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| Me, Age 74, standing next to a steam-driven tractor, April of 2013 |
Part I: Background
On Monday, April 29th, 2013, I engaged in my second major EMDR treatment, and I'd like to describe it for you so that you can witness this aspect of my healing. Let me give you a little background first.
I have spent the past three years getting my brain/psyche ready for EMDR--to learn more about the Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, Google the EMDR Institute or any of the reputable sites that come up when you Google EMDR. Some sites will tell you that EMDR is a way to reprocess trauma damage quickly. For some trauma victims, that may be the case. However, for somebody with C-PTSD, I do not believe the "quick processing" claim is true, but I'm not a mental health professional. I'm just a retired community college instructor who is healing her C-PTSD. I have childhood traumas and the damages from the sexual and psychological abuse during my twenty-year marriage to reprocess--some 42 years of abuse in all. Healing all that damage involves more than a "quick fix." In my case, getting ready for the EMDR "fix" has taken three years of commitment and hard work so far. I sense that I am on the "down slope" now and that the end of my therapy is in sight. I don't want to discourage my readers, but this present round of therapy is not my first.
I had my very first experience with therapy in 1980 when I recognized that I needed help and found it. I didn't know what my problem was then. I just knew that I kept fragmenting and having auditory hallucinations, and the fragmentation and hallucinations kept me from functioning the way I wanted to function. My therapist was wonderful! She used her training, her intuition, and herself to help me, and gradually I was able to put myself back together and the auditory hallucinations faded--all without medication. Six months after I began therapy, I caught my former husband molesting our daughter, turned him in, and got a divorce. Therapy at that point helped me get my bearings so I could deal with the aftermath and the legalities and so I could make the transition to being a single parent. Although my therapist was not familiar with Complex PTSD and did not treat me specifically for that disorder, thanks in large to our relationship and her training, she saved my life and helped me put myself back together.
In 1980, when I saw my first therapist, few people were aware of Complex PTSD. Bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman may have been developing the concept of C-PTSD at the time, but the symptoms were usually credited to other mental health disorders. In the years between 1983, the year my first therapist retired, and April of 2010, the year I began seeing my present therapist, I saw about 14 therapists, none of whom diagnosed me as having Complex PTSD and treated me appropriately. Some of those therapists were good people and did their best to help me despite not really identifying my disorder; a few of those therapists were so disturbed themselves that they inflicted more damage on me and added to the trauma damage in my brain.
Through all those years, I did not take medication. As is sometimes the case, my symptoms calmed down long enough to allow me to earn straight A grades in four years of graduate school and then to have a successful community college teaching career for about thirteen years. The symptoms were always there, playing in the background like elevator music. They were obvious enough to drive my search for appropriate help, but they did not hinder my functioning until after I stopped working in 2004. Then, perhaps because at some level of my awareness I gave them permission to emerge, my symptoms became more obvious and began causing me more distress. In 2009, the flashbacks and instances of dissociating became truly bothersome, and that is when I once again looked for and found a therapist who claimed to understand how to treat my problem but who, as it turned out, was not competent. After I discovered that, I found my present therapist, a woman who is experienced not only at working with EMDR but also at preparing clients for the EMDR work so that it can be done efficiently and safely.
So in the past three years I not only have had to deal with traumas from my childhood, traumas from my married years, but also traumas caused by inept therapists who may or may not have had malicious intent. The accumulation of trauma damage, then, is a gigantic mound of horse sh-- that has taken me an even more gigantic amount of energy, perseverance, commitment, intelligence, and plain old stubbornness to shovel off the barn floor, so to speak. What has motivated me to hang in there and do the job? Have you ever heard of anger?? At some point in the early 1980s, all the anger I'd been accumulating through the years of abuse boiled to the surface, and the energy from this anger motivated me to start the process of healing. I'm a true believer of the saying "The best revenge is a good life," and I started on the path to finding that "good life," the word "good" meaning to me "the life that I will find most satisfying."
Actually, my life has been and is "good" in some respects, but since I began the journey toward healing my C-PTSD, my life has gotten better. And I believe it will steadily become even better as I continue healing. But back to my EMDR session yesterday, April 29th. How did this session contribute to my healing? Answer below:
During my EMDR session on Monday, April 29th, I discovered the roots of my C-PTSD and could understand how my C-PTSD developed. I believe that what I discovered about myself probably lies at the roots of C-PTSD for many people--perhaps even for you, my reader, if you suffer from C-PTSD.
I will continue this essay in my next post and will reveal what I discovered regarding the roots of my own C-PTSD. Right now, though, I need to gather and organize my thoughts. Below are photos I took at the tulip festival near Woodburn, Oregon, last Saturday. The tree is a pink dogwood tree. Enjoy!
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