I have been thinking all day about this post, asking myself what I might want to be holding close in my mind as the year concludes. Asking myself what I might be willing to tussle with today, because it is both things, to write into a idea: it is an embrace, a welcoming, but maybe we are asking our arms to hold something that doesn’t want to be held. We may have to hold tight if we want to hold on. Our outcomes may only be as fruitful as our strength.
A little over a year ago, I sought out an EMDR therapist. I have “partaken” of therapy many times before, but never of the EMDR variety, and when I first learned about it this year, I was drawn to it like a magnet. This is because it posited something that I desperately wanted to believe: that not only do our traumatic experiences write themselves upon us, but they also write themselves into us. They become part of our physiology. And by so doing–by merging in some manner into our literal selves–they become difficult, unless you contend with them differently, in a manner that respects the power of experience to shape us.
I needed to believe that trauma required something more because I have been through many therapeutic experiences that yielded no relief. Perhaps it is me–I find talk-based therapy a performative challenge–not in the sense that it is difficult for me to speak about various things, but quite the opposite: I am naturally inclined to dazzle my therapist with my ability to identify, explain, connect. It is easy for me to do this–it is how I am wired; it is the “basement” of being a writer-type: we can see many beautiful mergings and implications, but we can also be tortured by that awareness.
EMDR relies on the Adaptive Information Processing model, which posits that the brain stores normal and traumatic memories differently from one another–not only differently, but, correctly and smoothly (normal) and incorrectly and ineffectively (traumatic). These “storage failures” can become more than just misplaced files: they can become impediments to healing. They can be ways your brain continues to believe that you’re still in danger when you are not at all. They can be the ways your brain tells you that what seems like an ordinary, manageable moment of stress or pain is a calamity of YOUR making, because YOU are damaged, and you have been for awhile, and you didn’t even know how it began.
EMDR therapy experiences begin with a multi-session intake process, aimed at identifying the negative self-belief that is currently disrupting the life of the individual. After that, the route forward is into memory identification, holding up this negative belief against one’s life and identifying moments that are connected to that negative belief that feel “charged”–that feel upsetting, angering, saddening, anxiety-filling, etc.–creating an inventory of those moments.
This process requires a weird blend of cool-headed data-mining and bleeding heart rawness: you must ask yourself to reenter the moments that you KNOW have hurt you so that you might list them for EMDR work. And, you must wind your way through other, more innocuous halls of memory, so that you might “muscle test” those moments for hidden connection to your current negative belief.
You must be open to the idea that your hurt began much sooner than you thought.
You must be open to finding yourself back at the bus stop in kindergarten. And you must be willing to accept that the silly misunderstanding by the neighbor lady of you and the other kids who only wanted to look at the nesting duck, not hurt it, could be the beginning of everything you hold against yourself in moments of perceived imperfection.
You must not be surprised by the tears. You must not be frightened by having access to this startling insight.
I have spent 2023 inside my mental inventory, going through a careful guided experience of each memory. I pull it into my brain and hold it with my negative self-belief and track the dot running across the computer screen, and my body comes alive: my lips tremble, my throat tightens, my eyes fill. Because I have been bleeding out of a crack in myself that I didn’t know about, and now suddenly I do, and now suddenly I can see what 5, 9, 12, 17, 18, 19, 31, 32, 33, 34 year old Jackie couldn’t in that moment–in part because of the nature of experiencing traumas; in part because of the clarity of hindsight: of finally understanding what it is I have held against myself when life hurts me, of finally getting to hold it up for all those mes and say, see, there is more here to our hurt. See, you can let this part go.
I wanted to write this post and be inside this language tussle tonight, as 2023 winds down, because it is a small window into the tussle that is EMDR. I have held many squirming memories in my arms so that I might look at them again, so that I might understand them in a new way. And I have had to be strong to even want to do this holding. It would be so much easier not to grapple with the pain.
But now I am on the other side of a year of hugging hurt pieces of myself close. And the firm arms both hold and release me.
Jackie Lutzke 