Try EMDR and see if it works

friend’s wedding, at her house in NC, turned out to be about three blocks from where my late husband and I used to live, the site of three of the four trauma triggers I desensitized through EMDR. I felt nothing other than a little amusement that it should be so close. That’s pretty spectacular, in my book.

In my last two sessions, we worked on the trigger of paying off debt. LOTS of stuff surfaced, from difficulty giving him up as truly gone to feeling lonely and unloved because I did it by myself.

I don’t have any PTSD symptoms currently and am feeling happier and more relaxed than I have in a very long time. I’m sleeping well, barely worrying and rolling around in love like a cat in catnip. I’m seeing the therapist next week to make sure everything “held” and I’ll see her again after that in six months for the same reason. I’m so glad I spent the money and took the time to do this.

Had what felt like a long time continuing in the stuck mode. I found it very difficult to bring up the memory in anything other than an abstract way. It was as if my brain refused to get near that encapsulated trauma. It felt like one of those dreams where you’re being chased and you can’t force your legs to go faster. So we did some work around why my mind didn’t want to go there, why I didn’t want to let the memory go.

Goddamn.

I can’t recall exactly how it happened, but during one set of eye movements, I suddenly got that since he was a bigamist and our marriage never existed legally, I somehow thought if I stopped mourning, I would be giving up the only thing that made me a “real” widow. How do these thoughts exist in my head without me having any idea that they’re there? The breakthrough came when my therapist mentioned that gay couples who are not legally married go through a legitimate mourning period when their relationships dissolve or they divorce or one dies, even though there’s no legal documentation. Well, of course! So why did I believe I wasn’t a real widow or I was lying to people if I said I was married and widowed? Who knows? But somehow the clotted trauma got untangled.

The therapist mentioned that it appears that I’m already processing some of the issues/negative beliefs we identified for the last trigger, which is the most recent. So there may have been a logjam of desensitization and reprogramming going on as my brain tried to deal with a myriad of issues at once. Sounds right. Even my brain can’t be satisfied with good enough, one thing at a time, first things first!

The eye movement wasn’t working for me, so my shrink tapped on my knees instead. She said it’s the same thing, as far as it is still bilateral stimulation.

So, I am paying someone 100 dollars a week to tap on my knees! Ha!

But, it actually did something. It was a weirdly intense experience. After three times, I had to ask her to stop – I was completely emotionally spent. It’s obviously good for progress, so I am going to do it again next week.

I’ll go ahead and check it off here, as I do not plan to publicly post my progression, but when I finally get that driver’s license, I’ll really be able to say it works. I’m feeling very optimistic!

I’m a little nervous, but I think it will be okay.

This one started at a lower distress level, but I got stuck and couldn’t get past an overwhelming sadness. No panic or tension, just huge waves of crushing sadness. By the end, I was so tired that I couldn’t rate my distress and today I still feel flattened. It’s hard to hold myself straight in the chair. I keep slumping and my brain feels sludgy.

Thank goodness I’m seeing Mr. Yes later. I need loving arms around me.

Last night’s session was one of the hardest, most rewarding things I’ve ever done for myself. I was in a good mood all day, didn’t melt down pre-appointment like last time. That said, when we sat in the chairs facing each other and she asked me to remember the event, rate my distress and tell me what was going on in my body, I was crying, sick to my stomach, one leg was jiggling so fast it was a blur, it felt like I had been punched in the throat and it was all I could do not to leave. I was terrified in a survival-level way. I had trouble breathing. It felt like I might go insane if I went back into the memory. I understood how people end up screaming in the fetal position at therapists’ offices.

We started. It was the last time I saw my husband, when he told me he was collapsing inside and was giggling one moment, crying the next. The night we went to dinner, where he drank, then drove home and he tried to hold my hand and when I finally shut the door on him, I danced with relief and giddiness that it was over. I thought I had been unforgivably cold and uncaring, acting superior and cruel even though I knew I was nearly free. We worked through the memory several times, with her doing the hand movements as I uncovered new layers of beliefs and thoughts. Every time we went back in, I would hear a scream or a whimper of “I don’t want to do this.” It took every bit of courage I have (a not inconsiderable amount) to stay in that chair. At times I couldn’t talk, though I probably could have screamed.

As before, I saw a clear image. This time it was a beautiful translucent fragile vase with broken jagged edges and a large hole. It was inside my husband’s torso. It was his sickness and brilliance. I saw how I had tried to fix it or stem the leaking and been cut open, how I had been bleeding for years, how there were pieces missing that prevented repair. I saw how my husband had been sliced open, too, as he tried to make his broken mind hold water. I saw how healthy it was for me to take my hands away. I saw how exhausted and battered I was and what a generous gesture it was to agree to a dinner, even if I was short with him and stayed emotionally disengaged. I saw that I had done the best I could and that given my emotional injuries at that point, it was damn good.

