EMDR

This has been a tricky blog for me to write, therapy is such a personal thing and the fact is that it has been a really tough process. I am not used to dealing with all the feels (probably part of how we got here to be fair)and it has been quite a hard situation to deal with.

My understanding of PTSD was very limited, very much thought it was around soldiers returning from the war, emergency services people who have been exposed to extreme events beyond anything any of us could imagine.

To be then told that your experiences mean that you yourself have PTSD is really hard to get your head around.

When i entered my therapy journey we spoke about the treatment and EMDR was not something i had heard or read a lot about but happened to know someone who had the treatment so spoke with them, they assured me it absolutely worked but was really hard work as the premise is that you deal with traumatic events over a quicker period of time than regular therapy, this makes the treatment intense.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. EMDR therapy basically does for the brain (psychological wound)what your body does for a physical wound. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once this is removed, the normal healing process can start again. EMDR does this for your brain removing the blocks holding back the processing of trauma ,so what EMDR does in very base terms is it resets your brain to the normal natural healing processes that the trauma has blocked from happening.

So EMDR treatment doesn't try to alter the emotions, thoughts and responses resulting from traumatic experiences, EMDR therapy focuses directly on the memory, and is intended to change the way that the memory is stored in the brain, reducing and eliminating the symptoms. EMDR uses eye movements and other forms of rhythmic left-right stimulation (e.g., tones or tapping).

This is how Bob and i have been working for the last few weeks, starting with small manageable experiences at first just to get used to using the process, then we moved on. I thought i knew the issues i would be facing, i mean they were buried pretty far down but seemed and felt like they were always kind of hovering in the peripheral so there was a certain expectation that there would be no kind of issues blindsiding me and i could be safe in the knowledge that i absolutely knew what we would be working on……turns out i was wrong when we began to work on the bigger experiences i was faced with a stark reality that i had buried some of the these so deep that initially i was really confused by it as it was almost like a movie being played on a screen im watching but as the session went on i realised it was a very real and very vivid memory and working through that was extremely painful.

Once spoken about the memory is reframed because its important to note that this therapy isn't about taking the memory away its a part of who i am, its about changing your perspective about it and how almost going from this was all my fault to a point where you recognise it just isn't your fault and from then the way you think about it after is changed, it also, if you have several experiences that are similar scenarios, reframes those too meaning you shouldn't have to then deal with them too and if you do you are in a slightly better position to do so.

After the session i was emotionally and physically drained…….i cried on and off for a day with the worse sore head ever but luckily i had room to do this because it doesn’t just stop when your session is done it takes work after and in-between sessions.

These blogs are getting harder to write every time but they have been amazing to do and im really pleased to be able to share these with you all, just know that its getting better all the time and i am determined to see this through to the end and i will get there. There are glimmers of the old me everyday (sometimes that's even a good thing haha) I am also proud of myself and how hard im trying, it would be really easy to walk away and decide that's enough but that's not happening.