Posts Tagged ‘love’

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Post-EMDR — The “Tightly-Packed Onion”

May 27, 2026

A new dawn?

“Whatever it was that he saw in me that made him choose me – I was determined that part of me would NOT survive!”
My journal, July 22, 2018

If ever there was a statement that captured the self-hatred, blaming, and disgust that I felt toward me all through life, this was it.

I assumed it was me. I was wrong, somehow to blame, somehow responsible, contaminated with some trait that he couldn’t resist. I must have brought something to the table that caused this…and thus…it was my fault.

Or, even if I cut me some “slack” because, at least in the beginning, I was an infant, still, I was disgusted with myself. He had chosen me for this hell. So whatever it was that I possessed that drew him to me, I was going to PURGE it as soon as I could identify it.

Looking back, it’s a ridiculous idea…it wasn’t me at all. But given that he abused me right from infancy, it is a logical one. When bad things happen to young children, they assume they caused it and are to blame. They are still at that stage of thinking that everything is about them. So good or bad, it’s their fault. And on some deep and early emotional level within me, I carried that same message.

It was only now, in my late sixties, that a germ of a realization was dawning upon me and creeping into my consciousness…an idea I could finally FEEL, not just tell myself and try to believe it: Was it possible…that I was NEVER to blame? For any of it? That maybe it was about whatever he carried WITHIN HIM all along…

Pre-EMDR Journal notes — BRING IT ON, OLD MAN!

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That First EMDR Target — Rage

May 20, 2026

Before I relate the session experience, I need to take a moment to consider the question – Why rage?

Why did I carry white-hot rage toward my father?
And why did that need to be the first thing we tackled?

I will let the images do most of the talking here.

Who was he?

Probably best answered by the stories he shared with me on our weekend car rides, all of them disgusting or upsetting. Such as the one about abusing cats when he was a kid.

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What’s the Best Target?

May 14, 2026

Which terror is the biggest?

In looking back at my 2018 notes, whatever the specific items I listed in that email, I realized they boiled down to these core items:

  • Fears (many)
  • Shame
  • Anxiety
  • Rage
  • Pain
  • Self-hatred

The usual culprits, at least for me.

Photo by author

As to fear, it was interesting to see how many different things I was afraid of. And I can’t say that any one of them was bigger than another. They were all about equal in size…huge.

For example, at that point in time, even as I started to consider writing this book, I was ADAMANT that it would be under a pen name. I was absolutely TERRIFIED that any family members or people who knew me would see my name on the book. And I fully expected I would be attacked for speaking out loud. For that matter, I may yet be. But I feel differently about it now.

But at that point, I was even terrified of using a pen name. I still hated my younger self, was drowning in shame over many things in my life, and I still believed that telling my story would cause others pain, that I didn’t deserve to pursue this “navel-gazing,” and I would, rightly so, be attacked, then abandoned.

So it was no small thing that I even considered writing this. I will discuss efforts surrounding the issues of “why write, how, and how to manage courage and fear” in a few upcoming posts.

Reassuring my inner person

I find it helpful, especially when all my fears and emotions feel like they are ganging up on me, to get it out onto paper. Like an exorcism. That way I don’t have to carry them in my head, which both releases the pain of them and reassures me.

On that latter one – reassurance – I feel like as long as I have a list on paper, I know those things won’t be forgotten. For that hurting inner person at my core, it is calming. Soothing. She feels like this time she won’t be forgotten, stuffed down, or….locked behind that door again like in the past.

Sharpening the focus

It also helps me to formulate a coherent plan. I can’t just splatter rage all over the therapist’s office…well, I can, and there is a time for that, but in terms of us making a clear plan for the upcoming EMDR, that wouldn’t do.

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EMDR – Time to Roll the Dice?

May 13, 2026

“Rest” need not apply

The thing about me, especially before all this work, is that I feared I might get stuck again. In fact, it is one of my biggest fears. I don’t easily slow down or rest because I fear I might not get going again.

