EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy

After Jeremie completed suicide, I knew I needed some support and therapy. I remember thinking: I can’t. I just can't. This is all just way, way too much for me to bear on my own or to ask my friends and partner to help support me through. I needed professional help.

I have done CBT—cognitive behavior therapy, talk therapy, psychotherapy. I’ve had some that were really helpful and many that I thought ‘eh’…because either our personalities didn’t match or they would try to give me insight but it was something I had thought before and I walked away feeling like I didn’t get much out of it.

I know I’m not alone here.

Many others have experience finding the right therapist and approach as challenging; going to therapy is hard for so many reasons.

First, you have to find one with the right ‘fit’, personality, approach, someone you mesh with and who gets you and can help you in the method you need.

And that process can be frustrating and time-consuming and expensive. I can understand why many people give up, especially when it can be hard for some to even commit to going in the first place.

I have had a few that really helped, like after my divorce.

But in February of 2020, I wasn’t sure I should go back to CBT. I looked into it, but then my colleague recommended EMDR to me.

I had never heard of it. But I took her recommendation and therapist referral. The therapist recommended only doing one at a time and so I chose EMDR, because it was something new and because it specifically addressed trauma.

I am so glad I did it.

EMDR was life-changing for me and I would recommend it to people, especially for those who have trauma (in whatever scale or in whatever way that that looks like to you.)

Admittedly, EMDR was a bit hard for me to—no pun intended—get my mind around. I’m an intellectual and too often think I have to process things, cognate?, to talk them through, to rationalize them. I was trapped by that mindset.

But when I had help from my therapist, read about it, did it, my perspective shifted.

EMDR addresses the truth that we carry trauma within our body. That it… gets stuck, when we experience event(s) so intense that we can’t really process it to release it.

So, what ends up happening is we carry it and we give it power and have all of these intense emotions that we associate with it, as we carry it. Over time, this embodied trauma has all sorts of detriments to our health and it may manifest through IBS, fibromyalgia, etc. (Which isn’t to suggest that it’s only trauma that causes these conditions, but sometimes these and others may be caused by undiagnosed and untreated trauma.)

EMDR is a therapy that involves guided eye movement reprocessing, so it tries to help clients process and release the trauma from their body. I think my therapist described it as providing some space between you and the event.

It’s not like hypnosis and I didn’t forget what happened, but, with help, I reprogrammed my mind into a healthier way of remembering it and addressing the traumatic event when I thought about it…Now, when I think about the memories that I have reprocessed, they no longer have the strong emotional ties, the downward spiral of unhealthy, compulsive thoughts, ultimately the power over me that they once did.

I get it if this sounds…downright bizarre. It did to me, for the longest time. Writing it out now, it still sounds strange.

I appreciated when my own EMDR therapist referred to it (before she was trained in it and practiced it) as “that voodoo stuff.” When she told me that, I chuckled. Not until she herself experienced the benefits from the therapy did she become a believer in its potential to help.

I think it sounds strange because it’s not just me; our society is so used to trying to make sense of things in our mind, and to try to separate mind and body from medicine and therapy…

I also understand that some of the most common and popular approaches to therapy are still the talk therapy, that whole “lay on the shrink’s couch” mindset. But I also firmly believe that we have been taught to separate mind/body in western ways of knowing, especially with medicine and mental health. And I don’t believe it’s the right approach or all there is to addressing mental concerns and trauma. I do think there is a mind-body connection that we try to minimize.

I also find it interesting because…there is a definite parallel between eye movement as a way that we humans process information, which is why we have that REM (rapid eye movement) during sleep and dreams. So, our eye movement back and forth is part of how our brain absorbs the events that happen during the day.

The idea, then, is that, with guided help, we can reprocess traumatic events.

It sounds so strange, and yet, it was true. It worked for me.

Here is my experience with EMDR:

My therapist worked with me to think about an event and the memories, thoughts and emotions that I attached to that. Then she asked me what I wanted to replace it with, and she guided me through activities/reprocessing to do that.

