I’ve been doing EMDR Therapy for awhile now, but not always writing about the sessions here. It’s harder to write up my experience when I have a 20 minute drive to get home after my session and I’ve already processed what came up. But I felt the need to write today, particularly for those who are considering EMDR therapy.
First of all, I think I’ve had five reprocessing sessions (including today) so far. It’s actually hard to remember for sure. The first four were very similar in that there were very vivid images of my hospital stay after the surgery when I was five years old. Memories I didn’t know I had came up, from my parents and the medical staff pushing me to be a “good girl” and do the breathing exercises that would help keep my lungs clear (even though it hurt) so we could go home, to listening to my doctor talk with interns about my list of defects.
There were times that I wondered if these things had actually happened or if my brain was manifesting stories so I would have something to say with every pause. Mainly because I was “seeing” these memories from the outside of my body. I watched little me experiencing these things like watching a movie. I’m not sure why that is. But the images were quite clear in visuals and in sounds.
Today was different. When we began, I focused on the image of my tiny little five year old self sitting in that great big hospital bed. This is an image I can bring up easily because there is a picture of me in a scrapbook my mother made. But everything else was fuzzy. I couldn’t see the room or the people around me. It was like I was completely alone and in space, only everything around me was bright light. I tried and tried to “remember” something new. But instead I just felt completely alone.
Eventually I could see my parents at the foot of my bed, arguing. I couldn’t hear their words, but I knew they were fighting about something. Little me tried to ignore it, coloring a picture to distract myself, but my chest tightened and I felt tears on my (now) face. My mother left the room and little me went over to my dad, who had sat down and was crying, and placed a hand on his shoulder. He held me in his arms for a bit, then asked me to show him my drawing. After a bit, I asked him to take me for a walk. As we passed people in the hallway, my dad changed in his demeanor. He was no longer folded into himself, but joking and talking with the people we passed. When my mom returned, she saw the two of us laughing together and little me worried that she was going to start yelling again. But she didn’t. She came and sat on the other side of me to see what we were focused on. I felt happy to have my parents on either side of me and both were smiling.
Then a nurse came in the room and needed to do something with my IV and my parents each stepped away from the bed, leaving me alone. It felt like they were miles away from me and each other. Everything else in the room was completely fuzzy/bright lights.
The next images were very confusing to me. I was still in the hospital bed, but I was no longer in the hospital room. I was in a field somewhere with grass all around and the night sky above. There was even a stream trickling nearby. I kept trying to pull my mind back to the hospital. I was frustrated with myself because I couldn’t see what I was “supposed” to be seeing.
When my therapist had me come back to the present we talked about that. I told her I had been trying to redirect my mind back to the hospital and she asked me why. I told her I felt like I was doing it “wrong.” This is when she told me that EMDR will lead to other memories and to allow anything that comes up to come up. The hospital is just the starting point, but that I will find many other memories connected to the beliefs we are reprocessing and that’s what we want.
I told her I felt like the memory of my parents fighting might not have actually happened in the hospital, I’d just tried to force it there because I had thought it’s where I was supposed to stay. She said she could feel that something was different today as well.
I have no idea where this is going, which is both intriguing and scary at the same time. I’m curious to see what else comes up as we continue to reprocess, but I also know that I have struggled with knowing where my beliefs have come from and the thought that I might be planting similar beliefs in my own children by accident. The more I uncover about how my parents’ and others’ actions that they meant for good affected what I think about myself, the more I fear that I have done the same. And while I can forgive my parents because they were trying the best they could, I’m having a harder time forgiving myself.
Something I am hoping that will come from all of this work is that I can accept that I can’t (and don’t need to) be perfect. That I can allow myself to make mistakes and forgive myself for them. I know that we are focusing on the belief that I am “defective.” But I think that’s tied to the idea that if I’m not perfect, something must be wrong with me (thus, defective). I wish I knew how many more sessions it will take before I see a difference. Or even what that difference will be. How will I know that it’s working? When will we know we are “done”? And once we are, then what? Unfortunately, even when I ask my therapist these questions she says there’s no way to know because everyone is different. But I think that’s probably the perfectionism again. I need to be able to measure my success or failure and I can’t do that if I don’t know what that looks like. I guess this is just another exercise in letting go of perfectionism…
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