After all the years trapped in my parents’ house, I never wanted to experience that again. So, for most of my adult life, I’ve operated from a frantic energy to heal. And “rest” was not a welcome part of that process.

My therapist has often remarked that for many of her patients, she has to give them a push sometimes. But for me, she frequently needs to slow me down and help me be more patient.

The EMDR failure

In 2009, when I started working with her, I was in such agony from PTSD that we tried to do a round of the EMDR routine – that process of eye movements while remembering a particular trauma, that helps the brain reprocess and heal that memory. I’ll explain more in the next post. For right now, enough to say that at least at that time, I reacted very poorly. It triggered such a high level of anxiety and stress that my therapist stopped the session and said we would use other methods.

Other tools

Since then, we’ve used, and continue to use, CBT- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. That is where we talk out the various issues, piece by piece, as often as needed, until I can figure out what is operating. Then we work to implement better ways to manage the trauma, and my life.

At times, she also taught me various Yoga breathing techniques to help my body relax. Or she would have me lie on my back with my feet elevated while breathing slowly. Both of these processes help the body’s parasympathetic nervous system to take over. That’s the one that helps calm you and slows down the stress and anxiety reactions.

The sympathetic nervous system is the one that is running in overdrive when triggered by trauma reactions. And no question, I spend a lot of time reacting from that sympathetic nervous system. Yet, these tools did help relieve some of that anxiety, and they continue to be very helpful.

The siren call of EMDR

But I also sensed that I wanted…and needed…to revisit that EMDR process again. It just kept “calling to me,” and my gut gave me no peace.

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There’s Always Time for Despair…

May 11, 2026

Overwhelmed

There is that question: “How do you eat an elephant?”
And the answer: “One bite at a time.”

It was the same thing writer Anne Lamott was getting at in her book on writing, Bird by Bird. She tells the story of her brother, who had waited to write his school paper on birds until the night before it was due. Frantic, he asked his father how he would ever get it all done? And the answer was, just write it bird by bird.

In this last section of my memoir, The Undiscovered Country, I am trying to draw to a close the many threads of the previous section, The Old Country. This is the climax, the finale, the meaning, growth, and wisdom part.

While I was writing the deeply painful posts about the abuses in my life, I said to my husband one morning that the writing was “so very hard…it just hurt so much.”

His response, while it sounds harsh, was actually an affirmation of just how well I was doing this work. His comment was delivered with great kindness and encouragement. “I think that is a good thing that it hurts. Not that I wish that for you. But it means you are really hitting the heart of those memories. You’re not just speaking from your brain, but from all those harmed places inside.”

His comment actually gave me relief and the energy to go on.

Buried in binders

When I got through all of those entries, I felt a sense of great…achievement…relief…gratitude. I thought to myself, Well, I’ve made it through the worst of it. Now I just have to draw the threads together and finish. So that should be easier.

Yet, every time I looked at all the folders spread out on that bed, each carrying nuggets of insights on different topics I’d introduced before, I grew more and more tense.

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Connecticut, 2017 — The Long-Overdue Returning

May 7, 2026

The “Teshuvah trip”

Photo by author

I didn’t even know what I should be looking for or what to expect on this trip. It’s like going into a grocery store, uncertain of what you need or what you may find. So you just start looking around and flinging everything into the cart that you guess “might” be useful.

Then, when you get home, you find you have bags and bags FULL of things. So many things that you have to spend a fair bit of time just unpacking it all, then sorting it, before you can even consider “Is any of this useful…and…how?”

This post is the “unpacking.” I collected so many bits in the journal I kept on the trip. I’ll let those entries do most of the talking in this post. I’ll “sort and prioritize it all” in the next one.

“Landing…back in time

Looking out the window, it struck me that Connecticut always looks the same when we return: Thick bank of clouds below…as we descended, so much so that the plane got very dark inside…It was the familiar gray, bleak outside, the usual “Connecticut gray” overcast….”

As soon as I stepped from the plane into the building, “it was like stepping right back into ‘then’ as if it was all still waiting there….Like a radio that had been turned off, but as soon as I walked in there, the radio came on and resumed from where it left off.”

Walking through the terminal, I felt like I had stepped into a time warp. I was in the present, but at the same time, I definitely was NOT.

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Alchemy – Thoughts About Healing That “Life We Learn With”

April 29, 2026

“You know, I believe we have two lives. The one we learn with, and the one we live with after that.”
From the movie, The Natural

If ever a statement gave me hope that I COULD learn, catch up to others, and end up with a good life, it was this one. It was only a fleeting moment. After all, it was 1984, that most horrible year after I got out of my parents’ house, and I plunged into a pit of suicidal despair. But still, that one sentence gave me pause. And sometimes a pause makes all the difference in whether you stay or go….

I would also add this newer quote:

“With the clarity you have now, it is easy to look back and think: ‘I should have known better.’ But you couldn’t have. Because you only know now what time has taught you, and back then, you were only doing the best you could with what you knew.”
@SimonAlexanderO / tinybuddha.com

I’ve been told by more than one therapist that what I considered my past “failures” were simply me doing the best I could in the moment, to blindly learn all that I’d been prevented from learning by my father’s abuse. Each emphasized again and again, that I really had been doing the best I could at any moment.

It’s taken until now to really believe that. Oh, that I had believed this, years ago…. But I do now, and I am hopeful.

What IS alchemy and why do I bother with it?

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It’s All About “the View”

April 26, 2026

Pegmatite

I am a rock person. Growing up in boulder-strewn “New England,” that’s probably not a surprise. But I am always fascinated by the wide range of textures, mineral compositions, and appearances in all of them. But pegmatite is a particular favorite.

For one, it was born from intense fire and pressure. I know how it feels.

Volcanic magma was forced under high pressure into granite fissures underground. There it cooled slowly, taking eons to become its final “self.”

Again, I know that feeling. It’s taken me a lifetime to distill into my current form.

Second, it is complex. Because it cooled slowly, it is composed of concentrated amounts of a wide range of minerals and chemicals. While other rocks shot out of the volcano and cooled quickly, the liquid that formed pegmatite was the soup of all kinds of leftover minerals that just sank to the bottom of the magma. To look at a piece of pegmatite is to see that it has many facets — dull whites, sparkling flecks, glassy surfaces, and deep mysterious blacks.

And it is precisely this complexity that makes it valuable industrially. It contains such a wide range of chemicals and minerals that its uses range from gemstones and ceramics to microchips and aerospace components.

Maybe the same is true of all of us, especially those of us who were born of fire and pressure and had to wait a long time in life to become “us”?

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The Most Important Tool: “Right Mind”

April 23, 2026

That path…

For ten years, I studied Buddhism. It helped me release some of my fears. My anger at God. It gave me a new way to look at what happened to me. How to understand and embrace pain in life. And it gave me a path toward healing and opening my heart.

That path was called the “Eightfold Path” in reference to the eight steps one could take to learn, grow, and heal. When I wrote the title above, I immediately flashed back to that Buddhist training and realized that more than a couple of those steps applied here.

Not a bitch session

The journey through this part of my writing is a journey into the unknown. It winds through darkness and descent, into that “soul’s underworld” spoken of in mythology and religion — the journey for understanding, meaning, transformation, and rebirth. In a bit, I’ll write more about that “Descent to the Underworld,” and what my journey there taught me. But first, I’ll revisit those Buddhist tools.

I call this piece “Right Mind” because it’s essential that I approach this whole phase of the book in the right way if I want to find peace. This part is not a bitch session or a blind casting of rage and blame. For sure, I won’t let anyone off the hook, and that includes myself. But there is just raging, and then there is a balanced review of what life has been and what it can teach.

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Addendum to the “Order Post” – Reclaiming the Bed…

April 17, 2026

In the previous post, I described my process to use “order” in this last section of the book to reach all the meaning and insights.

I showed this image of a bed covered with folders and notes, which I described as “all my clues” to who I am, at heart, and who I am becoming. That bed, with all those items, is my “power base” for healing.

Photo by author

But it was my husband who REALLY nailed a symbolism that I totally missed.

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