As I’ve said before, whenever I have a personal experience that goes with a topic we are covering, I share. It’s a great way to connect with my readers on a personal level. And since we tend to learn from each other’s stories, I like to think that my heal-alongs can do that. Since we have recently covered EMDR, this is my opportunity to share what processing my trauma in EMDR was like for me. But bear in mind two things.
1) I can’t share all the traumas we processed in one article (because that would be a book). But I can share what processing my earliest trauma (age 4) did for me.
2) If you read my last heal-along, you know that I made a ton of mistakes in the beginning of my healing journey. And it was all because of my mindset. You see, I was the one who stubbornly insisted on EMDR as my first trauma informed therapy.
I was so stubborn! (And maybe a little arrogant)
If you read my article on EMDR: Everything You Want to Know, you know that the last thing we should ever do is use EMDR as our first therapy. But like I said, I was stubborn. And the only reason I started therapy was because I found out I had every single symptom of CPTSD. Learning that EMDR was fast and highly effective, that was all I cared to know. So, I marched into my first EMDR appointment with the mindset that healing was a race to the finish line.
“Can we just get rid of all my symptoms so that I can move on with my life already?” Those were my thoughts, though I didn’t say them out loud. I had worked so hard at pushing away all those childhood memories, they felt more like past life experiences. And it seemed unfair that processing my trauma was my only hope for “curing” my CPTSD symptoms. If I remembered everything that happened to me and if I knew that what my parents did was wrong, what was the point of this whole “processing thing”?
I went along with the lecture that trauma is stored in the body, not the brain. But being the highly analytical sort, I was more than a little skeptical. All the while I was thinking, Wow, psychology sure has gone “woo” since the 1990’s.
Please note: The 1990’s was the era of quack therapy. In fact, that’s where I had learned all the toxic positivity I had been using on myself up until the year 2018. I was forty-four years old and everything that I thought I had known was about to come crashing down.
My EMDR Phases
Last week I gave you a comprehensive guide on the 8 phases of EMDR. (Here.) Now I’m giving you my personal experiences through the phases.
As I said in my last heal-along, we had no idea I was alexithymic until post-EMDR. So, due to my numb emotions, I had a hard time finding memories with a high enough emotional disturbance. As I would learn years later, by doing the daily work of busting through my condition, I actually had more Big T traumas than those that made it on my timeline. So, I guess you can say that I ended up only processing my BIG–Big T traumas.
We built my “safe place” (phase 2) and I chose George Washington. I had voraciously studied him just one year earlier and realized that he was raised by a cluster B mother too. In fact, I made a history comic on George Washington’s childhood and all the cruelties his mother subjected him to (here).
Anyway, I took this picture of him to every EMDR session. Each time we took a break and went to “safe place” I would take it out and stare at him. I used my other senses to “hear” him say, “I was raised by a cluster B too and I figured it out. So will you.” I “smelled” the forest while remembering his whole life – which I had experienced in all those biographies I had binged on – in the blink of an eye.
Processing My Earliest Trauma: Phase 3
Just as a recap, this was my first trauma (the cornerstone memory) in my timeline. My age four memory:
I was in the kitchen, and I knew my borderline mother was going to beat my father again. I begged her not to, but she ordered me to shut up and sit on the bench (or was it a cooler? I’m still unsure.) which was just on the other side of the den. That was the room where the violence happened. The last thing she told me before charging into the den was, “Don’t you dare get up!” There was a wide-open archway between the den and kitchen. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see the violence, but I could hear everything. I heard each hit and her loud, raging voice while my father hollered and pleaded with her.
The Cognition Sheet: More Reasons it’s an Important Tool
First, we had to do the assessment. (Phase 3.) We used the sound of the violence for my dominant “image”. I chose sadness as my dominant emotion, and for the life of me, I can’t remember where I “claimed” to feel it in my body. Being an undiagnosed alexithymic, I had no awareness of emotional body sensations. And, since I also believed that EMDR was “woo”, I played along by using metaphors.
When my therapist handed me the cognition sheet so that I could find the dominant negative belief I had at the time, it was easy to find. “I am powerless/helpless.” Then I had to look for the positive cognition that would hopefully “overwrite” the negative belief. There was only one in the positive column that felt right. “I deserve to be happy.” I looked at my therapist and said, “Wow! It really makes you wonder if that’s where all my self-abandonment (Trauma Glossary 2) issues started. Like saving people is more important than my happiness because I couldn’t save my father?”
Self-abandonment was one of my major CPTSD problems. I had spent twenty-two years of my adult life isolating just to protect myself from saying yes to everything. And I was excited that I may end up knocking out this symptom forever. (Oh, I was naive!)
