“Be gentle when
she shows you her scars.
It takes more courage
to remove one’s armour,
than to assemble it.”
J. Střelou
The racehorse in the gate
The digital clock to my right read 4:01.
I settled onto the couch, a pillow on my side in case I needed to pull it to my chest. My therapist moved quietly about the room, pulling the window shutters closed and turning off lamps.
She settled into her desk chair, a clipboard and pen handy so she could take notes. The only light in the room now was from her small desk lamp.
I appreciated the darkness of the room. It walled out the world and helped me reinforce that we were about to journey to another place and time.
Before me at eye level was a tripod about 4 feet high holding a 3-4 foot long horizontal LED light bar. It was narrow, about two inches high, with a black background.
My therapist clicked the remote for the light bar to ensure it was working properly. Immediately, a small green light zipped across the bar. She adjusted the light beam’s speed and reminded me that she could adjust it to whatever my comfort level needed.
Despite trying to relax into the sofa cushion, every muscle in my body was a taut rope. I wondered how I would react this time…what thoughts might come up…and would this do anything. I felt like a cliff diver perched high atop a rocky peak, arms stretched out before me, and leg muscles tensed as I leaned out over the expanse to drop into the surf below. Would I clear the rocks or land on them?
My therapist’s voice brought me back to the room. “How are you doing?”
“I feel like exploding…I can’t wait to get on with this.”
“Where in your body are you feeling tension?”
“My muscles are all tight…but especially my throat..like I am being choked. And a heavy pressure on my upper chest.”
“Do you still want to continue?”
She barely asked the question before I cut her off.
“Oh my God, YES! I can’t stand this any longer.”
She confirmed that my husband drove me to the appointment and was in the waiting room so that I didn’t have to drive myself home. Then she began the process.
“You are in control and can stop this at any time.
Follow the light beam back and forth with your eyes as you think about the image we have settled on.
We’ll stop periodically to give you a rest and see what comes up for you as we do this.“
I shifted on the couch and stared hard at the dark light bar. I was a racehorse in the gate, ready for the sound of the gun.
“On a scale of one to ten, with one being no discomfort and ten being the highest level of discomfort, where are you now?”
Again, she barely finished her question, and I blurted out, “Nine…almost ten.”
“On a scale of one to ten, with one being not true at all and ten being totally true, how true is the statement ‘I feel powerful.’”
“One.”
“Okay. Let’s start. Just focus on being there in your house on Sunday afternoons with your father coming down the hall and yelling at you.”
And with that, I leaped into the surf.
The memory we chose – Sunday afternoon storms
He was furious with me. Saturday morning, he had slipped into my bed when Mom went out to get doughnuts from the bakery. I recoiled and wanted to vomit, and I tried to make him leave. He was immediately “hurt” that I wasn’t “ecstatic” at this opportunity to be together. He didn’t care what I felt. He wanted me. I didn’t want him. And even though I kept trying to explain that it just didn’t feel right, but that I really did love him, it didn’t matter. My fate for the weekend was sealed. I was going to pay.
First, he spent most of Saturday totally ignoring me. If I tried to talk to him, he walked right past me like I wasn’t there. Or he would shoot me a look of pure rage. By bedtime, I was worn out and grateful for the break from him. But the weekend was still young.
At Sunday lunch again, he wouldn’t even look at me, even though I sat right across from him at the table. He talked to everyone else but ignored me. If he did look at me, I saw total ice in his eyes as he looked right past me.
After cleaning up the dishes, I bolted for my bedroom so I could just lose myself in my homework. At least I figured I couldn’t get in trouble if I was busy with homework and out of his line of sight.
I tried to focus on typing a report and then reading the next pages in the book, Homer’s Odyssey. I loved that book…the adventure, the mysterious lands, and the courage and determination of Odysseus, the leader. It was another world, far removed from my house.
Right now, he and his men were trapped in a dark cave, prisoners of Polyphemus, a one-eyed, man-eating, Cyclops monster. It was only a matter of time before the monster would return and make a meal of them all. So he was quickly devising a plan to save them all. I knew how he felt.
Then I heard them. From down the hall, Dad’s footsteps approached. He was coming toward the kitchen…and my room. Maybe he would just keep ignoring me.
But it was no such luck. I don’t even remember what questions he started firing at me. Just that he asked them so quickly – like firing bullets from a gun – that I didn’t even have time to think of an answer, much less speak. But then, it was never about the questions. Or the answers. Those were just the excuses to start the attack.
My inability to answer was exactly the response he hoped for because that meant he could come into my room and really start yelling. As he did that, he would always walk straight to the closet door. I knew what was coming next.
He would yank it open, still yelling, and go on about what a mess it was. Of course it was. We had only two closets in the house for all of us to share, and mine was a small one. So it was never neat enough.
