Blog Post 1/21/24

Deciding how to go to the next level in my healing.

In this post, I talk about my experience with deciding to go to EMDR therapy and what I thought about it.

What is EMDR therapy?  Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy. That’s a mouthful, but hopefully, it will tell me the pain that keeps getting recycled in my life. This pain affects relationships with self, others, and, I believe, God, meaning that if one doesn’t love themselves, they can’t see loving relationship evidence. Generational pain can also be addressed. This is an essential part of my blog, so I will share this experience.

Today is Monday. A new week to figure out what the heck I’m doing. I am a die-hard self-improvement nut. There is nothing I would like better than to figure out what I need to do to get this life thing figured out. I have concluded that there is no way to figure it out. This implies I can learn to control my environment and everyone in it. If you have done any living—you know that this is impossible.  So I go to therapy.

I am a bit nervous about my therapy appointment tomorrow. I have done therapy before. In fact, I think this will be my fifth time allowing someone else to poke around in the dark caverns of my head.  But this time, I am trying a new therapy called EMDR therapy.  Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing Therapy. This new therapy is to help the client work through unprocessed memories from childhood that keep getting in the way of adult life.  Yes, it is used a lot for PTSD and extreme trauma, but it is also used for chronic trauma events in childhood.

I am a believer in the concept of therapy. There is something to having someone I don’t know take a look at thought patterns that I have begun to question. You can tell I’ve had therapy before, you say? It was the questioning of my own thought patterns that gave me away, wasn’t it?

Life is complicated. I have shared this in other blog posts. Especially when you bring in messy family systems that have existed for at least one hundred years. 

I come from a family of survivors.  They may have survived by the skin of their teeth and caused lots of damage along the way, but they survived.  My oldest has a great reference to vehicles that come in all beat up in a race because they weren’t equipped right: Shitty, Shitty, Bang, Bang. (excuse my language). But wow, does it describe a messy family modus operandi.  I can picture a beat-up car carrying all the messed up family members who never bothered to look around to see if there was a nice Chevrolet or Dodge that would be functional and not nearly as dramatic. One that has fewer crashes, fewer breakdowns, and less experience of running out of gas.

I have talked about my mother and the complicated relationship we had, but I haven’t spent much time on how that affects my grown children.  There is so much shame in parenting when you haven’t created the ideal environment that you wanted to have.  My children told me I haven’t done everything right in how they relate to me daily. This hasn’t always been the case, but it sure is now.  They know that I wasn’t shown the proper way to mother (verb) and that my mother’s wound probably affected the way I mothered, but it sure doesn’t help me in reconciling being in the same role my mom was with me. I had such high hopes for myself. I wanted to do everything right. Be home with them, unlike my mom, who preferred working; she told me several times when things would get messy around the house, so like a good daughter, I would try to straighten things up. It never worked. She was still unhappy. I know now that she had a lot of unmet needs and that I wasn’t the one who should have tried to fulfill those needs as an eight-year-old or even a 16-year-old.

On the other hand, as a mom, I thought I was cut out for motherhood. I felt drawn to it and could do so much better. I cooed over new babies and decided on a career in elementary education and nurturing the children. I chose well in a spouse, tried to enrich my kids’ lives, and tried to do things “the right way.” I took them to library time and the park, took part in their imagination games, and tried to love and care for my children the way a good mom should. What I found was that there is no right way. There is only the vital act of connection. I struggled with connection with my kids the way my mom did. I had no idea of what the concept of unconditional love meant. No idea.  I was so busy projecting their actions or worries on myself that I completely lost sight of them in the process.

So, back to EMDR therapy. One of my daughters tried this out first. She stated it was a way to process buried emotions that have never been addressed. She said the counselor used sensory techniques like tapping to individually access feelings that may have been ignored during the emotionally charged event. In a family that didn’t accept the human condition of having emotions, I could see this might be the case in my situation. I have found a counselor who does this therapy, and I am planning to learn more about the possibility of using this technique as we visit. I hope to learn more about myself and why I struggle with ancient feelings that come up in current situations. I have found in self-reflection that I recycle these feelings and never put them in the”out” bin on my mental desk. 

And so I went…..

I walked into the therapist’s office. I was honestly surprised at just how normal this person looked. I didn’t know what to expect, so I had pictured someone with a more new-age vibe. We talked about the therapy I had done in the past and how helpful it has been in my life. We also talked about the relationship struggles I still had. The feelings that would sneak up on me in situations that seemed out of place or dramatic. I admitted that I knew these feelings were irrelevant to the situation at hand but that they were just as intense as if they were. I gave her the example of feeling out of the picture in my family. I thought I didn’t belong- and even when going somewhere with my kids, I would feel left out and isolated if they didn’t include me in their conversations or walked ahead of me as we walked into a store. In my sane head, I knew this was trivial, making me feel even more of an outcast. The therapist acknowledged my pain, and we dug into past experiences that had similar feelings. The mean girls that had taunted me as a doe-eyed teenager, the feelings of needing to fix things for my dysfunctional family, and other experiences that I had talked about with therapists but never really processed. I thought of several that could be categorized as the same feeling I had with my family. I had no idea the energy that was taken up in some childhood or angsty teen feelings. We made a list of things I could remember that were still painful memories that didn’t seem to have a conclusion. She explained that we would process each troubling experience as an adult. I could, in fact, soothe and help my younger self process what had happened more healthily. I found these sessions very helpful. I went to several and continued with the methods she taught me when new things came up.

Life is one long lesson in humility, loving yourself, and finding out what works for you. I am thankful for the tip of a daughter. Even though it was ironic that I may have added to her reason for going to her sessions of EMDR, we found solace together in the vulnerability of healing generational trauma and talking about memories that needed a bit more processing.