EMDR FORUM ARCHIVE, 2000
Will it ever end ?
John (EMDR - Client) · 08/26/03 at 10:45 PM ET
Hello Dr.Paulsen Inobe I am delighted that I have come across this forum. I thank you and all who have contributed to it. I am a 42 year old male. I have been in EMDR therapy for over 8 months now and must confess that I am extremely frustrated at how long this process is taking. As I'm sure that you are aware, there is very little information available in terms of data on people who exceed 12 sessions. In fact, I know of only one situation where an individual went longer than I. Hers was 18 months. Though I have seen my therapist over 60 times since we started last December, probably no more than 25 of those involved EMDR, the others were to deal more with the processing. There is no doubt that my situation is complex. My response to childhood trauma clearly paved the way to engaging the world in a manner that exacerbated the existing trauma and created many new incidences. On a good day, I consider myself fortunate to be doing what I am. I am aware that the vast majority of people that have encountered experiences similar to what I have will conclude their lives without ever having really lived them. On other days however, this is little consolation as I consider that I have spent almost my entire life, trying to get over my life, if that makes any sense. I was engaged in talk therapy for three years just prior to EMDR and a 12-step program for 13 years before that. I am the most open and honest person that I know when dealing with my past. I have never knowingly withheld anything from a professional that I was working with. Prior to starting EMDR I was addiction free, including smoking, on no prescription meds, and had my life uncharacteristically stable and quite. I even had my finances looked after so I wouldn't have to worry about money until I was finished. I wanted to do my best to prevent anything major from interfering with the EMDR or dragging it out unnecessarily. Because my therapist was initially engaged to complete an exhaustive history and assessment for an insurance company, he had a pretty thorough understanding of the task at hand. We had several months to get to know each other before we got started. Because he was so familiar with my history, He correctly estimated that it might take a fair chunk of time to work through it all, so that part didn't really come as a surprise. I have experienced much difficulty in my life and have consequently received multiple diagnosis's on those occassions when I sought help. I have often elevated my hopes as some new professional communicated to me how absolutely certain they were that I would respond magically to whatever therapy or medication was on the table that day. These approaches usually made the condition worse, not better. Consequently I do not impress easily. In fact it would be accurate to describe me as a person of little faith and hope when it comes to therapy or pharmaceuticals. For only the second time in my life however, I felt good about the therapist sitting across from me. He seemed very honest, competent, remarkably thorough and genuinely concerned. I even felt that he liked me. What really impressed me about this man was his humility. I am very sensitive to being engaged by someone that speaks to me from "on-high", a condition which seems to commonly affect individuals that receive higher levels of formal education. It took quite a while for me to build up enough trust with my therapist. I took home and read his masters thesis on "childhood sexual abuse" and then his doctoral dissertation on "EMDR". There was lots of information that supported the effectiveness of EMDR, I however remained unconvinced. One day I said to him, "If I wait until I feel good about this, it will never happen will it"? He just smiled. I confessed to him that I was skeptical and that I have heard enough BS and the all too common "over promise - under deliver" approach to last me two lifetimes. I also told him frankly that EMDR sounded like the "McDonalds Drive-through school of therapy" to me, and that I felt a bit foolish watching a hand move back and forth, especially if it ended up not working. It took a couple of sessions before I could start relaxing a bit, but make no mistake, when things started coming up, boy did they come up. I was completely amazed at how it was as if a part of my mind that was blocking everything was easily set aside. It was like being granted access to an area that has always been off limits. So, people can say what they want about EMDR, there is no doubt in this skeptics mind that for whatever reason, something happens during EMDR that even a completely open, honest and willing client like myself couldn't accomplish through conscious effort in talk therapy if his life depended on it. If there was something that I was unprepared for, and God knows I have complained enough to my therapist about it, it was the reactions to the EMDR, or the processing as we like to call it. Physical pain, exhaustion, nightmares, crying for hours, binge eating, anger, etc, etc. I would swear that at times I felt close to as much as I could stand. The worst part was not necessarily the intensity, because most of the time it was manageable, it was the dragging out often for days at a time. I would feel worn down by the length of time. I had always suspected that there was unfinished business within me, but comments from others and an assumption that talk therapy had accomplished more than it had, caused me to severely underestimate how much was there. I estimate now that the amount of trauma that needed to be processed exceeded my expectations by a factor of 10 at least. Going through all this processing is a very painful experience. I have discovered that it isn't what happens to us so much, but how we interpret what happens to us that causes all the trouble. Though there have been some horrific traumatic experiences in my adult life, we moved through those remarkably fast. It was the events of my childhood that have been the culprits all along as it turns out. I would estimate that 95% of the work we have done has been in that earlier time in my life. There was all types of abuse including sexual during my childhood. Even so and based on what I've learned in life and what I've heard from other's directly or indirectly I would have judged my childhood abuse as mild to moderate in severity. It is very clear to me now however that I seriously underestimated the impact of what happened during those years. We are no longer processing memories and have not been for quite awhile. It is more like everything that I had come to believe in life about myself, about people, about God etc has turned out to be a big fat lie. I can't believe how much stuff has turned out to be complete BS. It has been very painful coming to terms with the BS that I built my life on. The world and the people in it look very ugly to me now. About God? I don't know. I would be an idiot if I couldn't see that something has continued to look after me in this life. I have survived too many close calls for that to be coincidence. I can only hope that as my BS belief system completes the "blown-up" phase and develops further with the new beliefs that things will settle down for me. I have been reading earlier post on here for days now and at first I wished that I had found this site earlier, thinking it would have made me feel more comfortable after reading the opinions and comments of others. I see however that there are those who believe in EMDR and those who don't, so eventually I would have had to make my own decision regardless. As it stands now, I don't call myself a believer yet. I need to see how my life is different afterwards and how I feel. Right now I'd simply settle for all the processing discomforts to ease off for a while to let me catch my breath. I hope that I'm closer to the finish line than it feels like right now. Thank you for enduring this long post. There is a request out of all this. Throughout my EMDR process, my support system has been pathetic to say the least. I have no family around to speak of, no spouse, I no longer attend support groups for addictions or a church. As for my friends and acquaintances it would seem that I had leprosy or something. I have done tons of work on myself over the last few years and as a consequence it seems that the people in my life have all vanished. Mind you I had many unhealthy people around me at one time and should be glad that I have evolved passed that. It is just that this whole personal growth and healing business has gotten to be a pretty darn lonely experience. I have been looking for two things. First of all, an internet support group for clients going through EMDR and secondly, if there is any information or stories about people like myself who have undergone the "long haul" EMDR experience. If anyone can help me out here at all, I would be very appreciative. Thank you. - John B.
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