Phase 4: Pardon My Bladder…
My therapist used a set of vibrating pads, about an inch in diameter as his bilateral stimulation tool. I held one in each hand and it allowed me to close my eyes while visualizing the scene. That very first session of processing my age four trauma was the strangest and most vivid of all the EMDR sessions combined. The moment I closed my eyes with the vibrating pads in my hands, I sensed it in my frontal lobes. It was like a creepy pop-up book opened up, and I could see the full layout of our home from my age four vantage point on the cooler (or bench).
Suddenly, I saw the blackest black curtain. It made the sound of a slamming door as it was yanked to. And that was when my bladder filled up out of nowhere. One minute I was okay and in the very next beat, I was squirming on the couch, fighting my bladder. Where did all this water come from? I wondered. I hadn’t had anything to drink in the past two hours, and yet my bladder was behaving as though I had chugged a few 44 ounce sodas. But I was determined to get through this session uninterrupted.
I told him about the curtain and I knew what it represented. This memory had happened more than once, but I couldn’t access the other one. But there was so much going on in the memory I that could access, I was genuinely curious. I was remembering more just from my therapist’s questions. “What happened next? And then what? What is it you see now? What is it you hear now?” Each question gave me a new answer. By the end of that first session, that memory fragment had a beginning, middle, and end.
What Happened…
I was crying uncontrollably on that cooler or bench and screaming, “No, Mommy! Stop! Please!” And I screamed for my father because I was scared for him. She was using a sack to beat my father, though what was in it, I have no idea. But I heard it rattle and I knew it was the brown grocery sacks we used in the 1970’s. Then, once it was over, I heard my mother’s pounding feet. And the moment she entered the kitchen, she switched her persona into a warm and loving mother. She had the audacity to try and hold me, but I was having none of it. I screamed, “You hurt my daddy!” My mother denied she had done any such thing. Then she proceeded to explain why she “had to” do what she did to my father.
All the while, all I could think – in my futile attempts at squirming out of her arms – was that I didn’t want her touching me. But she wouldn’t stop trying to hold me, and so I hollered, “I hate you!” My mother’s wide-eyed, open-mouth reaction lasted only a microsecond before she shifted right back into rage. She slapped my naked thighs repeatedly, raring back her arm each time in swift motions to achieve maximum pain as her hand crashed against them.
That woman even mocked me while I was screaming from the pain. She put on an exaggerated crying face while she called me a daddy’s girl. Then she added, “You love your daddy, but you don’t love me.” And she punished me for it with more slaps to my thighs. When she was finished with me, she pointed her finger down the hall and ordered me to my room.
Processing my trauma through my bladder??
I looked at my EMDR therapist in awe. “My God,” I said at the end of the session, “She abused me too in that memory. But I never remembered that part. I did more for my father at age four than he ever did for me.” My therapist agreed. I had a hard time paying attention to whatever he said afterwards. By this point, my bladder was threatening to explode.
Finally, his closing remarks over, I made a beeline for the counseling center’s bathroom. It was one of those pee sessions that seemed to go on forever. “What in the anomaly heck is this?” I was thinking. I was growing impatient with the endless stream. Stranger still, I had used this very bathroom right before my EMDR session.
The drive home was only twenty minutes, but by the time I pulled into my driveway, I was racing inside the house to pee again. This pattern of racing to pee every fifteen to twenty minutes would follow me the rest of the day. And even at work (I worked nights at the time) I had to stop and go pee throughout the night.
The following day, things returned to normal. But the phenomenon of my bladder still haunted me by my next session. So, I told my EMDR therapist about it. He said that in one of those memories, I responded the way that four-year-olds respond when they’re scared. Four-year-old me had wet myself, and that was the memory behind that slammed curtain I had seen. “The body will always remember,” he added, “even when the brain cannot.”
What a way to learn that the body does in fact keep the score.
Processing my trauma to victory
I held the vibrating pads and we started processing that memory again. It was the same sequence of events as last time with no new information. The only difference this time was, there was no curtain. Though I sensed something mysterious within. It was a mixture of relief and validation, even as my bladder was filling up yet again. But as I watched the scene replay itself, the home seemed brighter, as though all the shadows had lifted. The memory was just a memory. And so, I told my therapist, “I’m getting nothing.” He asked if I was ready to accept the positive cognition and I excitedly replied, “Yes, I think I can!”
And just like that, I watched four-year-old me hop down from her seat and march into the den. She grew until her shoulders hit the ceiling and she looked down at her parents. They were frozen in fright as they stared up at her. “I deserve to be happy!” giant four-year-old me roared. Then other scenes that involved witnessing my father’s abuse flashed before me. And I was saying the same five words to each one. “I deserve to be happy!” It was clear that I had just defeated the overall remorse I had carried for not saving the father who didn’t want to be saved.
