EMDR with M

So, Sunday I did EMDR with my new therapist, M.

I was super anxious and nervous because I knew it was going to be different. M started to suggest that maybe we wait a few weeks, and I thought about it but really didn’t want to. I knew I’d be fine once we did it. It was just the anxiety over something a little new and a little different, but I’ve DONE this before and I know it helps and I was ready to just jump head first into it. Putting it off would just make the anxiety bigger.

M usually does EMDR by holding up her fingers and moving them side to side. This was a bit strange for me, and I found her going a bit too fast at times and it made me dizzy. She slowed down a bit when I mentioned I was dizzy.

After the fact I mentioned it was a bit odd at first because I’m used to the tappers, and I found out that she had forgotten that, and she made a big note in my file so that she would remember for next time. Since apparently she DOES have the tappers, she just doesn’t use them much. I assumed she didn’t have them. That’s nice though. After experiencing it differently, I much prefer the tappers.

But anyway, I was anxious and nervous, wondering if it would still work without the tappers. Well. It did. It really really did. It was a very intense session, and some heavy stuff came up.

It brought back the image of the little girl… my “inner child” or whatever. And I have a really hard time facing her. I tend to reject her, and try to turn away from her. I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to comfort her. I just want her to go away.

M noted that I’m angry at her, and I guess I am. I said I blame her. I said what she did do to try to protect herself, it wasn’t enough because here I am still fucked up and crazy.

After my session, I was thinking about it some more. I realized the first word that comes to mind when I think of the image of my younger self… is ‘weak’. She’s weak.

I know it wasn’t her fault. I know she did the best she could. I know it’s my mom’s fault. I know it’s my dad’s fault for not protecting me. I was just a kid.

But I still feel like she was weak. I still blame her for the fact I have these PTSD symptoms now.

I’m supposed to care. I’m supposed to love her and comfort her, because no one else did.

But I can’t.

I don’t want to.

I don’t want to see her. I just want her to go away.

Therapy, Scary Bus Rides and… Tea.

Had therapy today. It was hard.

Last night I e-mailed J about some things, that I’m having a really really hard time with. It’s a tricky triggering subject of attachment issues and all this stuff tangled up with my mom’s bpd and the way she thinks and the things she raised me to believe. And… I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not going into detail, but it’s a BIG ISSUE and it terrifies me.

J encouraged me to talk to M about it, because it’s something that needs to be addressed with EMDR.

It was really really hard to pluck up the courage to talk to M about it. I struggled with the words. J had advised me to just share the e-mail with M, because then I don’t have to talk. But I had no way of printing out the e-mail, so… thankfully I remembered what I wrote and the insight I had, but it was still hard to get those words out. So, so, so hard.

The tricky thing is, that this is something that will probably only be fully resolved by talking it out. But it’s a conversation that absolutely terrifies me and I don’t think I can ever really have. I don’t WANT to have it.

But yeah, I explained things and then M said next Sunday we can do EMDR work to process this and work through it. I’m relief and nervous at the same time.

 

After therapy, I took the bus home. I was not prepared for it to be so scary and uncomfortable.  There was this boy on the bus, who was clearly mentally handicapped in some way. I could tell by the way he talked and acted. He also had the special bus pass and ID that you can get if you have a physical or psychological disability that allows you to pay a discounted fare to ride. (I have the same pass for my PTSD.) You have to have a doctors note and stuff to get the ID.

He immediately started talking to me. I couldn’t really understand him, partly because his words kind of slurred together, but mostly because the bus is loud and I have a difficult time hearing people. My brain is overwhelmed by all the talking, the loud noises the bus makes, the sound of the road. So I do what I always do when I can’t really make out/understand what someone is saying- I smile and nod. This boy gave me his phone number. I was nervous because I don’t like talking to people. I just wanted to be left alone. Then at some point he moved to sit right next to me, and I started to panic. I was blocked in, trapped against the window. He made me text him so that he would have my number. I was frozen with panic and fear, and he was right up next to me and in my space, and wouldn’t leave me alone, so I did it. He kept leaning into me, and touching me. I have no idea what he was saying, because I was trying to breathe and was dissociating, floating outside of myself and panicking. I vaguely remember he was saying something about how I need to come over to his house and we can hang out.

