Approaching the Point of No Return
It would be the slow buildup to that 2023 EMDR session. The step by step plodding through therapy, life, and years of things surfacing. My psyche was literally like the roiling magma deep in the earth beneath a volcano, compressing, bulging, subsiding, rising again higher, until finally, it could no longer be held back and it would erupt…
Are you crying?
It was news to me when my therapist said something in passing about my “dissociation.” I had never thought of myself in those terms. She explained that no, it wasn’t the kind where I split into a separate personality, or did things I didn’t remember.
It was more the way I had walled off intense emotions all my life. I was aware of what was happening, but my psyche managed to lock away what I was feeling in those moments as a survival mechanism.
She noted, for example, that in all the years we had been working together, she had never once seen me cry in a session. Stopping to think about it, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I cried about anything.
As a kid I cried all the time. And of course, it was standard in our house that if I started to cry, my father’s anger would immediately flare. Then he would deliver that ultimatum that had me gulping down sobs and denying tears:
“Are you crying?!!”
“N-n-no!” This was delivered with a quivering voice that I was rapidly trying to turn to steel.
“You better not be crying!! Because if you’re crying, I’ll GIVE you something to cry about!!!”
And of course it was accompanied by “the look” that instilled terror to your core. So I trained me to stopped crying, FAST.
Now it’s also true that in the 1950s and 1960s, that was a common threat from many parents. It was the times. But I think many did not include that look, or clenched fists, or gritted teeth when saying it.
What was even worse though, was the shame heaped on me afterward when he added that “You’re too sensitive!” That judgment of failure cut even deeper than the threats.
So I had learned long ago not to show emotions. Not to show weakness. And especially not to cry.
December 2019
The buildup to that 2023 marathon EMDR session would come slowly. Anger would come up, but subside or be stuffed down almost as fast. But over time my reactions to things changed. Anger was quicker to surface and its intensity, much hotter.
From my journal, 12/3/2019:
“Right now I am so pissed off at him (Ed). His temperature went back up again after almost reaching normal. The doctor said ‘Use the fever and pain as a guide…symptoms should be improving…Worsening fever ….is not normal and we should see you.’
When I mentioned it was time to see the doctor as the fever had been going on long enough, Ed uncharacteristically flared back at me. Cursing, he copped an angry look and yelled, ‘Don’t you trust me to know my own body?!‘”
Frankly, at that moment, given how sick he seemed, no, I didn’t trust his assessment of his body. Looking back, I also acknowledge I can overreact from fear.
But what also caught my attention in that interaction was my reaction to his anger. Normally, I would have backed down. In fact I did have to quell a fear reaction in that moment because his angry tone left me flashing back to Dad.
However this time, my anger rose to match his and I almost told him to stick that f–king thermometer up his ass. Instead of backing down I reinforced my concern that he might not realize how sick he was.
Somehow, during this interaction, a part of my brain started to call a “time out.” That part – my rational side – was very aware that this interaction was NOT how we normally talk to each other. In fact, I think we both realized it at the same time. And while his anger upset me, mine shocked me even more.
The two of us managed to reset our emotions enough to untangle the knot we’d tied ourselves up into. I was able to communicate that I had worked fifty hours that week and was tired. Then watching him seem to get worse was scaring me intensely. That was compounded by the fact that the next week was the anniversary of his nearly dying in 2006. So my emotional flashback circuits were overloading.
He shared just how frustrated he was with being sick so long, that he was worn out from it all, and thought that I felt he wasn’t doing a good job of taking care of himself. It hadn’t occurred to him I wasn’t judging him but was, instead, really afraid for him and cared deeply.
We eventually figured out what to do to get him some help for his fever. And for me, it was clear I had been badly triggered by all of this. While it was good I stood up for myself this time, I could also see that the anger was shifting in me. So that became the EMDR session the following week.
The EMDR identified a number of things for me:
- My fear of losing him, which, after his near death in 2006, was VERY real. INTENSELY real.
- My fatigue from work as well as underlying emotions from all my abuse therapy made things worse.
