Re:Physical reactions

Thank you for your story, your courage. I thought of deleting this, because I don't want clients to feel they must defend me. I didn't delete this because you asked me not to, and because I know how strong you are.

For clients recovering from trauma, and for those for whom dividedness (and forgetting) was necessary for survival, these questions of what is real and true are very painful and difficult. Often it was necessary to not know one piece of truth, in order to keep the attachment to the parent (for example) that the child needed more than anything. So we can understand how it is that one piece of experience is held in one compartment, and another piece in another compartment in self, and so on. The cost is that the child sacrificed the self to keep the love of the parent intact. As an adult the "body keeps the score" as Bessel van der Kolk says, and the symptoms emerge until they are addressed. EMDR can be one piece of that recovery.

I do not know what the truth was of what happened to you or many other clients. I only know that life was not extinguished by the pain, that the will to recover is strong, and that EMDR can sometimes remove some of the obstacles to that recovery. I also know that there are skeptics who doubt all of this -- the reality of childhood abuse, of the forgetting of trauma, and of the ability of EMDR to catalyze recovery (in the context of an overall treatment plan).

Replies:

Re:Physical reactions , by by string originator, 02/16/01 Re:Physical reactions , by Robert P. O'Brien, Ph.D., 02/17/01

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