I was scared.

I don’t know what he meant or what he was implying or… I mean, maybe it was innocent and child-like thinking on his part, but I obviously took it in a way that he wanted to hook up or something. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just know I was scared and he kept touching my arm and my hair and I wanted him to stop. I don’t like to be touched, unless I really trust you. I don’t like people sitting right next to me. I don’t like people being within my ‘space’, which is within arms length of me. It’s my space. My little bubble of personal space. I don’t like it when people invade my bubble, and this was… beyond invading it.

Eventually I yanked on the cord to stop the bus and got off. I wanted to run away, get the hell away from there as fast as I could. So I finally did. I escaped into a big store nearby and walked around in a frazzled daze, it was busy and crowded in the grocery section which didn’t help at all. But I wandered around and ended up in the homegoods/furniture section which was a lot quieter. Eventually I just sat down and started tapping on my knees and trying to ground myself. I think I was in there for nearly an hour.

Eventually I felt grounded enough to manage walking around a bit.

And I decided to pick up some tea.

My therapist loves tea. Last week, when I was still getting over that nasty cold, she offered me some peppermint tea. I love peppermint. For me it’s very calming and grounding. So I said yes and I took some. I liked it well enough. I’m not sure of the taste, because… they all just taste like tea, to me. But it was warm and smelled like peppermint and I love that smell. Today I tried chamomile.  It was okay, too.

So, I wondered throught the tea isle, and decided… what the hell. There was a box that had different flavors, like mint, and chamomile, and lemon, and other blends. So I grabbed it and bought it, and when I got home I made myself some with the peppermint/spearmint blend. It helped ground me some more. Plus, I find the warmth helps soothe my throat which is still achy and scratchy.

I’m still not a tea person. I know nothing about tea. But this stuff was nice.

Ugh, it’s been a long day.

Is my PTSD not as bad as I think it is?

This has been something that’s kind of bugged me since I met with my new therapist, M.

At one point she asked me if there’s different degrees/levels to my dissociation and I said yes, and she asked me to explain them. I started off by explaining the more “mild” episodes, where I zone out, my mind goes blank. I’m sort of aware of where I am, but, my mind is just blank. It’s like I’m on autopilot. Then there’s episodes where I feel extremely detached, sometimes to the point of feeling outside myself. Then there’s the times where I shut down emotionally.

M said that the ‘mild’ stuff is fairly normal. That it’s more like what a lot of regular people experience, and not necessarily trauma related.

M said something along the lines of, “I don’t think you’re as sick as you think you are.”

She said it in a very gentle way I should note. It wasn’t condescending or anything, it had more of this feeling like she thought it would make me feel better or relieved even.

I’m not sure how I really feel about it though. I think at first maybe I was relieved, but now I’m… I don’t have a word for it.

I think it’s something I want to talk to her about again. Maybe I didn’t explain it right. It doesn’t FEEL normal. It only happens when I’m upset or uncomfortable. That can’t be normal right? I don’t know. I’m confused.

Edited to add: As I’ve been thinking about the “mild” zoning out, generally tends to lead to a “mild” detached feeling… that can grow stronger and stronger the longer I’m in that state. I think this is more the way my mind copes with day-to-day stressors. With the “smaller” things. Where as the out-of-body, and the emotional shut down… they tend to happen a lot more suddenly and with BIG triggers. In fact, the emotional shut down I’ve kind of only experience when I’m dealing with someone talking about wanting to self-harm or commit suicide.

Don’t tell me what to do

Kind of irritated at someone forcing their opinion.

I was talking with someone about therapy, and I mentioned how my therapist uses EMDR. Turns out they’re one of those people who is against it, and started telling me how it makes things worse and that I need to stop doing it.

I felt attacked.

No, EMDR is not for everybody. Neither is CBT, DBT, psychoanalysis, ACT, hypnotherapy… etc etc etc, and all the other methods and techniques.

Yeah, some people have found EMDR to be triggering, or not helpful or they get stuck. Everyone is different. What works for you, might not work for someone else. What doesn’t work for you, might be a miracle for someone else.

So back the hell off. I like doing EMDR work. It has helped me immensely. My therapist is trained properly and knows what the hell she is doing.