- And there were those old “friends of mine: Issues around fear of things I couldn’t control, and the rage at all of it
From my journal, 12/16/2019:
How do u live in a world that could change in a second and not live in fear and not try to control things to avoid the bad? The ultimate Buddhist lesson, I know. How do I let go and trust in the moment, when circumstances come up that pull me back into active management?
And active management/choices/taking action, how to know when it is absolutely right and called for to act appropriately. It is hard for me to do – hard to be sure of right actions, and I get caught in indecision. I was so passive for years and had no autonomy or identity, my own perceptions, feelings, and beliefs were never honored, always Dad tried to talk me into his way of thinking. So, I never felt anything I thought was correct. Always needed an outside affirmation of what the reality and truth was. Never trusted my own.
That is why I was so angry at Ed that night when he got mad at me about calling the doctor. I had not even said it as a “must do” but was trying to gently (? maybe not so gently) suggest it because it just felt like something was wrong and needed to be checked out. And even that is hard for me to do because if I get any pushback, I immediately assume I am wrong, over-protective, and I get scared and back down.
But THIS time, when he got mad at me, I saw Dad’s anger, and I became enraged. NO ONE was going to put me down, and HOW DARE HE treat me that way, especially after that time when he almost died. HE wasn’t there consciously. HE didn’t see how bad it was. He just expects his word to be accepted without challenge, and if questioned, he got mad.
During follow-up visits, my therapist and I spent a lot of time going over what had happened to Ed in 2006. It was clear the trauma from nearly losing him was very much alive in me. In fact, during one of those visits, I started crying.
While I thought I was losing it, my therapist was thrilled! She gently reassured me that I was definitely NOT losing my mind, but that this was all good news! She pointed out that FINALLY, I was letting go of my lifelong emotional dissociation and “reconnecting to my emotional circuits.”
After decades of rigid control, my emotions were breaking free. I had unstoppered the genie’s bottle, and there was no pushing those emotions back in. The final straw had been the intensity of the emotions trapped in me from nearly losing Ed. They could no longer be stuffed down, and when he got sick this time, that fear blasted apart the last parts of those protective psychic walls I’d had up my whole life.
As my therapist put it – this was HUGE PROGRESS…
Sometimes progress is messy and involves snarling at the person you love most in life, or yes…crying.
After these sessions, my therapist advised that we take a break from rounds of EMDR. I had been at it frequently this past year, and she felt my nervous system needed a rest.
But the rest would only be temporary. EMDR and my emotions were not done with me yet. And with all the work we were doing over the next four years, it was only a matter of time before “2023” would happen.
The emotional limp
There’s a story in the Bible of Jacob in the desert, marching to meet his estranged brother the next day. But the night before, all alone, he found himself up against an unknown adversary. The foe might have been God, or an angel. The story does not say. But all night the two wrestled, each giving the battle their all. But by daybreak – it was a draw.
At that point the adversary said it was time to end the fight. Jacob then demanded and received a blessing from his foe. But that adversary also left Jacob with something else as well – an injury to his hip that would leave Jacob with a permanent limp. It was his scar…his reminder…of their battle.
March 27, 2023 was a battle to a draw with myself. It was a “landmark” EMDR session – a two-hour pitched battle with that wounded side of me that fought back with all its power to avoid yielding to my efforts to change it. It was terrified to give up its old beliefs, convinced that to do so would be my downfall.
While those old messages had protected me in the past, now they were harming me by forcing me to fight old battles again and again over dangers that no longer existed. I wanted to, and HAD to, be free of those beliefs in order to move forward.
The 2023 EMDR preparation
A few days before this session, I sat down with my husband and asked him to say what he had been seeing in me of late. I knew for myself that I seemed highly irritable, ready to flame at anyone who annoyed me, and felt a deep, heavy exhaustion.
