EMDR success
oh boy. This is hard for me.
I am an incest survivor, by both parents, from evidently a very young age. Also a survivor of physical abuse, multiple rapes, emotional abuse, etc.
I began therapy at 29 yrs. old. group therapy was okay, but it's difficult for me to open up in a group and dilvulge too much detail. One on one therapy worked well once I found a therapist that I trusted, and that took some time. EMDR was very successful. If you need me to explain the steps, I will do that for you. But basically, we decided to choose one specific moment of the abuse. (As you probably know, in abusive homes, there are rituals, repeated daily, nightly, weekly. ) I chose very painful, possibly the most painful memory of my childhood, a ritual, that my mother did to me at night in my bed.We did the EMDR in the steps, and I cried and sobbed throughout the entire thing and really let myself cry like I had never cried before. In between the steps of EMDR, the therapist stopped to let me cry and we talked, and I breathed and we talked, once I could speak, about what was going on in my head. Then when I was ready, we continued with the EMDR. This therapy session was not your normal 60 minutes, and I made sure that I had nowhere else to be after this appointment, because I was an absolute mess for the rest of the day. So, we did this over and over until my crying slowly stopped. And, you know, it did.
What I learned about EMDR is that (correct me if I am wrong) our trauma is like unorganized words on paper that is on piles of unorganized paper dumped on the floor. EMDR works like REM sleep does while you sleep in that your eyes move back and forth, organizing the day's events into relevent and irrelevent information; some stuff gets dumped into the trash, and some information gets reorganized and filed away neatly to be found later by the brain when the brain needs it. During EMDR, we focus just on one tiny event, just that one 60-seconds of time, over and over, for the brain to find it, gather it up off the floor, and organize it all out of that mess on the floor, and file it neatly.
In my own experience, I can tell you that before EMDR that thinking about that ritual would make me cry hysterically for a long time. After EMDR, it still hurts to think about that ritual, but I can do it without crying; I now think that 2quilt survived because she is strong, she is resilient, she overcame what she thought was impossible. 2quilt did not die. I can now look at that situation from an adult's viewpoint, not from the viewpoint of a frozen 2quilt on the bed at 4 year's old.
I am not 29 years old any more, that was a long time ago, and EMDR treatment does not last forever. I am getting EMDR therapy again now. But I can tell you that this treatment I am getting now is not half as intense as the first go round I had back then. I healed a tremendous amount from EMDR therapy the first time. It was difficult the first time because I cried really hard, and I had to think about my trauma and talk openly and detailed about my trauma, and cry loud. And I cried! My depression really hit hard, but I had a loving boyfriend at the time and the medication I was on worked for me. EMDR is difficult because you have to trust your therapist to talk about the details of your trauma openly, to be able to cry openly with your therapist, you have to be willing to face your trauma, all the ugly details of it, and talk about them, and to let yourself cry out loud. Let it all out.
If you do try EMDR, remember, you can say stop at any time. You are in control. You are the customer!
<moderator edit to remover trigger warning. You can read more about why we don't use trigger warnings here : Community Constitution | My PTSD Forum >
