Anxiety can manifest itself in many ways, and it can change over time. My anxiety sort of evolved from panic attacks with the physical fight-or-flight response to more of an anxiety attack with an emotional out-of-control response. It’s really hard to make sense of things when your emotions are behind the wheel. It’s even harder when the wrong emotion shows up to the party. I can go from 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds flat. (Well, Ben says he can see it coming before I realize it.) But to me, it’s like getting slammed by a mack truck.
If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.
Unknown
What I did realize was that my out-of-control emotions were actually hurting some of the people that I love. It was completely unintentional, but nonetheless I knew I needed to do something about it. So back to therapy I go.
Finding a therapist is like getting thrown back into dating. Ugh! I am married, and I do not want to have to do that again. Therapy is just so individualized, and it is not an easy task to find the right match for you. It took me three times to find the one that I am finally seeing progress with. But I would also like to add that I needed a different type of therapy than I used to. You can read this post and this post to read more about my previous therapy experiences. Simply put I changed, therefore my needs did as well.
In 1987, Dr. Francine Shapiro concluded that “eye movements can reduce the intensity of disturbing thoughts.” (Source.) This type of therapy is called Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR), and what I chose to treat my anxiety and trauma. In practical terms, the therapist introduces bilateral stimulation to the equation.
The therapist will hold out a wand for you to follow with your eyes from left to right, back and forth. He or she will then describe a memory to you or have you visualize a painful moment. You will think upon that visualization while you follow the wand. The idea is that by focusing on the wand, the image will be less disturbing, allowing you to work through the trauma in a safe environment. It sounds weird and sort of like hypnotism, but it’s not. You will not quack like a chicken. (Unless the chicken is related to your trauma in any way, I kid.) Then you can move on to process your trauma, and in doing so reducing your negative thoughts related to that trauma.
Traditionally it is done with eye movements (hence the EM in EMDR), however it has also done well with senses other than sight. You can use music to do the left-to-right, left-to-right through headphones, but this is only practical if the therapist is also speaking into your headphones. I prefer the hand-buzzers personally. And they are not like the ones you used to get at the toy store to prank your friends with. They just vibrate left-to-right, left-to-right.
Okay, you may be wondering what I mean by “process your trauma.” So you start with the traumatic event itself. The first trauma I worked through was the propane accident. It was the freshest in my mind, and the easiest one to start with according to my therapist. So I thought about the image of me lying there in the hospital, and I did what I normally do when faced with a hard emotional situation. I detached. I tried to fight the emotions, because I didn’t want to go through that again. My therapist called me out on it.
Sigmund Freud
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Once I started focusing on the bilateral stimulation, my brain quieted down and I could just focus on the memory itself. That’s when I stopped trying to detach from it. I finally allowed myself to feel the emotions attached to that moment. We could then walk through my memories to pick them apart so I could find out the true emotional backlog. For me, it was feeling powerless.
Now that I have let myself feel all of the emotions associated with the propane accident (yes I basically sat there and cried), we now take that feeling of being powerless and turn it around into a new thought. We turn the buzzers back on, left-to-right left-to-right, and visualize that same image from before, but with a new, positive thought. I went from feeling powerless to knowing it’s all over and we are all safe. Huge sigh of relief!
The big takeaway from processing though that trauma was that I learned that your emotions do not equal your truth. I had heard people say things along those lines before, but I never really understood what it meant until now. It’s okay to feel your emotions, just don’t let them control you. Your emotions lie to you. Feel them, and acknowledge them. But don’t apply truth to them. Mind blown!
This revelation is a hard one for me. The concept itself makes complete sense, but how do I do it? Like how do i actually feel an emotion and then just let it go? The answer, as is with most things in life, practice. I have to learn how to allow myself to feel my emotions before they feel me. Then I need to move the F- on! I have to stop harping on the feeling. Besides it may not matter as much as you think it does at the time.
My therapist says that this I will probably change quite a bit as a person when we are finished. I welcome this change; I look forward to it. I wouldn’t be in therapy if I didn’t need that change. Change is hard. But I know that if I want to be truly happy, than I will make the necessary changes to make that happen. Even though it involves dealing with some deep-down shit.
Socrates said, “The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Do you do well with change, yes or no?
XOXO – Jenna