But again, he knew that. He counted on it because this was his next torture tactic. Hold a spot inspection just like they did when he was in the Navy. And of course, because I always failed inspection, that meant he could do what they did in the Navy – pull everything out and make the sailor put it all away again. This time, the RIGHT way.
He immediately started grabbing handfuls of shoes and clothes and throwing them on the floor in my room. Then he reached up for the stack of game boxes on the shelf and pulled those down. Game boxes went flying, while dice, playing cards, spinners, and little game pieces spilled out everywhere.
I knew better than to say anything. My stomach was in knots, and given that I had just eaten, I wanted to throw up. But he was just getting warmed up.
He moved on to the clothes bureau next. But then…I knew that would happen too. It always did.
One by one, he yanked out each of the drawers and dumped all the contents on my bed. Drawer after drawer, piles of stuff blending together into a total mess. This was going to take me half the afternoon to pull apart and put away.
All the while, he was yelling at me – about the mess. About why was I such a slob? About anything that came to his mind. The words spilled over me. I was shaking all over.
Meanwhile, his face was contorted in rage, and for a moment, I thought he was going to come at me and grab me by the throat. That happened sometimes, as it was one of his other common methods of attack. But for right now, he just snapped at me to clean it all up, and that he’d be back. Then he stormed out of the room.
I was so nervous my insides felt like dissolving Jell-O. If it was possible to be so tense that muscles could snap, mine were about to. I scanned the devastation on my bed and all over the floor and knew I had to work quickly. If he came back and it wasn’t done, I’d be in worse trouble, and he might start swinging.
I grabbed things as quickly as I could to put back into drawers or back on closet hangers, but it was hard. Because I couldn’t think straight, I was having a hard time being organized. I needed to think for that, but to think meant to take extra time…something I didn’t have.
Outside of my room, no one came near, and it was quiet except for the TV down the hall. My mother was in the kitchen next to my room, putzing with something. But she never once looked in my room or at me. Just a turned back. No one came near my room.
I strained to focus as I rushed to clean things up. But then, I heard his steps coming…it was round two….then he left….then came back for round three…I lost count. All I knew was that every time he left and came back, my terror was at a higher and higher level. And I was being pelted with questions I couldn’t answer or staring into the eyes of pure fury and hate.
After several rounds of this, when he stormed out of my room yet again, my mother finally asked him why he was acting this way.
Wow. About time. And…she didn’t ask why he was doing this to me. She just asked why he was acting this way.
It was like I didn’t exist. To either of them. In between his rounds of attacking me in my room, he would look past me and not even acknowledge my presence. If I tried to speak or apologize, he just walked away as if I wasn’t even there.
And in between his terrorizing me, my mother never came near me. Didn’t come into the room to see if I was okay. Never even looked at me from the kitchen.
Maybe she was afraid that if she showed me any attention, he would turn on her. Or…maybe she knew deep down what was going on and felt I deserved it?
All I knew was that I couldn’t stand much more. Bedtime could not come soon enough…..
As the light beam flashed
The images flooded my brain as my eyes followed the light beam. Those Saturday mornings. The Sunday afternoons. I let them come. And then I let whatever emotions that were trapped inside me flood out, too.
Rounds and rounds of my following the light beam. Feeling things. Statements and questions coming up in my mind out of…somewhere… like an exercise in free association.
While I had the freedom to stop and take breaks, I wouldn’t. I was like a hound chasing a rabbit down a dark hole – hot on the heels of my quarry, teeth barred, and unwilling to stop the chase.
So my therapist would call a halt. She would watch me, my expressions, the intentness of my eyes following the light. She would see “something,” and then call a halt. The question was the same:
“What is coming up for you?”
And I had to admit…a LOT.
The processing that happens
The process is…surprising to me. Because you wouldn’t think anything would happen, just by following a light beam. But it does. And even after having done twenty-four rounds of EMDR over eight years, I never fail to be surprised at how I can start the round in one place emotionally, and end up in such a different and better place by the end. And the far-ranging explorations of my brain – questions, statements, shifts in thinking. It is just amazing to me.
In this particular episode, while I started in that room, my thoughts began to expand. Question. Emotions would come up out of nowhere. Rage. Tremendous sadness. But a LOT of rage. And…surprisingly – a sense of POWER.
As I went through rounds of following the light beam, many questions flashed through my brain. Questions I hadn’t thought of before we started, or maybe ever.
Questions during the session
As I relived those moments, I began to think about him, the person. Just who WAS he at his core? HOW could he feel good about beating up his kids and wife? What the HELL was wrong with him?
Lists of questions I’d never considered before. I had grown up thinking that Dad was a man who loved and protected us, but just had this one bad side we had to try to survive. And I’d always viewed me as the failure or the blame.
