Spotlight on EMDR
My Experiences With EMDR, Chiropractic, Sex Therapy, Group Therapy & Meditation
When I began looking for a therapist, it was to help me deal with an endless cycle of drastic weight fluctuations in the hopes of opening myself to love. After a series of failed starts with the wrong people, I focused exclusively on those that treated eating disorders and found Rachel. In addition to eating disorders, Rachel specializes in trauma and practices EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy.
Over time Rachel and I made a great deal of progress in all areas of my life except one: my quest to find love. Determined to crack the code, I tried many things that I normally wouldn’t consider. But the longer I was in therapy, despite all my progress, the more desperate I became and, as a result, more open. While working with Rachel I explored alternative therapies including a chiropractor to release trapped “fight or flight” responses, sex therapy and group therapy for sexual abuse. I also started meditating and found it so helpful I’m adding it to the list. I didn’t know anything about any of these therapies or meditation before I started, and this is the first in a series of blog posts about my experiences with each.
Bear in mind that these experiences and perceptions are mine and therefore unique to me. What works for one person may not work for another. That said, being open is key and don’t underestimate your ability to grow and change. For most of my life I would have chosen death before revealing my childhood sexual abuse. I felt ruined and thought the only way to undo it was by undoing the abuse itself, my most fervent and futile wish. But it is possible to undo the ruin within and these types of therapy, along with life experiences courtesy of the universe, helped me do just that.
Let’s begin where it all started, with EMDR.
EMDR is a psychotherapy technique that helps people suffering from trauma. It uses bilateral stimulation that activates the opposite sides of the brain, releasing emotional experiences that are "trapped" in the nervous system. EMDR helps you work through issues by focusing on your physical reaction to stress, thereby reducing the emotional impact. Whereas thoughts and feelings generally follow a path, like train tracks, trauma is an explosion that blows up the path. EMDR is supposed to help you make sense of what is floating around untethered and bring it back to the track.
Because you’re relying on physical sensations in addition to your thoughts and feelings, EMDR can enable you to work quickly, which was key for me. It’s a long process to get prepared with many visualization exercises in which you picture happy places, tranquil states and storage for bad feelings so that whatever awful feelings you dredge up, you are prepared to ground yourself and not be overwhelmed.
You start by identifying a target that you want to resolve. It can be about anything that resonates with you and your issues – a memory or incident, dreams, family or relationships, etc. You also identify an image and a negative self-belief about the target. At the start and end of every session, Rachel would ask me to assign a number to the target of how it made me feel from zero to 10.
EMDR relies on bilateral stimulation – left brain, right brain – and you can choose chimes in your hands, have the therapist tap your knees or wear headphones that emit beeps in alternating ears. I chose the headphones and preferred the lowest possible volume, apparently my hearing is spectacular, and the beeps are a few seconds apart. Surprisingly, it’s not at all distracting and fades into the background, or at least it did for me.
When the bilateral stimulation began, I would close my eyes and think of the target. I had a series of targets that ranged from my childhood sexual abuse, nightmares and any number of things that made me feel out of control or powerless. Because my weight was a constant source of despair, I often targeted binges. In those instances, I would think about the target and picture the first image that popped into my head which might be the treats in question, foraging for them in my neighborhood, overeating at a party or restaurant, etc. The negative self-belief was that I am powerless over food.
With EMDR, you start slowly and home in on a memory that has some emotional charge but doesn’t pack too much of a wallop. The goal is to target your memory and talk through it as you experience it so you can make sense of it. But you must feel it so that by focusing on the physical and emotional sensations you can get to the heart of what it represents.
After many weeks of preparing, Rachel and I were ready to dive into EMDR. I picked an incident that was a five on a scale of zero to 10 in terms of how disturbing it was. I felt nothing. We targeted different memories and for all of them, I felt nothing. Rachel suggested ratcheting it up to a seven or eight on the feelings scale and still I felt nothing. We carted out the big guns and targeted especially difficult memories that always caused me to react. Still nothing.
This continued for several sessions, and we went back to traditional talk therapy. Rachel explained that I was disconnected from any feeling. She said it was normal, that the emotions were so difficult for me that my mind and body shut off before I could access them.