Honestly, I sometimes wonder if people who have had bad experiences with EMDR if they were doing it with a properly trained therapist. I’ve had some rough sessions, where I got stuck, but my therapist was always, always supportive and able to help get me unstuck and grounded again. EMDR has never made my PTSD symptoms worse. It works for me. So don’t tell me I have to stop, just because some people claim to have a bad experience with it. It helps me.

The American Psychiatric Association supports it and recommends it as a treatment for trauma victims. The Department of Veterans Affairs & Department of Defense strongly recommends it for treating trauma. There’s more, but those are the two I know off the top of my head. Then there’s plenty of research and studies on it saying it’s been effective, as well as personal reports.

So don’t write it off just because one person says it didn’t work for them.

And don’t go telling someone who’s doing well in therapy, that they should stop their therapy because someone else didn’t find it effective.

Back the hell off.

2 Weeks in New Home

Been a while since I updated. It’s been 2 weeks since I moved. I now live several thousand miles away from enDad and BPDm. I’m still kind of in a very surreal state of mind- it doesn’t quite feel real yet.

The first day was extremely hard. I was an emotional wreck, and cried for hours. I felt so scared that maybe I’d made a huge mistake and I wanted to go home.

Eventually I pulled myself together, and the next few days weren’t so bad. However, I’ve been dissociating a LOT. For some reason it’s especially bad in the grocery store, I don’t know why. Sometimes I don’t quite realize I’m dissociating until a while afterwords. It’s like, I’m present enough to know I’m out in public and usually where I am, but I can’t remember what my best friend was saying to me or what I paid if I bought anything.

I had a session over the phone with my therapist; she suspects I may be overwhelmed by my new environment. On top of moving out and away from my parents and all the guilt and old stuff that goes along with that, I moved to a completely different part of the country. Nothing here is familiar at all. It’s cold. It rains. There’s hills and mountains- you’ll be driving along and all of sudden you’re on the side of a cliff (or hill or whatever it’s called) and you’re up really high and it’s a over the edge is a straight drop down, and it’s kind of scary, and all the going up and down makes me very dizzy . Everything is green, there’s gardens everywhere, there’s trees I’ve never seen. The grocery stores are different.

It’s DIFFERENT. Unfamiliar.

It’s not bad and I’m not complaining that I don’t like it, it’s BEAUTIFUL here. But it’s different and I’m not used to it. It’s alien. And at times I think it’s too much, so my mind dissociates.

My therapist told me to try setting aside time twice a day to do a few yoga breaths and meditation, in order to help me stay grounded, since I used yoga to cope in the past. It’s familiar to me and she thought it might help. I’m doing my best to keep up with that. I usually manage at least once a day.

I’m also supposed to try just sitting outside for like 15-20 minutes a day, in order to just take in my surroundings and grow used to it. I haven’t been doing that. I suck.

Transportation was another issue that was starting to overwhelm me really bad. I was getting frustrated and scared and felt trapped, because I don’t have a car and I was used to being able to go wherever I want, whenever I want. I was having major anxiety over taking the bus- public trans is really big here-I’ve never ever taken a bus before and I was terrified of it. My best friend went with me on it one day and I feel a little better. I think I can manage better now. I’m planning to go downtown to the bus ticket center place thing, and get more route maps and stuff like that. I’m trying to gather as much information as I can, I’ll feel safer that way. I went to Barnes and Noble last week and got a map of the city.

I’ve had ups and downs.

At the end of last week, one night I had a bit of a major meltdown. I brokedown, relapsed a bit, was overwhelmed by old thought patterns, and triggers.

I’m doing better since then. I know it’s going to be like this for a while. I’m going to have ups and downs. My PTSD symptoms are going to get worse before they get better.

Things are okay, I guess.

Rough EMDR Session

Trigger Warning: animal neglect, effects of abuse, bpd mother’s suicide ideation and threats

Last Wednesday, in therapy, we did more EMDR work. It was intense and really really hard. I got stuck for a while.

Started out because my dad said stuff to me, asking what I’m going to do about my cats. I explained I’m taking them to a shelter, because I can’t take them with me, and if I let my mom have them she’d eventually dump them in the woods. He made some comment about how he’d do it too, and that’s what happened with the cats we had when I was young before my parents divorced.