He concurred with all of this. While noting he could see I was trying to moderate my emotions, the truth was that I seemed to be fighting the world. “You are fighting anything…it’s a way of life for you, a zero-sum game, and lately even more. And you are rising to things that aren’t worth it….You are fighting a dead man… a corpse…”
I frankly agreed with all of his observations, so my therapist and I prepared for the session. Given how intense all my emotions were this time, we decided to plan for a slightly longer visit. And my husband offered to drive me over and wait for me in case I was really tired afterward.
A few days before, I collected my thoughts about what I hoped to achieve:
Journal 3/21/2023
“I am not unhappy with how my life is, not by a long shot. That is not the reason for the rage. I have tried to live my life to the absolute maximum I can and make every bit count. And I believe I am where I am supposed to be now.
But at the same time, there is such rage and sorrow at having the choices, possibilities, …taken away, and coming to terms with what I see as a HUGE loss. It is my feeling now that anytime I ‘don’t fight,’ I go back to that same trapped 20-something person with him in my face yelling ‘why don’t you fight back?!’…
…but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting battles over stupid things all because I really still want to fight a corpse. I want to be free of that energy.”
The session
For the last two days before our EMDR visit, my jaw was clenched, my chest was tight, and I felt that strong choking sensation in my throat. Anger and anxiety were right there ready to flame. I was so relieved when the appointment time finally arrived.
The room was darkened, the light box positioned in front of me. As my therapist reviewed the instructions, I felt like a racehorse grinding on its bit in the gate of a racetrack, demanding to bolt free.
And then we began, recalling the image of that day in my room when my father taunted me for not fighting him.
It was representative of all the moments he had pinned me to a wall or choked me in anger. It was the apex moment of helplessness for me. One of thousands, but especially worse because he got right in my face and taunted my passivity. Or at least, what he perceived it to be.
The light beam in the room flashed back and forth. My eyes followed. My rage swelled. Waves of shame, trapped rage, and total impotence flooded out. Words came:
“I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!”
Questions ran through my mind:
How do you go to church each week and pretend to be such a good Catholic and still do these things????!!!!
How do you think this is RIGHT…choke me…hit your wife…demean her??!
How do you RATIONALIZE this?!
All of it was SCREAMING in my head.
Round after round of light beam work, messages, emotions. Rage filled me as I realized how f-cking tired I was of ALL of those things…having to be afraid…having to keep him happy….always freaking out when I heard his footsteps coming down the hall….and all those years, asking. “WHEN…DOES…THIS…STOP???!!”
My therapist would call regular halts to the work to ask if I was okay and what was coming up. Then we’d dive into it all again.
Confusion was the next round. How do you make sense of a man who one minute is protective and loving and does nice things and in the next is raging and violent? Did he plan it that way? Was it just primal emotion he could not control? Both? My therapist, on a break, characterized it as similar to a two-year-old’s tantrum.
Each time we took a break, my therapist would recheck to see what my level of rage and discomfort was and if it was diminishing at all. Usually after a few rounds of light bar work, the intense emotions would calm more and be replaced by a sense of increasing power in myself. But this day, the storm would not ease. It just kept going in full fury.
For almost two hours it raged at full power before I could finally feel that familiar shift starting. Slowly the terror ebbed away. Disgust and disappointment with his behavior replaced shame over mine. Gradually I felt my “adult self” stepping in, deciding that enough was enough and “she” was drawing the line with him. Phrases passed through my mind like:
“Oh HELL no, THIS stops now!
I am NOT AT YOUR MERCY!
I AM IN CONTROL! HERE is the line and YOU WILL NOT CROSS IT AGAIN!”
Still we continued on because the intensity of my rage had not slowed enough to be in a place of peace.
But what did happen was that gradually, the shame was gone, replaced by the realization that I HAD fought back…just not the way he was trying to provoke…AND that my standing firm in being unwilling to physically fight back was actually the stronger power.
At that point we could finally work on installing the new beliefs I wanted to have:
I don’t have to prove anything…to anyone.
If you know your own power, you are free to choose when or if to fight
and the last and strongest one:
I am free to make the wise choice, and THAT IS MY SUPERPOWER.