We restarted EMDR and after a few more sessions I managed to get a slight charge where I felt a fuzziness behind my eyes. Rachel asked me to explain it and I thought if I weren’t there I would cry. I also had a tightening in my chest and throat. At my next session I managed to feel and be in the moment for about 30 seconds. I still felt it behind my eyes and chest, but my hands started to burn, and I could feel a line of heat generating from my shoulders through my right arm to my hand. The more I tried to examine the feeling, the quicker it receded.
Rachel and I stuck with it and ultimately, I was able to make progress but it was slow going. We would start the bilateral stimulation, I would close my eyes and think about the target, and nothing would come to mind. This was a regular drill for us. Rachel would then ask what I felt in my body. I’d get a slight numbness in my arm, and she would advise me to concentrate on that. The numbness became more pronounced and spread down to my hand, similar to the pins and needles sensation when your foot falls asleep. I’d feel tension building in my chest until it settled in my throat. It was fitting that everything would be trapped in my throat as it was all my secrets I couldn’t tell. My stomach would often become a whirlpool and I’d be so nauseous I felt like I could be sick. Rachel would tell me to concentrate on my stomach and I’d see a churning sea of orange-red swirling out like a drain. I was a speck caught in the whirlpool, being sucked down.
This became my standard modus operandi and often all I had I do was think about certain topics or memories and I would have an immediate onset of sensations including energy in my chest, numbness in my arms and a swirling whirlpool in my stomach. It also became an indicator of things that were bothering me but were out of my awareness. I might “see” nothing when I tried to think of a target, but the constellation of sensations in my body was a tipoff to my unease.
Once I was able to synch into a target, physically and mentally, EMDR had a stream of consciousness quality to me. I might start off with a particular memory or event that would lead to seemingly disparate thoughts that ultimately bridged back to where I began.
Rachel began and ended every session asking me to rate how I felt from zero to 10. Whereas I might be quite high on the scale at the start of the session, I deliberately chose targets or issues that were causing me angst, I tended to be very low on the scale at the end of the session. In fact, it was rare that anything rated above a zero or one. I had a great ability to immediately disconnect from whatever I was feeling as soon as the headphones came off. I also completely forgot about our sessions when I walked out the door. In the beginning Rachel was surprised that she had to remind me about what we discussed the prior week because I didn’t remember. There were exceptions and, in those instances, it was often about things I found very disturbing.
Feeling emotions wasn’t natural for me, which I think is common. Enduring trauma is a daily exercise in survival. We push away what is too difficult or painful to process, especially as children when we don’t have the words or vocabulary to describe what’s happening and how we feel. I assiduously avoided feeling anything, especially emotions that made me vulnerable, such as sadness or grief. As a result, I would immediately tamp down unpleasant emotions as soon as they surfaced. It was such an ingrained response that I did it without thinking.
Yet I am surprisingly comfortable with anger. Many people are frightened by anger, whether within themselves or others. It feels too big and powerful. For me, it is mobilizing and no matter how terrified I may be, I absolutely will not back down or give in to it. By contrast, sadness is passive; there’s nothing to do with it but feel it. During therapy, I would often start out enraged about something and as I became better able to identify and sit with my emotions, I realized that anger was often just masking tremendous sadness or disappointment. I was especially reluctant to feel those emotions for fear I would drown in my grief and sorrow.
It was a long road to get to a place where I was able to feel my emotions and be vulnerable with Rachel. As much as I liked and trusted her from the start, it was several months before I was able to cry in my sessions. Fit is absolutely critical to success. I met with multiple therapists before finding Rachel and my advice is to trust your instincts. Therapy is incredibly difficult and depending on your issues and what you hope to get out of it, you may have to mine a lot of pain. You must be able to entrust your therapist with the most fragile pieces of you and know that they will do you no harm.
I never thought I would be in therapy for as long as I was (and just because I was doesn’t mean you will be) and used to constantly ask Rachel when I would be done. When would I be fixed? Who knew? Not her. Not me. I’d be done when I was done, and I hated that. But it was a mercy. Had I known it would take 12 years, it likely would have crushed me. But that’s the thing about life. If we’re lucky, time passes.
Generally speaking, I became happier day by day, month by month and year by year. So, my other piece of advice is to try not to think about an end date. It’s great to have goals but as I learned from my own experience, you’ll be done when you’re done and as long as you’re moving forward and making progress, it’s a victory.
Learn more about EMDR, Chiropractic, Sex Therapy, Group Therapy & Meditation.
