I mentioned in my Introductory Post and my Now What?... Mindfulness post – I just started EMDR therapy and I plan to share the experience and my thoughts as I progress. I thought I would be starting sooner, but as it turns out you still have to do a little talking about things before you start. But, this week I finally had my first actual session. My therapist confessed that she doesn’t entirely understand how or why this works, but that she’s done it enough times to know that it does work for most of her clients. I’m fine with that, because I am the kind of person who likes to try things and see how they work for me and learn on my own anyway. I also had already researched it before deciding to give it a try, so I understand how it works to retrain neural pathways. If you need a therapist who can explain, in detail, the science behind the work you're doing, make sure you find that!
We don’t have a history yet, I’ve only gone to see her three times now so, we are building trust and getting to know one another as we enter this process. The first session is a history taking session. I shared with her that I score a 9/10 on the original ACE studies questionnaire. She didn’t actually know what that was so I had a nice time educating her about that and it made our session easier because we were speaking a common language. I gave my history from a detached, fact-based place. I’m not ready to get into the feelings of the experiences with my new friend. I know that will come when we start the sessions. I thought about people who are in crisis and have to give their history to strangers without any empowering knowledge about their conditions and I felt good about where I am in my healing. I remembered being a child and speaking with child welfare workers about what was happening to me and feeling like I was shrinking smaller and smaller each time. It’s so important to celebrate growth and success on this path and feeling like an empowered adult in charge of my own healing is an enormous success. I shared my list of goals for therapy and the symptoms I feel I need some help reducing. I have decided that my primary goal is to address trust, I see it as connected to all the other issues (self sabotaging behaviors – procrastination, isolating, and defensiveness for example). I want to trust my world to be safe, stable, and nurturing. I want to trust myself to recover when my world is not safe, stable, or nurturing for some reason. I know I need other people to do this, so I want to trust myself to be a good judge of character and a good advocate for myself. This speaks to boundaries and I hope to write about this at some point too.
So, with that established we had one more talking session before beginning with the first session of establishing and installing a ‘safe space’ that I will use throughout the sessions.
We chatted and got comfortable as she explained the process of building a safe space and installing it. The purpose of the safe space is to have a place to which I can return when exploring emotions associated with traumas becomes too difficult or overwhelming. My first decision was whether to use eye movements, physical tapping or sound to install the memory. I chose bilateral sound – It felt like a natural fit for me since I have always turned to music for comfort and healing and I have also played with binaural beats as a supplement to meditation. (anyone in sound therapy or music therapy out there? Talk about your work, please!) Also, check this out!
I didn’t build my safe space from scratch; I used a real place – a solitary retreat cabin in VT where I once spent a long weekend.
She had me put on a set of headphones and we played with the speed and volume of the beeping. I don’t know what frequency is used, but I will remember to ask next week. If you’re interested in how different frequencies impact the brain, this is a fun site to play around with.
She just asked me to describe the place and then let things sort of progress from there. I think this speaks to the importance of creativity in healing. But, I will eventually discuss that in a separate post. In the end, I had my safe space installed and it looked like me as mother and me as child living a peaceful, rhythmic existence with myself in a warm and loving space with healthy food, a wood stove, and lots of reading materials. I would love to know what other people’s safe spaces look like. If you or someone you know is doing some form of EMDR and you want to share yours here, please do!
I’ll post again after my next session which is scheduled for Tuesday!
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