He’s ALWAYS saying these awful, cruel things about my cats, because he hates cats. I HATE it.

He then went on about how I didn’t take care of them so we got rid of them. I was like, “I was FIVE YEARS OLD.” And he just rolled his eyes and was like, “So? They were your responsibility.’

It still makes me angry. It’s complete bullshit to expect a 5 year old to be completely and solely responsible for an animal.

While working with EMDR, I quickly saw the connection between being expected to take care of an animal all by myself at 5, and having to take care of my mother. It was like, “I didn’t take care of my cats, and then something bad happened. So if I don’t take care of my mom, something bad WILL happen.”

Fuck it’s so depressing to look back on it now. That I had to fucking have that weight on my shoulders.

I got really really stuck during EMDR, and I was somewhat dissociative. My therapist had to keep reminding me to stay in the present, stay grounded. It felt like a long time where I just couldn’t get past the, “My mom IS going to kill herself. She’s going to do it, something’s going to push her over the edge.”

It was a struggle to call it what it really is. My mom is NOT suicidal, she uses threats of suicide to manipulate and control people around her. She’s never made an actual attempt, she just talks about it until I panic and try to “fix it”.

Something that particularly got through to me, was my therapist was giving me things to focus on in case I got stuck again outside of therapy, and she pointed out that my mom survived before I was born. That kind of hit me like a ton of bricks.

It’s true. It’s completely, and totally true. She survived, she got on with her life, before I was born. She’s not going to shatter if I’m not around to hold the pieces together. I keep reminding myself of that.

God it was so so hard to face that, to pull myself out of the well worn path of thinking. It’s particularly hard because it involves facing and letting go of a role I’ve played so fucking long it’s become my identity. I’ve found myself thinking at times since that session, “Who am I if I’m not my mom’s caretaker and emotional support?”

I’m not sure. I need to figure that out.

I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me

Trigger Warning.

But my mood is really low. Like, really really low. I haven’t been depressed in a while, but I am now.

I’m not exactly sure why…

I had therapy today and it’s tough. My therapist finally brought up that maybe I should consider not reading my mom’s e-mails for a few days.

My best friend and people online have been telling me that for weeks, and I keep making excuses.

Part of it was the illusion of control, of trying to feel safe. I thought, if she e-mails me crazy shit, then I know she’s in crazy mood at the moment… and I thought that if I KNOW then I can be more prepared to protect myself. But my therapist had me question if it’s really helping or if it’s just hurting me.

Because the e-mails are abusive. My therapist outright said it, and I’ve known that, but I think maybe I was denying it or the way it effects me.

Is it really better to read her e-mails, and know she’s cycling through moods every few hours, which ends up making me sick with anxiety, and terrified of being at home? Is it better to be so anxious and scared that she’s going to show up at the house, that I spend entire days sitting in my car in the back of a parking lot, because I have no where else to go?

I told myself it was my warning system… but it’s failed in epic proportions… because my mom is severely mentally ill, and you just can’t predict what a person like that is going to do. I think I need to face the facts here:

When has my mom actually shown up out of the blue?

When I’ve been completely unprepared and not expecting her cause I haven’t heard from her in weeks.

And, so, when she starts flaring up, and raging and manipulating, and harassing me and attacking me via e-mail? What happens then? Does she show up, like I keep expecting her to?

No.

She didn’t show up, she didn’t make the effort to come out here to try to attack me in person.

So what the fuck good is it to read her e-mails, get all triggered and anxious and dissociative, get upset and scared that she’s going to come over? How many times did I get up at 5 in the morning, and take off, park somewhere hidden, and try to sleep in my car for a few hours, and not go home til at 6pm at least, often times closer to 9pm. Only to find out that she never came to the house.

What the fuck good is it doing me?

Yet it’s so HARD. I feel like I need to know what’s going on.

And part of it is the fear that something awful is going to happen.

I even SAID it outright in therapy, that I felt like if I didn’t ‘allow’ her to e-mail me, she’d get worse.

I had to face the fact today that I still haven’t let go of having to be my mom’s caretaker.