She also asked me to pay attention to my body and the physical reactions that I felt when I thought through these things…without judgment, just to let them be and notice them, from a distance and with curiosity.

What did I feel in my body? Nauseous. I wanted to puke. Tightness in my chest and tension in my shoulders.

At one point, I also felt like someone was choking me.

Those bodily responses astounded me and—quite frankly—disturbed me a lot.

Because, I’m someone who thinks a lot. I over think. So, in these sessions I wasn’t thinking anything new that I hadn’t already thought dozens upon dozens of times before.

But I had never had such a strong physical response tied to it as I did when she did this with guided eye movement.

After my first session and reprocessing (which addressed the memory of finding my father’s brains), I was totally wiped out. I felt ill, like I had the flu, and for a few days.

I think I’m pretty tough, and have powered through some hard and tiring things, but I have to say—That that mind and body exhaustion was something I’m not sure I had ever quite experienced. I had to lay low. And sleep and rest for a few days.

And I thought—seriously? Really?!??? All of this because of eye movement reprocessing. But yes, all because of that.

I guess it’s not uncommon. My therapist said that she frequently has people who throw up when she does reprocessing with them and feel flu-like for days after the first session.

Though there are different responses since we all have different ways/places in the body where we store the trauma. And sometimes, she said, the longer that we hold onto trauma, and the more there is, and you don’t let it go, the worse the physical responses can be to letting it go.

Whew, it was intense.

But she assured me—the brain knows what to do. It knows how to heal itself. When you help your brain along with this reprocessing, she said that you create new pathways and ways for it—in the future— to address other trauma or future trauma.

I guess that’s a relief, that you don’t have to undergo this every time for all traumatic events in life. That sounds exhausting. Time-consuming. Expensive. Terrible.

The other bizarre thing that happened from this was when she asked me to trace the first memory that I had of feeling that choking sensation. Almost immediately, I was transported back in time: a memory of my dad with his hands around my neck. He was drunk, red-faced and screaming and I felt choked. A traumatic moment that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. And so maybe, this is why trauma for me was represented by the sensation of being choked.

I was floored when that came flooding back to me.

My mind couldn’t really recall that so easily on its own. But my body remembered and associated that feeling with trauma.

I guess this is also common, that EMDR brings up these moments that you think that you have forgotten but that your body recalls.

It is hard. Reliving these hard, sad memories and the physically unpleasant responses to them.

But at the end—I cannot describe how much lighter I felt…how much freer. My body felt less weighed down. I moved with greater ease. Almost like I wasn’t trying to move underwater anymore.

Afterwards, the memories and flashbacks didn’t have quite so much power and control over me. There was some space between them. I was a bit de-sensitized to them; those hard, traumatic memories when I remember them now immediately are associated with the new thoughts that my therapist had worked with me to reprocess, or to program myself to have. “He had a disease, He wasn’t in his right mind.” Also: “It wasn’t all there was to him; it doesn’t define him as a whole; his choice of exit doesn’t define me.”

A colleague of mine confided in me that EMDR had really helped her…even though she didn’t really consider her trauma “all that bad,” like with those who experience sexual abuse survivor, etc. ..I think this is to say that any type of trauma could possibly benefit from this type of therapy. It doesn’t have to be the worst possible trauma you could think of. And again—we have no right to judge another’s trauma.

I share this experience because EMDR did change my life. My therapist did use some talk therapy in connection with EMDR; it wasn’t all guided eye movement reprocessing. But the reprocessing helped my body immensely. As someone who experienced floods of cortisol to my system after Jeremie had completed suicide, I needed some bodily assistance, with this kind of therapy and trauma-healing.

I also share this because I didn’t know about—had never even heard of—EMDR before I started going in 2020. I read about and was open to and interested in various forms of therapy, but I had never heard of it.

I think it’s important to know the options, and that it is important to find the best form of therapy that would work best for you.

Voodoo shit? Maybe.

But also—in my experience and with some friends of mine—potently effective.