Note: This is my post for the second week of May in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month. Click here to go to the post I shared last week.
Last week I shared a post #FromTheArchives going back to the week after I began therapy in 2016. It was a little tough for me to revisit, but it also made me feel really proud. I have put a lot of good work in over the years, yet I have found that sometimes the hardest person to impress with your growth is yourself.
This week, I want to share the greatest tool used with me in therapy.
EMDR.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy method that helps people heal from trauma and other distressing life experiences. EMDR therapy uses eye movements or other forms of stimulation to activate the brain's natural healing process and reduce the emotional impact of negative memories. EMDR therapy is proven to be effective for treating PTSD, anxiety, depression, and panic disorders. A quick Google search of EMDR will find you all you could ever want and more about the technique.
In 2016, I had never heard of it. I will also confess that I was hesitant that it would work. I was a passenger in a really serious car accident in high school. One of the things I had to learn to live with was some permanent muscle damage in my back and shoulders. For two years, doctors tried a lot of different things to help. One of them was something that is probably a sister or cousin type treatment to EMDR. Either way, I came into the experience of EMDR with a lot of skepticism.
My therapist hoped that EMDR could help me process both the trauma I remembered and what I did not. Clearly there were some gaps in my memory bank as we learned that very first session (I mention that in last week’s post). The truth is that our memories, whether active or buried, impact our daily lives. We were both hoping EMDR would help us uncover what seemed to be lurking below the surface.
Another goal with EMDR was helping me learn to process grief except we did not know that before we began. One of the things we discovered in those first weeks and months of therapy was that I seemed to have built a vault internally that looked (in my mind’s eye) remarkably like my memory of the library at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Shelves as far as the eye could see filled with tiny Tiffany-like gift boxes except they were wrapped in kraft paper with red ribbon. The goal was to detonate a box within the safety of an EMDR session. What we learned was that when something had hurt or bothered me, I had wrapped it up and put it on a shelf in the vault. I had probably been doing this since the age of eight. Maybe even a few years prior because we discovered I had heard and seen a lot of things before the bottom completely fell out when I was eight. Needless to say, I had a lot of grief bombs (as I began calling them) gathering dust. Some of these were what some might say standard, normal, or unremarkable events such as the loss of a grandparent or changing schools. That was true in some cases. In others, those “normal” things got compounded with more complicated events making a mess of my ability to discern what was normal or happy or sadness or even grief. Not being able to cope, I would put nearly everything in those boxes and on those shelves. It feels important to my heart to remember that I was eight years old when this began. That does not change the end result which was how I could easily dissociate from the people and happenings around me. It is hard to describe what it feels like to feel everything and yet nothing simultaneously. I excelled at it to the point that I built a life on that skillset.
Before my therapist put me through EMDR the first time, she had me complete an exercise. I had to come up with a “happy place” and describe it to her in great detail. The point was that when the EMDR got too rough, she could tell me to go to my happy place allowing me to instantly feel safe. I knew immediately what mine was, so I closed my eyes and described to her the rooftop at Jumecourt in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti, at sunrise listening to the kids waking up at the orphanage next door and singing while they got ready for school. I promise you that if you ever experienced it for yourself, that single experience would leave you undone as it is so pure and beautiful. I know it might sound strange, but today, even years later and long past all of that intense EMDR work, if I am having a rough go of it and have the presence of mind to think about my happy place, you will see my breathing and posture immediately change. While on sabbatical last year, I made a Hail Mary to a few people I know still working and navigating throughout Haiti despite the unrest there. I asked if there was any way they might be able to get me back into Haiti to help them and to visit friends I still have there. The responses I got broke my heart and killed the last of my hope that I might be able to return to Haiti in my lifetime. At a minimum, no time soon. I owe Haiti a lot, and if for no other reason than it gave me a safe place to land (in my mind) during some of the hardest work of my life.
My last pitch for EMDR is that after my Sis had gone back to school and was studying to be a therapist around the time that I was entering therapy. She was so amazed by my experience with EMDR that she made a point to get certified in it post-graduating with her master’s degree. For some reason that made me feel so good both that she could see my own healing, and also that she cared enough about her patients to add this offering to her work.
That leads me to a disclaimer. Not every therapist is certified in EMDR so make sure to do your homework and select a therapist who has it if you are interested in using it.
I originally thought I would share some old words I wrote around the time I was doing EMDR, but I got a little too excited sharing about EMDR. I do want to share that I was in counseling weekly for nearly three years and no less than monthly for another year after that. I would love to share that healing looks like a line graph headed straight to the stars.
It does not.
During those four years I was also living a lot of life. I had a company doubling every year in a state where we were also creating the very industries our company operated in. I started doing legislative work to support those industries, and our firm. I got serious about writing my first book. I bought some land and built a cottage, helped start a non-profit, traveled. I also lost the most important adult figure in my life (and grieved in therapy, in a healthy manner for the very first time). I learned that my biological mother (who had disowned my Sis and I years ago) had passed, and on and on. Not to mention that this was all in the four years prior to the pandemic years.
My point is this.
Life goes on while you are getting help.
That means you are healing the old and the new simultaneously. Something happening to you in real time does not sit patiently in the corner waiting it’s turn while you heal forty years’ worth of old wounds.
Make space for grace in your life. Grace for YOU.
Trust that the skills and tools you are learning stay with you long past the weekly sessions with your therapist. You will not believe they will, but then one day something will happen, and you will handle it better than you did once upon a time. Your eyes will get a little misty. A tiny smile might appear on your face. Suddenly you will know that all of that hard work, time, money, and energy were worth it.
Therapy is the best gift I ever gave myself.
I did not have the time. I did not have the money. I did not have the energy.
I did it anyway.
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If you have ever thought about therapy, but do not know where to start, I am happy to help answer any questions regarding the process that I followed. Questions can be anything from how I found my therapist to forms of therapy we used to how I prioritized therapy into a very full and demanding lifestyle. Feel free to comment or inbox me with those questions.
This is so great, Heather. Therapy has been so instrumental in my own life. You are correct, do it anyway.
This is so interesting! I am a firm believer in therapy, and I have several friends who are licensed therapists, but I never heard of EMDR! Thanks for sharing about it!