EMDR

This might be IMDS because I never know how personal I am supposed to be on these things. I always think I know who reads it, then hear later about really unexpected folks who have been following along. Which is honestly why I haven't been writing much lately. But, ah well- I consider it an educational piece. I'm not really ashamed or embarrassed of any part of my life so what's the harm in sharing.

Started the EMDR today- eye movement desensitization reprocessing. It's a therapy tool that is supposed to connect your two brain hemispheres, help you see difficult moments/ memories and experience them more like scenery passing (and with less emotion), and supposed to heal a lot of things that are connected together. So you start with an early memory, as early as you can get, and deal with those emotions particularly. Then later situations that trigger similar feelings or are similar in nature are supposed to be cleared of their bad energies as well.

There are a few options for the actual practice. Its inventor had her patients (clients, whatever we're called) following the her finger back and forth across both sides of their vision while thinking about these memories. My therapist uses ear phones with low, one-second beep tones, and buzzers in your hands. The tone on the left goes off with the buzzer on the left, then it all moves to the right, back and forth, back and forth. It's important that they move together so that only one side of the brain is stimulated at a time. The effect is supposed to be moving your thought process from the frontal lobe to other parts of your brain, namely the ones that house your emotions. I am almost all frontal lobe in her office, so she thought this would be helpful. And the beeps and buzzers are supposed to help ground you in the now and enable you to be a little separated and objective.

I felt kind of under-qualified to do it because the practice is usually for traumatic events. This is more of an emotional pattern I'm trying to rework. But she suggested it, so I'm trying to get out everything possible. I had to sign a waiver and do some reading, then work on safe-place guided meditation (a hot pond in Hawaii by myself). On one hand, this all made me very nervous. On the other, I thought it was a bit overboard. It's just for a separation anxiety that started as a kid. The me of today as traveled the world by herself and should be past all this by now, right?

She would let me sit for about a minute with the beeps and the buzzers, then would stop it all, tell me to blank out and take a deep breath. Two if I wasn't able to look at her yet. Then tell her where I was. After talking briefly, she'd tell me to go with that and we'd start again. My thoughts were everywhere and I tried to control feelings and memories but it became harder each time I returned to the practice. So it was a bit more stressful than I had anticipated and I had to ask for the safe-place meditation at the end instead of continuing on to one more memory. Ended up with memories of people I put intense trust into letting me down, and me trying to control the feelings by acknowledging that a) they are human and b) I have done similar things to other people. But the feelings were uncontrollable and I had to step out of it so I could enjoy my Halloween and process things throughout the week in the frontal lobe way I enjoy.

We'll do it again next week and maybe for the full hour. I feel like a drama queen doing such a seemingly extreme thing. But it's free and we all have our hangups and I figure self-discovery is one of the more difficult paths of life. So bring it on. Let's go another round.