I also related some of the scarier aspects of his mental illness, the ones that made me feel unsafe and threatened. While being careful not to diagnose a dead man, she explained how his actions and words, and the fact a prescription he told me was for anti-anxiety to help his stuttering is used for psychotic episodes, spoke strongly to the possibility that he was psychotic. I hadn’t wanted to use the term, thinking it too harsh for someone who was non-violent in his actions, if not in what he screamed in his sleep. I told her how he mourned his dead mother, who turned out to be alive and well. I told the truth and it hurt.

By the end of the session, I was laughing. It seems unimaginable that I could get that far in a little over an hour, but when I looked at what I had expected of myself, it was comical. I told the therapist that if a loved one related a similar story, I would have told her to tell him, “Drop off the car and go to hell.” This wasn’t denial or intellectual reasoning, it was gut level belief. I am a loving and kind person who did the best I could and did damn well. You can’t imagine how it feels to finally see that. A lot of other people saw it, but that didn’t help. I had to lie on the monster’s tongue and touch its teeth before it could become a harmless memory.

Finished working with the first trauma memory. It’s tiring work. About an hour before the session, I started getting very emotional. Mr. Yes texted me something and I was infuriated and then so hurt I nearly cried. I finally texted back asking him what he meant and telling him I was feeling a little raw. I had misunderstood. He explained what he meant and said, “I will support you with what you need to be happy. I love you.” I realized that I was projecting onto him my anger and hurt at how my husband didn’t want me to express my emotions in an emotional way, that he felt it was cruel to him or damaged his sobriety. I’m grateful I was able to stay kind and curious with my emotions and that I asked Mr. Yes what he meant.

I discover a lot in these sessions. I found out that I felt like I should have known about the alcoholism/insanity and not married my husband. The therapist pointed out that highly trained professionals doing psych evals on him were fooled, years later when the diseases had progressed. I finally got that I did the best I could. At the end of the session, I was able to look at the memory and see myself as a loving person who was under extraordinary strain and snapped. I did love him and support him. It’s odd. Trying to recall the memory now just makes me tired, as if it’s so far away and I’m done with it.

It’s hard to think today, to be honest. I feel sleepy and drained. Near the end of the session, it was as if I could feel something in my brain move to the side to let in the new beliefs, as if a physical shift happened or something hard dissolved and the rest of my brain was reorganizing around the new space. It felt like waves shimmering inside the top of my head. When we looked at the next memory, a lot of the emotion was gone, though that could be brain/psyche/heart/body exhaustion.

This is hard work. Safe, but hard. I have to jump right into the flashback and stay with it, look at the things that have been haunting me, say out loud what I have been feeling. I wish I had more vacation days. I could use a half day off after each session. I went right into a conference call afterwards. Tonight I’m going to go to the gym and then collapse at home. I picked a hell of a time to give up caffeine.

We worked on the earliest trauma trigger memory, a time my husband chided me for something minor and I burst into tears and rage and when he tried to check my rush into the house, told him that he had no right to speak to me about something minor when he had ruined my life. You could see him crumple. He believed me.

At the start of the session, we took a SUDs reading. (Subjective Units of Despair – my new favorite phrase.) I was at a 7-8, full of shame, disgust, wanting to run or wail or vomit. That part wasn’t so fun. We started in my safe happy anchor memory, then she had me remember the incident in detail while I tracked her hand with my eyes.

I had a lot of breakthroughs that I felt deeply, that weren’t just intellectual conclusions. One was that he used the language of Alanon/AA to suggest that if I didn’t trust him, after multiple deceits on his part, or if I expressed anger, hurt, etc. about the effects of his behavior on me, I was making him feel bad and undermining his sobriety. I went to Alanon for awhile. It was very helpful and I never got that message from the group. Another was that I internalized my parents’ discomfort with emotional displays (my dad is so tenderhearted about his people that he literally feels what you do or goes rigid to avoid it and my mom is straight up stoic) as a belief that expressing my emotions in an emotional way was intrusive and wrong. My husband was the same way. Rather than feel guilty for the perceived injury I gave them if I expressed my emotions with passion, I learned to speak calmly about what I was feeling, which left it trapped inside me.

I figured out the childhood connection when I said, “I was a good wife” and a little voice inside, mean and quick, said, “Not good enough” and offered his suicide as the proof. Using EMDR, we traced that voice back to when I was in my late teens/early twenties and my sister’s depression/mania was accelerating and I was trying to keep everyone’s emotional plate spinning at a steady enough speed and I felt it was never enough unless everyone was okay. If they weren’t, I had done it wrong. And while I took total responsibility for my emotions, I felt I had to protect people who were emotionally or mentally fragile from my emotional expression, thereby making their emotions my responsibility, too.