After two hours of total, full-blown battle, we came to rest a place that was calm enough to call it done for that day. Was it all better? No. I am still wrestling with and reframing rage to this day.
But it is different now than it was then. After the longest and most intense EMDR session ever, there was a shift…a BIG shift. Shame was gone. A sense of adult strength was slowly making an appearance. And we’d introduced some powerful new beliefs.
There would be many more sessions yet on rage and many other scars, and no doubt may be in the future. But it has never again been that intense.
The reframing I am doing in the present is to finally accept that rage as okay. To accept its presence in me as I do anxiety — welcoming it, holding it, accepting that while it will always be my scar, that is okay. And I can love me WITH it.
Even more wonderfully that day, the shift in rage wasn’t the only gift I received. Even as I was exhausted, and even as I had started to despair that we’d ever manage to transform the rage, afterward I sat there amazed, basking in the warmth of incredible new emotions.
There was tremendous relief….an overwhelming sense of gratitude….for the work done, for my therapist, my husband and…for myself and my courage.
Most of all, there was HOPE. Hope bordering on actual JOY. For the first time in my life I experienced the sense that there REALLY IS A WAY PAST THIS….Healing really could be possible!
Later I would journal: “I hold hope within me that in spite of all… if we keep trying and fighting to our last breath there is always hope for change in the future”.
It is what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks talked about for creating a new future by reframing one’s past:
“We cannot fully understand what is happening to us now until we can look back…By action in the present, we can redeem the past, and thus, change our future…it is by allowing the present to reshape our understanding of the past that we redeem history and make it live as a positive force in our lives. This lets us change our future. The way we rewrite the next chapter in our lives affects all the others that have come before. By action in the future, we can redeem much of the pain of the past. We cannot change the past. But by changing the way we think about the past, we can change the future. Whatever situation we are in, by reframing it, we can change our entire response, giving us the strength to survive, the courage to persist, and the resilience to emerge, on the far side of darkness, into the light of a new and better day.” (p 64)
So what does a transformative EMDR session feel like after?
After a particularly rough week with the flu, I spotted a photo of an early morning sun cutting through the trees onto a crisp snowy hillside and decided to oil paint it. It reminded me of being in my 20s, atop a ski slope first thing in the morning about to push off. I could literally see each crystal of snow glistening in the sunlight, feel the cold seeping into my boots, and hear the crunch of snow under my skis.
I loved that sport, but I also had a fear of heights. So that first push down the slope was always the toughest. I wonder sometimes, if I’d been able to get back on the ski lift and ride down the mountain, would I have ever pushed off to face my fears?
But…I also knew the exhilaration of schussing through powder, no one else around me, and the sensation of my skis carving the first path of the day through the fresh snow. So I would just grit my teeth and shove off.
I’d carefully pick my way down through the steep valleys between moguls, terrified but focused, until finally, on the other side of that patch, I’d dig in my skis and skid to a stop, spraying plumes of snow around me.
Only then would I look back UP the hill and see how far I’d come, and that I had indeed survived it. Conquered it even.
In that moment I could then relax and soak up the sensations of crisp air frosting my face and brilliant sunbeams highlighting the slopes below. It was an intoxicating mix, and why I faced my fears at the mountain top — I knew there was beauty beyond the terror.
Beauty beyond the volcano
While I haven’t skied in years, this painting reminded me of my youthful attitude toward challenges, and that there are many types of ski slopes in life. No matter the fear, you just grit your teeth, shove off, and dive into a new terror, because often, on the other side of terror is beauty.
Such is the exhilaration on the other side of any challenging EMDR session, when you can literally feel a very core wound just… shift to a new place
But THIS EMDR? That change was seismic. And it was a shift that would make all the future work both inevitable and even more effective. Up to this point, as hard as I was working, I was still very “blocked” emotionally. With this round of EMDR, a biggest hurdle from a lifetime of repression had been blasted out of the way. The dam had been broken. Now, the waters could flow freely.
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Soul Mosaic 
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