I had my first session last Friday

• I will probably start EMDR soon by martha, 11/12/98
  • Support for a fellow EMDR participant by John K., 11/17/98
    
    

Thanks to John for your words of encouragement. In my first EMDR session, my therapist asked me to recall to conscious memory a particularly painful childhood event. Several came to mind, but unfortunately, I could not bring up the EMOTIONS associated with these events. I could just remember them factually. So we used a more recent event involving my stepmother (who also played a big role in my difficult childhood), which took place a few weeks ago. I could still recall my anger. So my therapist asked me to focus on that event. Then she began to swing two fingers back and forth in front of my eyes, asking me to move my eyes with her fingers without moving my head (so that the movement would be concentrated on the eyes). Especially at first, I noted that concentration on this maneuver drove out any thoughts of the event that I had been asked to think about. My therapist repeated this maneuver a number of times for about an hour (by which time I was tired and ready for some verbal interaction with her). No earthshaking events occurred. The most striking thing I noticed was that during the session, my mind was empty and quiet of the constant stream of words that usually fills it. I am usually always ruminating about past events and even more what I need to do in the future and especially what negative events might happen in the future, that I would have to plan for in order to avoid. I commented on this to the therapist, who pointed out that in a way (as far as I understood her), the EMDR was an attempt to get me "back into my body", because so many of my emotional troubles stem from the fact that I have become detached from my body. The "words" are a sort of defense against feelings and body states due to past, most likely sexual as well as other, abuse that I received, some of which I cannot even remember. I have tried to achieve this state with meditation and have so far been unsuccessful. So I can say that the EMDR was beneficial in that it allowed me to step back from the words for a change. Some feelings did rise up at one point during the session. I felt as if I wanted to cry, but I could not quite access those feelings, and there were no particular memories associated with them. Again, I found that I was not really able to focus on the stepmother event or others that my therapist and I remembered during the session AS LONG AS THE ACTUAL EMDR WAS GOING ON. I will let everyone know of my further progress; I am scheduled for another session this coming Friday. MARTHA

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