could start the sessions, I had to fill out a questionnaire and write down all the troublesome memories I wanted to work on. This ended up being more of a brainstorming exercise in the end because I think we used two out of the eight memories I originally wrote down. The rest were determined by the progress made in the sessions.
I was so excited the day of my first session, I know I talked about it all day to anyone who would listen. When I got to the office that afternoon, Jennifer (EMDR Practitioner) had us set up on one of the rooms with two chairs facing each other and a small table in between. Jennifer entered the room with white wires dangling from her arms like a decorative fringe. She smiled at me as she arranged the machinery on the table. She had a white rectangular object that reminded me of something, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was until she set it upright. It looked like a Lite Brite with all the pegs already placed across the grid of the screen. She had untangled the little white wires that had disks on the ends that you could lightly grip in your hands. These were used for the tactile stimulation that would sync up with the light pattern I would watch on the “Lite Brite”. Jennifer explained to me how I could choose which light pattern I wanted from the machine and proceeding to show them to me. It could choose from a center light moving left to right or right to left. Diagonal patterns and zig-zags. I tried all of them to see which one I was most comfortable with and then she selected the infinity loop. Perfect. The infinity loop made so much sense to me, it’s like watching music being conducted. The tactile receptors in my hands would vibrate in time with the loop I was watching along with a synchronized click. After all the mechanics were arranged, the pace on the loop set and me very comfortable in my chair we began.
She first asked me what memory we were working on that day. I decided to go for something I considered easy, something that had always bugged me. I have had asthma since I was 5 or so. At least that’s when I had my first documented asthma attack; documented mainly because it occurred in the doctor’s office while my mom was getting her allergy shots. My father had an unhealthy fear of my asthma to say the least. The memory, or collection of memories, was of all the times he told me I would die from an asthma attack when he caught me running around and playing. I couldn’t get worked up, laugh too much, cry to much, get emotional, run or any exercise that could cause an attack. Pretty much, I couldn’t be a kid. Jennifer asked me how the memories made me feel and I was to list off emotions. I said angry, sick, alone, scared, betrayed, worthless..and then we stopped. She asked me to hold the memory in my mind and tell her where I felt tension in my body. The tension was in my chest. It hadn’t registered to me until she asked that my chest had become tighter and tighter since we began.
“What do you want to feel when you think of these memories?“ She asked.
“I want to feel safe. I want to feel that it’s okay to be alive.”
She then told me to hold the emotions, the sensation and the memory in my mind and watch the infinity loop. The disks in my hands pulsed in succession with the loop as it careened back and forth. At first, all of my attention was on the loop and the sounds. I had to concentrate to keep up and then my mind began this odd sort of wandering. It was like a spool of memory unfurling and cascading to the floor. I gently moved along the ribbon of memories that was weaved together by one memory into the next. There association with the other didn’t always make sense. Jennifer stopped the loop.
“Where are you?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know. Not where I thought?”
“Can you keep going?”
“Yes!”
The loop began again and the pulsing in my hands felt as though I was holding my heart. I concentrated on the light looping effortlessly across the panel and the memories began to stream across my mind again. I think this must be what it’s like when someone says that their entire life just flashed before their eyes, but though the sensation and the flow of memories only lasted a few seconds it seemed timeless while in the experience.
I could hear my dad. I could smell the house I grew up in. I could hear the TV and cartoons I used to watch as I though I was in the room. I saw myself sitting out in PE. I saw the sadness within the child I used to be, as though the sadness were a color. I heard myself being teased by kids I once knew. I felt disappointment radiating all around me. My chest began to hurt and while completely conscious of what was happening to me I had a phantom asthma attack. Jennifer stopped the session to assess if I could continue. I insisted that we keep going. I knew I was close to the source. But the source of what?
We began again and it went much faster. It’s as though I had to wander along all these old memories and ask this memory where that one had gone and they guided me along, until I reached the one I needed to find which couldn’t have been more surprising.
Everything looked golden, like it does at sunset in June. I could feel a warm breeze and I felt small. There were two long black shadows flanking me and a shaft on golden light glowing down from above. Then the shadows began to speak and I realized the shadows were my parents. At first, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. As I strained to understand the words they were speaking, I found I had to make myself concentrate because I felt overwhelmingly bored. But I wasn’t bored. The me actively listening and trying to suss out this memory recognized I was experiencing the memory as it was. At the time that this memory was occurring I didn’t understand what my parents were saying and I was bored by it. Then my attention shifted as it had at the same precise moment it did when I was a child, They were fighting. They were fighting about me. Then my adult self heard them, heard every nasty word they rained down over my child head. As soon as I could recognize what was said it became a jumbled mess. Words that I know and understand I suddenly forgot the meaning to and then I recognized that child me didn’t know those words. I had heard them spoken and they had been recorded in my mind without any association to their meaning. It was one of the most intense experiences I have ever had. It took me a moment to grasp that I had gone back and relived a recorded moment in my mind. Jennifer stopped the loop.
She had me briefly describe what I was experiencing and then asked me how I felt.
“I feel…I feel neglected.” The moment the words released themselves from my lips my entire body relaxed and I felt this heaviness in my soul dissipate.
“Where do you feel it in your body?” Jennifer asked and I noticed her disposition had changed.
During the session up until that point she had been very calm and peaceful, but now she was driving the session forward very quickly. It seemed to me that we had reached the breakthrough and now it was time to move out whatever had decided to nest in that space within me.
“My Chest.”
“Focus on it and watch the lights. Don’t lose it.”
We started the loop again and I focused on the pain in my chest. Every breathe became more laborious than the one before and then this pain began to move. It moved towards my heart and felt like I was being stabbed from within.
“Where is it now?”
“It’s in my heart.”
“Okay, you need to move it out now.”
The lights began their loop again and I focused my mind on the pain in my heart and started to move it down my arm until I felt it move completely out of my fingers. The left side of my body felt exhausted and my muscles were very tired and weak. It was also hard to miss the very acidic smell coming from that side of my body. It smelled like poison and sickness. I went home that evening and ended up having to drink a ton of water and rest because you would have thought I had the flu with how achy and exhausted I was. That was one of the first nights in a very long time that I went to bed and fell asleep without having an anxiety attack of some sort. I felt better inside my own head than I had in a long time and that was only the beginning. I learned that this process for me was like peeling layers off an onion. It took alot of work to get down to the core traumas that had been controlling me.
I’m happy to report that the asthma issues, chronic bronchitis and pneumonia that plagued me through childhood into early adulthood has subsided. Since having that EMDR session I have not had any chest illnesses. I’m very proud of that and now truly recognize the body/mind connection. This session is also my favorite to recall probably because it was the only one where even if just for a few seconds I was a kid again. I remembered her and I haven’t forgotten her since.
If you are curious about EMDR here are a few sites to check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJDrMDT_ezUhttp://www.emdr.com/http://www.maggiescarf.com/
