EMDR Session 1

So as promised, I said I’d share a little about my journey through this EMDR stuff. As I've said previously, I want to keep it kind of lowkey because a fair chunk of what will be covered is very personal and very few people are actually aware of it, but nonetheless I think it’s important to share the process. I know some people cannot understand why I’d chose to share this sort of thing or alternatively think it’s a shot at some major attention seeking, pick me,"feel sorry for me" kind of behaviour but I can absolutely assure you that this is purely a case of raising awareness. When EMDR was offered to me, I was hesitant to accept as I was scared of what it might entail. It was also tricky to thoroughly understand it based on how little lived experience stuff I could find, there wasn't really anything available that helped me understand what I should expect. So I just (potentially) want to be that person for someone else who might be reading this and feeling the same way I did.

I’ve been seeing my therapist (let's call her Kim) for about three years now; I approached her about a situation I was dealing with for a well over a year that I simply was not coping with and was becoming borderline suicidal. She’s been absolutely fantastic, and we ended up gelling very well, so I’ve been back and fourth a few times since then, when previous traumatic stuff spins into something more current.

The first step of EMDR was information gathering, so although she knows about my life in great depth, we had to identify ten poignant / traumatic memories that elicit an emotional response. This was harder than expected because many of my things weren’t instant traumatic incidents as it were, many of them were long standing stressors. So, the trouble with this is that EMDR will only work if the thing you’re processing is a situation that can be pinpointed and effectively “walked through”.

So, yes this was a task. I think the list will be amended as we go on but the ones I recall being the “ones” were the actual surgery, and the times where I had projectile coughed blood. Among others on the list was along the theme of the 2021 catastrophe, things surrounding not being listened to / being denied / invalidated by medical professionals which as you might guess, aren’t all in your face, traumatic flashes but they do contribute to the overarching PTSD thing. So although we only managed the first draft of this list, Kim is confident we’ll be able to isolate specific memories.

Now, I am not entirely sure if I’ve got this second part correct so don’t take it as unflawed information but as I understand it, we talked about how these events made me feel about myself, and how the reoccurrence of events reinforced these “core beliefs”. Again, this I struggled with, because if I do have any negative beliefs, I don't truly believe them, or they've potentially morphed into defensive mechanisms which I believe protect me so aren't necessarily a "bad" thing. We then discussed how I’d like to feel about myself instead, which again, I’m not really sure of but she said this sort of thing would come in time and would just click, a bit like an electricity circuit connecting.

We were coming to the end of the session at this point so Kim didn’t want to start on something that was particularly in-depth without dedicating some down time afterwards, so we started on a more recent memory that elicited anger rather than the traumatic “holy shit I’m about to die” kind of memory, almost like a practice run before getting into the hard ones.

So, I was sat opposite Kim on the other side of her little, beach themed garden hut and was instructed to sit with my feet on the ground, and my hands on my legs I believe. She started to wave her fingers across the front of her and I had to follow with my eyes (I’m so good at psyching myself out of these things, I become acutely aware of what I’m supposed to be doing, and how it’s supposed to make me feel so, naturally I lose track of the task in hand).

As she was doing this, she asked me to picture the scene, and what was I looking at, so I tried very hard to put myself back in the seat I was in during this memory and started to notice things in the environment. I’m unsure of how long this went on for, I would hazard a guess of 30 seconds to a minute, potentially more. She’d then tell me to take a deep breath, pull her fingers down and ask me where I was. Then she’d say, “go with that” and continue with the waving of fingers and I’d naturally become more immersed into the memory, to the point where I was smelling things, what I’m feeling in my body (interestingly, until this moment, I hadn’t realised that I feel a lot of anger in my hands) and the same emotions that I was feeling at the time were coming up in a very active way.

By the end of processing (this one took perhaps 10 minutes in the end), she spoke of a ball of light floating towards me and then surrounding me and as it lifted away, it took with it all these unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and the complexities of that scene. This memory isn’t anywhere near as distressing as the others, so I was okay but did cry before leaving her house, so it was certainly an emotional afternoon, even when I had got home that evening.

She made a point to tell me something about my reaction / perspective of this scene which perked her interest, one that she hadn’t noticed before but unfortunately, I can’t actually remember what it was.

She said that as we go on through this list of memories, it will get easier to tap into and hopefully as I become more familiar with the processing, I won’t be overthinking it quite as much. She also hopes to get deeper into these memories where we can really pull apart what happened and then neatly pack it away and let it go for good. And also hopefully this will allow me to get through and enjoy life without a little devil pounding on my shoulder even when the smallest thing feels out of place.