I had to face the fact that this is what keeps going through my mind: If I don’t ‘allow’ her to e-mail me, if I don’t give her that outlet then she’s going to end up killing herself (and possibly my brother).

I just… don’t know when or if I’ll ever let go and detach.

And I guess I’m kind of depressed because I realized moving isn’t going to be a magical solution. I’m not going to instantly be better and healthy and okay. I kept telling myself, “once I move, I’ll be able to go NC. I’ll feel safe enough to do it. I’ll change my number and my e-mail and everything.”

Yet that’s bullshit. If anything I’m going to be more anxious and terrified for a while. I’m going to be obsessively checking my e-mail more than I already do, because I’ll feel like I “need to know” what’s going on with her. Because I finally left, and it’s going to trigger the abandonment in my mom and she’s going to dysregulate and get depressed and- and- … and right here, my mind keeps saying ‘and she’s going to end up killing herself and it’s my fault because I left instead of fixing it’. Even though I CAN’T FIX IT. NOTHING I DO WILL FIX IT. Even though it’s not my job to take care of her.

But I’m still stuck, and in some ways I’m still enmeshed.

And I guess maybe that’s why I feel shitty. Because I feel like I’ve taken several steps backwards. *sighs* I know healing isn’t easy, I know there’s going to be set-backs but it still makes me feel like shit.

I need to focus on the positive.

I need to focus on the fact I’m not giving up.

I need to focus on the fact that I’m moving, I’m going somewhere where I WILL eventually feel be a much happier and better person, where I have a support system and people who love me unconditionally.

It gets better.

It has to.

It may take years, but I’ll get better.

Grounding

I already posted about therapy, but I wanted to make a separate post about this. One of the first things we addressed was the dissociative episode I had earlier this week. My therapist said there’s things we can do to handle this better so that it hopefully won’t happen again, or if it does, I can come back from it quicker.

For one, in EMDR, we’re going to have the tappers move a bit faster from now on. Just a little bit. My therapist also said we’ll do grounding exercises, stuff I can even do outside of therapy.

One of the ones she suggested is to look around the room and find 3 things you didn’t notice before. As well as focusing on what you can hear, what you are touching, etc.

Hopefully this will help if I have future dissociative episodes.

I’m trying to be less afraid of them.

I really suspect that I dissociated quite a bit in high school and when I was younger. It seems stupid that I’m so scared of it now…

I’m not sure if ‘scared’ is too strong of a word or not. What bothers me about the dissociative episodes I’ve had, is that they feel ‘weird’ to me and ‘not normal’. I find myself asking, “Why isn’t my chest feeling so tight that I can’t breathe? Why isn’t my throat closing up? Why am I not shaking? Why is my head not spinning with panicked thoughts, what if’s, and negative beliefs?”

For probably 5 years anxiety and panic attacks have been so much a part of my life that they’ve become my normal. I’m so used to being in a high state of anxiety, that it feels normal to me.

But the dissociating feels like the exact opposite of how I feel when I’m anxious. So this makes it not feel right. It feels alien, wrong, different.

I think I dissociated more when I was younger, because it was how I coped with living with my mom. I was a kid, I had no choice but to live with her and put up with the crazy. I was powerless. Helpless. The crazy went on almost every day. My mom’s bpd is almost always cycling.

Then I moved out. From what I can remember, the anxiety attacks started getting bad towards the end of high school and through college. I wasn’t living with my mom. I had breaks from the crazy. There was still trauma going on, but it was very different from the experience of living with my mom. When I think about it, it kind of makes sense. The headwrecking wasn’t constant, so I didn’t need to dissociate all the time, but I didn’t know WHEN the headwrecking was going to start up again so I became increasingly anxious.

Dissociation

I dissociated during therapy today. Not fun.

It still scares me. I don’t dissociate often. Anixety and panic attacks have become so much a part of my life they feel normal.

I felt light headed during therapy. I felt detached. My therapist was talking to me and I had an extremely hard time focusing on what she was saying. I felt blank. I remember feeling like… like her words were bouncing off a wall in my head and I only caught snatches of it.

I remember feeling like… almost like I wasn’t in her office, like we were in and open, empty, blank space. Now when I think about the session it feels fuzzy, it makes my head feel like a tv that’s showing static snow.

This sucks hard core.

It scares me so much.