Two more big breakthroughs. (Can you believe I share all this with y’all? Well, I’m EXPRESSIVE and learning that’s okay. Wonder what the character limit is on 43T.) One was when she asked, while doing EMDR, what I wish I would have said to him instead of “you ruined my life.” I said, “You need to make this right.” We were always recovering from the latest disaster and moving forward and I never took time to acknowledge the damage he created and how it affected me, how hurt and exhausted and angry I was. He was always going to make it right in the future, which never came, and frankly, that was as much or more for his sake as it was for mine. I was so much a part of our team that I didn’t ask him to make it right to me as an individual.

The other breakthrough came as an image of the huge metal cables that are used in suspension bridges, with the words, “If you put enough strain on anything, it will break.” That was a big one. I had been under strain for four years at that point and I snapped. I lost control because I had been holding up the marital equivalent of the Golden Gate bridge for four years, not because I was selfish or cruel or weak. It was an inevitable as a twig snapping under a heavy boot. The miracle is that I hadn’t snapped earlier. What happened was an exaggeration of a healthy, natural response to his behavior.

Am I still writing? Dear god. At the end of the session, I looked at the memory and it felt so long ago and far away, like a movie or something that happened when I was a kid. My SUDs rating was about 3, but she would like to see it at 1, so we’ll work on this again. She said sometimes her clients find that their minds keep chewing on it even if they don’t think about it consciously and the shift happens naturally. I know I’ll keep going for as long as it takes to turn these emotional rocks into sand.

I had my first session with the EMDR therapist last night. I was so confused and frustrated when the PTSD symptoms that started after my husband killed himself, and that I had thought were resolved, recently reappeared, just when life is going well. I’ve got a good job, new car, healthy, happy relationship with a wonderful, solid, loving man for the past year and great support system from friends and family.

During the session, I realized that what caused the retriggering was paying off all my debt, most of it created during my marriage and by the huge income tax bill the year he died. (Tiisi’s helpful hint of the day: Don’t marry a bigamist!) I had looked forward to paying off the debt as a sign that I had made restitution and learned the lesson of not trusting someone I knew was untrustworthy so I wouldn’t have to ask questions and make things uncomfortable. I assumed I would feel so free and strong and instead I felt bereft, full of sorrow and even a little ashamed and sick to my stomach. I felt like I had done something wrong. I resisted telling people about this huge accomplishment ($23,500 paid off in four years) and I couldn’t figure out why reality didn’t match my assumptions that I would be throwing a party.

Last night it finally clicked. By paying off the debt myself, I blocked the possibility of my husband ever making it right. Some part of me wanted him to be able to redeem himself and now that I did it for myself, that part of me had to admit that he’s truly gone, that he cannot make up for the mistakes he made in this world, that this isn’t a movie where I’ll get an unexpected bequest and feel his presence. I’m mourning the fact that his legacy includes such pain and dishonorable actions. It’s shocking that I could believe such illogical concepts, but such a relief to know why I’m back to being hyperalert, having horrible dreams and even hearing his voice calling me awake.

We identified four trigger memories and the negative self-identifications associated with them that we will reprogram through EMDR. If I had any doubts it would work, the process of creating my safe anchor memory dissolved them. As the therapist moved her hand back and forth in front of my face and I followed it with my eyes, I thought about Fort Bragg and camping as a child in MacKerricher Park. My body relaxed (what a foreign sensation!) and I got a goofy grin on my face, like I was a little happy kid romping through the forest again.

Next week we’ll start with the earliest of the four trigger memories. I did a lot of crying and was drained after the session, but it feels right, like this will finally budge the horrible self-judgments I have. (I should have been kinder. I was cruel the last time I talked to him. I’m making this all up and it isn’t that bad.) I’m putting off saving any more money until I’ve gotten at least six sessions done (at $90 a pop). This takes priority.

today with a therapist who does EMDR. I got her name from the EMDR Institute and she’s near home/work. It will be a history/intake/am I stable enough to deal with traumatic memories/do we click kind of visit. I’m very detached about the prospect of talking about my husband’s suicide. Strange for me. I did tear up at lunch when I thought about it, mostly from emotional exhaustion.

I’m doing it outside of my medical insurance, which has a pretty poor mental health network. It’s $90 for a 60 minute session, which seems reasonable. I feel so flat. I think I’m scared if the memories/PTSD symptoms intensify, I won’t be able to function. Nasty dream lately about a woman looking for her husband, opening a door and having his shoes at eye level. As she realized he killed himself, I (in real life) jumped out of bed to my feet so fast I hurt my back. Ain’t life fun?

Did I mention I’m emotionally exhausted? Yeah.