And then of course, I had to pee again before proceeding to phase 6, the body scan. As I said earlier, having no awareness of emotional body sensations, I would continually “ace” this phase, but only by default. My EMDR therapist high-fived me. Two sessions of processing my trauma into victory was impressive. Ha! I thought, This whole processing my trauma stuff is easy. Little did I know that four-year-old me wasn’t finished with grown-up me just yet.
Memory 0.5 Reveals Itself
I remember going to work that night and shamelessly bragging on myself. “At this rate,” I said, “I will be moving on with my life in a matter of weeks and I will never have to think about my childhood again.” What a terrible self-parent I once was!
It wasn’t until the following day, while driving to work, that the memory that was hiding behind the black curtain revealed itself:
Four-year-old me feels the urine and stares down in horror. She places her hand between her legs in an attempt at stopping it. “Oh no, oh no!” she thinks, feeling like a baby. She doesn’t understand why her body has just betrayed her this way. Her heart is pounding inside her chest because she knows she is going to be in so much trouble when mommy sees this.
This was my first experience with a driving meltdown, but it wouldn’t be my last. All those years I had spent separating myself from my childhood memories was working against me. You see, my whole life I have had a soft spot for children. And though I knew logically that it was me at age four, it “felt like” it was happening to someone else. I was feeling this child’s feelings and thinking her thoughts in one continuous loop. (See Looping in Trauma Glossary 2.) Knowing how my mother was, I kept asking this child, “What did that b**** do to you?” But it remained just a tiny sliver of a memory, and I was desperate to know what happened next.
My age 4 flashbacks
I tried to distract myself at work that night, but I was unusually sensitive. The slightest shift in a co-worker’s tone of voice would bring fresh tears to my eyes. “You’re mean!” I would think, though I hadn’t used such words to describe hurt feelings since I was small. This would bring back the looping memory in earnest, and I would start crying. On and on this cycle continued. I was trapped inside the headspace of a sad and scared four-year-old who had a long road ahead of her before she would be free from Borderland (Trauma Glossary 1). On the drive home, my meltdown was so intense, I had to pull over to the side of the road and cry it out before continuing home.
Processing my other trauma in EMDR had been such an easy victory. And so, I vowed to this new memory that I would take care of her on our next EMDR appointment. But first, we had to survive the weekend in this constant loop of emotional pain. This memory deeply impacted me like no other. And for the first time in my life, I was reparenting myself. I went to Kroger and ordered a cake with the words, “You deserve to be happy, Baby Girl” on it. Then I spent the weekend crying with the memory and doing my best at nurturing it. My heart was breaking every second.
Processing my 0.5 Trauma
Four-year-old me has her hands between her wet legs. She hears her mother’s pounding feet approach the kitchen. Four-year-old me attempts to hide the puddle on the floor with her feet but she can’t reach without sliding off the cooler or bench. Mother rounds the corner and returns the sack to its spot by the wall. She hasn’t seen me, maybe she won’t see it at all, four-year-old me thinks. But my mother must have smelled it because she snaps her head around suddenly and looks at me. “Did you piss yourself?” she roars. Four-year-old me doesn’t even know what that word means, but she can tell by her mother’s tone that she had better not say yes.
EMDR couldn’t retrieve any more of that memory, but it was enough to help me see outside the loop. I had spent the whole weekend nurturing this hurt inner child. Now it was time to champion for it. I had chosen “I am okay as I am” as my positive cognition for this one. So, I watched four-year-old me transform into adult me the moment she hopped down from her seat. I stood toe-to-toe against my mother and said, “I am okay as I am.” Then, just because my hand had been between my wet legs, I added, “Here, have some piss, bitch.” I flicked my urine in her face at that, then picked up four-year-old me and carried her out of that house.
Lessons Learned From Processing My Trauma
I used my imagination in EMDR to give that hurt child new information to escape its loop. And for a few days afterwards, that memory would come at me and I would say to it, “I got you, Baby Girl, and I got that b**** for you too.” I reminded it of the new version of “What happened next,” which is the fastest and most effective tool for escaping such looping memories. The pain slowly dissolved as it got the message that it was finally free from its loop.
I shared what processing my age four trauma was like for me in EMDR because for whatever reason, it was the easiest of all the traumas I worked through. It was my crash course on the importance of inner child work, reparenting, and practicing self-compassion. I had gone my whole life doing none of it. And so, all those years I had been perpetuating the abuse on all my childhood traumas purely by telling each memory “It was a long time ago, get over it.” No wonder I never grew until I finally started healing.