EMDR

the woo-woo practice that changed my life

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

I have told several friends of EMDR over the years.

I continue to tell others - when they discuss therapy.

It’s not because I think that everyone has to try it - although it’s helpful for most everyone.

It’s because more people do not know of it —

Too often we treat psychotherapies/talk therapies as the only means in which to treat someone’s mental state, mental health crises, psychological issues.

And it’s because of our culture’s obsession with mind over body - as though the two are detached. (A product of colonialism - to parse it all out and divide, when integrated approaches are more helpful and more accurate).

But - the general premise is that trauma is stored in your body - as is grief -

And a lot of times it gets stuck and needs help to be processed and to move through the body.

We repress and get our emotions stuck, though the name for them suggests emote - to move out.

But too many of us don’t process our emotions.

Some drink or use drugs, yes.

But others - stuff it down, shop, eat, but there are countless other ways to stuff down those emotions —

Until you make yourself sick, in some way, shape, or another -

They’re linking chronic pain and auto-immune disorders now, caused by inflammation and stress on the body due, to repression.

Somatic healing - releasing the emotions and grief and trauma - from the body, as I told someone the other day, has been of the two most powerful forms of healing I went through.

But, it sounds woo woo as fuck.

You reprocess memories through guided eye movement, following someone’s finger back and forth - to get better associations with memories.

It sounds bizarre, but then -

We really don’t know why we have REM - rapid eye movement in our sleep, during dreams and deeper states.

But it does seem to be an integral part of why/how we process things.

I took my traumatic memory - finding my father’s remains (his brain) and reprocessed that one.

Though the memory sounds shocking - and it certainly it - graphic - when I explain it to others - it wasn’t even the violence and rawness of that - (I mean, most people will go through their entire lives without seeing a parent’s organ that they can’t live without plastered to a wall),

But honestly - worse than that, was all the internal crap that I had come to associate with

1-What that mean

2-What that said about me - my family, my life

I would have intense shock and inner feelings of not being safe - whenever I watched someone get shot or shoot themselves in a movie or tv -

And for awhile I went through this morbid and dark stage of watching the Senator, gunshot wound to the head, that was caught on camera, as he bled out, on live tv.

But though there was a sick fascination with how it all went down with my dad (then my brother), there was also -

I’m not normal -

Look where I came from -

These are my genes - DNA - family line -

This was my father - isn’t there some degree of protection that is supposed to happen -

Instead, there wasn’t - severely lacking growing up, but even worse, now I am made to carry these scars of seeing the implosion of your internal landscape?

This is my emotional inheritance? What the fuck do I do with that?

I don’t know.

There was no blueprint or map of that - especially for two people with suicides in their immediate family. (That I could find, written about).

I had a single-even trauma that fucked with my mind, that I couldn’t think my way of out -

That needed to be reprocessed and released from my body.

And there were layers and levels of that.

The EMDR of that particular moment allowed there to be space created and it no longer carried the emotional weight that it once did.

The process of doing EMDR is exhausting.

Many feel sick. Nauseous. Some throw up.

I felt choked - a familiar feeling to me, as I was told that was how I came out of the womb - with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and then later, when my father in a drunken rage put his hands around my neck.

I grew to associate a tightening around my throat when I felt danger or emotionally stifled.

Afterwards, I was exhausted - like I am a zombie and I need to nap and sleep for days - COVID-like level. I felt like I was down with a bad case of the flu.

But, afterwards, I felt lighter.

Lifted.

That sounds nice, perhaps, to you —

But for me - terrorized, gripped, nervous system dysregulated - constant state of hypervigilance and cortisol -

It gave me my life back.

Internally, I find felt like there was some hope that my father’s graphic suicide would not [have to be] the defining event of my life, for the rest of it.

Like I could finally have some ownership and agency of authoring the rest of it.

I know some get scared of trying or undergoing the therapy, because it sounds scary or like it’ll be too hard, you’ll be too exhausted or re-traumatized -

But - it’s so much better than to live terrorized by a memory -

To get a little more tired, to get better-

Rather than living in an endless spiral loop of emotional exhaustion, perpetual defeat, constant, normalized repression.

EMDR changed my life - and I know it has for others too, treated other tragedies and accidents.

Because it reprograms your brain, to help itself heal.

That’s why you don’t need to do reprogramming of all the memories and childhood memories that are scary - you only need to do a few.

It was so well worth it.

Woo-woo sounding as fuck -

But I will take woo-woo, and something I can’t quite my mind around - if it works.

Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash