I think July will always feel like a transformative month for me. July 1st, 2021 was my first EMDR appointment. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and it's a therapy technique used for treatment of depression, anxiety, and trauma.
Cosmos in the July 2021 garden
In summer of 2021 I felt like I had lost my mind. I was having uncontrollable panic attacks, hyperventilating, heart-racing, constantly on the verge of tears. I was deep in a pit of depression. I went back to see a therapist I had seen in the past, Laura.
I’ve had 5 therapists over the years. The first one I saw when I was a young teenager, and I started going back on my own in my 20’s. Over 20 years of therapy. Of trying to feel better.
Finding a therapist is a hard thing to do. It’s exhausting to find someone, to get the appointment, to sit down, be vulnerable and try to figure out where to start. Everytime I would see someone new, I would start with what I thought was my current problem (work stress, grief from the death of a close friend, depression, anxiety) but it would soon devolve into talking about my mom, our relationship, and my childhood.
I went to therapy because I thought I was the problem, and I wanted to fix myself. I received all the diagnoses. I thought knowing what was wrong with me would allow me to treat my symptoms. I wanted someone to give me the pills that will fix it so I could move on with my life.
Lilies, yesterday 07/01/24
I’ve been diagnosed with depression, general anxiety disorder, ADHD, seasonal depression, complex PTSD, and probably other things I’m forgetting (also, memory loss due to trauma.) I’ve tried lots of pills and combinations of pills and none of them worked well enough to be worth the side effects for me.
I believe complex PTSD is the root of my diagnosis, although it is crystal clear that I am neurodivergent in other ways. I can’t really tell if my ADHD symptoms were present before what happened in my childhood, or if they are tied up with my trauma, or what. But regardless they are apart of who I am now.
Anyway. In 2021 I went back to Laura, desperate for help. The panic attacks, breakdowns, and constant stress were at a tipping point. She was the one to diagnosis me with cPTSD a year earlier. She had listened to me talk about my childhood, and was the first one to label it for what it was, and also what it continued to be: abuse.
She wasn’t the first of my therapists to suggest that my mother likely has narcissistic personality disorder, but she was the first one to suggest that maybe something wasn’t inherently wrong with me. But that maybe growing up with a parent who was willing to sacrifice their child’s body and mind, who neglected them, and abused them psychologically, who had knowledge of them being molested, but never protected them, who gaslit their child into believing they were insane, who never had any interest in having any emotional connection, but expected them to continue to play their part in the pretend perfect family…maybe, just maybe, that could be where the problem was.
When she first mentioned abuse, I was taken aback. What? Abusive childhood? I mean, I know some shit happened to me, but I thought I was just a terrible teenager. I obviously knew my mom had made many incredibly selfish decisions, but everyone else in my family was able to move on from them, why couldn’t I?
Laura had suggested EMDR in 2020, but I had said no. It sounded very woowoo, not something Scientist Heather would ever try. Her suggestion that my mom was a toxic, abusive person felt brand new then, and I thought that my new perspective on our relationship would change the dynamic of it. I thought I could just set some healthy boundaries around how she treated me, and be on my way. I definitely didn’t need to relive my past trauma to move forward. Right?
In 2021 I was back and worse than ever, because instituting “healthy boundaries” had failed miserably, and instead it seemed like now my mom was just taking every opportunity she could to scare me, manipulate me, and gaslight me into doing what she wanted, amidst a global pandemic that she didn’t believe was happening.
So I went back to Laura, and in that first session back she asked “how do you expect to heal from what happened to you and move on, when that abuse is still happening?”
I was dumbstruck. Continued abuse? I was an adult, how could I continue to be abused when I had moved out and started my own life? Yet it was always my interactions with my mother that would trigger my intense anxiety and depression, so I had to admit the correlation.
I realize that from an outside perspective, it probably seemed obvious that I needed to step back from this relationship that was causing me so much continued harm, but when you’re inside of it, when it’s your reality, and the only reality you’ve ever known, it is completely invisible. I didn’t know what that would look like. I didn’t I even know I had the option of not having my mom in my life. Family is everything. That’s what she drilled into me, as does our society.
But, at that point I was desperate, and really needed help, and would do whatever Laura suggested to try to be less miserable. She again suggested EMDR, and this time I agreed to try it. But she also said that while we were doing that work, I was going to need to take space from this abusive relationship that was causing so much pain. We agreed that I would tell my mom I needed some space, and that I would not be speaking to her during this time, while I worked on my mental health. (This went over as well as expected, but I am grateful for the ability to block phone numbers when my needs were again ignored.)
So, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. A flashing light that traveled in front of my eyes while I talked through my most painful memories. The memories that I could feel viscerally. The scenes and emotions that felt so crystal clear and pulled me back in so easily. The ones that would show up again whenever my mom would say something cruel, whenever she would be so casually selfish and callous, whenever she would make it clear that how I felt did not matter, I just needed to get in line.
We worked our way through those memories in the summer of 2021. In the beginning, the memories of my childhood brought up feelings of hopelessness, of guilt and shame and fear. Of knowing empirically that the person who brought me into this world, who was supposed to love me unconditionally, was fully willing to sacrifice my body, my psyche, my life to hide her own shame.
EMDR was a very painful process for me. It took weeks to work through a handful of memories, and each hour long therapy session left me feeling physically drained and emotionally raw.
The idea of this treatment is to allow you process and integrate painful, vivid, traumatic memories and transform them on an emotional level to something bearable. It’s been proven to work well for PTSD victims, and although it takes longer, to also help those with cPTSD. To move past these memories and the negative beliefs they inspire, the ones your body and mind have been holding onto.
For me, my memories (and my mother, in my memories) were telling me that I was worthless. That no one would believe me. That I was crazy. That I was the problem. That I needed to just shut up about the past. These beliefs had permeated my life and my sense of self so completely, that it was hard to even peel them apart from myself. These beliefs created such a constant level of stress, that my body cycled through a whole range of physical autoimmune issues in its attempt to handle the constant state of fight or flight I was in. My body would not allow me to “just move on” from what happened to me, and because my mom was never willing to have any sort of conversation around what happened, I was stuck, along in a dark place, for such a long time unable to move forward.
Through EMDR I was slowly able to take a step back from those memories and beliefs. When they no longer pulled me in, when they didn’t feel so visceral, I was, for the first time in my life, able to look at what happened to me from an outside perspective. For the first time I was able to understand the looks of confusion and horror I would sometimes catch from friends when I talked about some of the things that happened in my childhood. Until that time, it had just been what was normal to me. I spoke about those things causally, because it was my reality.
I was incapable of recognizing abuse, because it had been in my life for as long as I could remember. The way my mother treated me was not at all how someone who claimed to love me would treat me, but I was unable to see that, because I had no other personal experience. That was the only relationship I had experienced with her.
EMDR allowed me to give myself the grace and compassion that I would give any other person. If I had heard about what happened to me, happening to another young girl, I would be livid. I would go out of my way to help her, to protect her, to let her know she did nothing wrong, that she deserved to be loved and that she was a caring, honest child who was trying to do the right thing and to get help. That she didn’t deserve to be treated that way, that she deserved the unconditional love and protection that all children deserve, that her life is valuable and precious.
EMDR gave me a complete and total perspective shift, on my life, on myself, on my family relationships, on all of my relationships. It allowed me to be brave enough to stop self sacrificing, to choose myself for the first time, to protect myself, my mental health and my peace.
It allowed me to have the courage to go no contact with my abuser. I haven’t spoken to my mother in three years.
That decision allowed a peace that I could have never imagined to slowly seep into my life. The slow healing is still ongoing, and after living my whole life in fight or flight mode, it is no surprise my nervous system is still recovering. But the slow changes have been incredible.
I am a very different person today than I was three years ago. Once I finally removed myself from this abusive relationship, I was slowly able to grow into the person I believe I was meant to, but never had the chance to be. Instead of the chronic stress, fear, negativity, and toxicity I was experiencing from that relationship and reflecting into all other parts of my life, I’m able to take time to figure who I actually am. I am able to live as authentically me, without the constant pressure to conform to her expectations, manipulations and moods. I realize this is something most people are able to do at a far younger age, but I’m just enormously grateful to have gotten here, despite my late arrival.
There are still bumps along this road, and I’m still healing, still growing and learning as I figure out how I want my life to look now.
The first year was spent in amazement of how suddenly peaceful my life was, without the constant, persistent negativity of my mom. The second year was spent grieving the loss of one of my most precious relationships, my relationship with my father, which was a casualty of my boundary setting with my mother. That second year was also for taking meaningful steps towards being towards being the person I really want to be in this life. Someone who gives back to the world and makes it a better place.
This last year has been spent growing in my new roles, and also settling into a life where my nervous system can slowly heal. I’ve focused on caring for myself physically and mentally in ways that can foster more well rounded, sustainable health and wellness.
I recognize that I’ve had successes in moving forward, in healing from trauma. I can see and feel those successes in my day to day. But that success has also meant that my brain has finally felt safe enough to release some other things, very old things that I did not have the ability to process before, and some of those realizations have been devastating. I’ve had to restart EMDR again. This time for memories that happened when I was even younger.
But as July rolls around again, it’s a reminder to me that in order to heal, you do have to open some of those old wounds. Ignoring them allowed them to fester and spread like a cancer, but bringing them out into the light allowed me to make meaningful steps towards healing…which is I guess the purpose of writing this post that I don’t intend for anyone to read.
I honestly don’t think it’s possible to do this work without help. Help from an unbiased, trained mental health professional. Someone who is not your friend, who does not have their own biased perspective, someone who can help you clearly see when those close to you can’t. Someone who can lead you through the dark and back into the light.
I have so much love and gratitude to Laura. I’ve had a different therapist for the past year, and I love her too, but Laura will always be the person who held my hand and guided me through as I crossed the biggest precipice of my life. She helped pull me out of my despair of the before, and gave me the gentle push into the peace and healing of the after.
So, happy three year anniversary of EMDR to me. Three years of gaining some control over my life and my brain, over my peace, and putting me on the path to healing. To becoming the person who I want to be, to being my most authentic self.
A marigold found in the garden July 26, 2021. Some other day I will ramble about how having the soft landing of the garden gave me the courage to make these changes in my life. The unconditional love and reciprocity this land has shown me has taught me more about mothering than my own mom ever did.