But now, as we did these rounds of EMDR, I was asking myself questions I’d never thought of before:
- Were any of his actions, especially the good ones, the truth? Or a calculated manipulation?
- Was anything about him real?
- Did HE even know who he was, or was he busy constantly changing depending on the situation and people?
- Just who WAS he?
- Was he just an empty shell?
And things about Mom came up:
- How could she sleep with him again after learning what he had done to me? Wouldn’t she always be wondering who he would be thinking of during sex?
- What kind of marriage was that? What does it say that right from the start, something must have been wrong because he was turned on, giving us baths when we were babies? Did it show to her?
I thought about the time I was eight months pregnant with my son and brought them into my therapist’s office to say out loud, finally, what he had done to me. More questions popped up:
- Why did he come to the counselor’s office the day I opened everything up?
- Because he was no longer in control of the situation and had to find a way to get back in control? When I had threatened him with jail, maybe he needed to figure out how to get leverage again?
- Did he think no one would believe me?
- Was that his way of still trying to get control?
- Maybe by knowing what I said and how they reacted, he could gauge the situation and know how to try and spin it?
- He could be submissive and play on their love and sympathy…and their need – emotional, financial, etc., so he knew he could eventually sway them?
- And with Mom…he despised her lack of power and dependence on him; he knew he could wait out her anger at him, and be apologetic, because he knew she would never leave him and stand on her own.
- And her – she left her town, family, friends behind, and never even said goodbye to friends….she did what she had to, to protect their unspoken bargain
And then questions about me flooded in:
- What did I want? Or feel?
- I want to be less angry
- Less driven to fight and wanting to fight everything
- Trying to need less control over everything in life
- Could I just let go and be?
- Could I have less judgment and impatience with people and situations?
- And could I be kinder to me?
- What was the new direction I wanted after all this hard work?
It was amazing how quickly things came up in my head, and then moved on to the next thing, and the next. Sometimes my therapist would help me reframe and reconnect if it seemed the questions were going too far afield. But mostly, we let the emotions and brain processing lead where it had to.
The changing statements and beliefs
As the images, memories, questions, and emotions raced by, my therapist would ask on a break if there were any statements coming up. And, yes, there were some very interesting things. But even more interesting was the power of what I FELT about the statements. They weren’t just words. Or anything coming from the logic brain. They were coming from some deep emotional place that for the first time ever, actually BELIEVED what I was saying.
Where in the past, I always assumed I was in the wrong, or believed or remembered wrong, or didn’t trust my own judgment, now these things were coming up in my brain, and they carried the power of CONVICTION with them. Things would pop up during the rounds, like:
- I know what I know
- I am empowered
- I WASN’T WEAK. I DID fight him, confront him. And even when I had to give in, it was because it was the only thing I could do in the moment.
- Rather than being a failure, I was brave and determined. And I DID DO the very best I could in any given moment. It might not have been perfect or the best it could have been, but it was MY best
And I thought about how, when he was old, weak, and starting to lose his memory, in spite of all he did to me, I didn’t take revenge. I helped care for him. What did that say about me? And the statement came out and said: I am kind…caring….protective…ethical. I didn’t take advantage of his weakness.
And about how I managed all that time in that house, something I had felt so ashamed of, the statement came:
- I did what I had to do; what I needed to do; what was possible to do in each moment.
Aftermath
I was a limp dishrag by the time we stopped. But the amazing thing, though, was that when my therapist asked her questions again at the end, my answers were so different from when we started. And, that change was true from my depths, not a forced answer:
“On a scale from one to ten, where ten is the most discomfort, and one is no discomfort, what is your level now?”
“One to two.”
“And on a scale of one to ten, where one is a true statement, and ten is not true, what do you believe about the statement, ‘I have power?”
“Eight to nine.”
I almost couldn’t believe my answers as they came out of me. But they were the truth. In that moment, I was in such a different…better place.
What next?
My therapist was very pleased with the work I had done, how hard I had worked on things, and stayed with them. She instructed me to drink a lot of fluids and rest now. And to pay attention to how I felt over the next several days – body, energy, emotions, dreams. And we set up a follow-up appointment for next week to go over the whole experience, what came up, what I learned, and what I thought.
For sure, this was not over. It was only the beginning of a very long journey. And even as I had made some very good inroads, we just opened the door. There were a lot of “rooms to clean out” yet. And many of the issues, particularly around rage, would need to be revisited many times. When trauma is as long-term as mine was, with so many rounds of abuse as I had lived through, we were going to have to revisit things as many times as would be necessary until I finally came to a place of peace about them.
But for today…I rode home, foggy, exhausted, feeling like mental mush, but… satisfied, relieved, and HOPEFUL. There might truly be a way back from the hell of this trauma yet.
Soul Mosaic 
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