I love Hope!! I was really holding back on going on a ramble about how much I love this character but I can’t contain it anymore. I missed her soooo much last season and I’m so glad she’s back. Her storyline has been so good and it’s been amazing seeing her and Doc’s relationship grow through the struggles. The friendship she’s building and dealing with her grief, all of it has been so well done and I’m loving it. Also, she’s sweet underneath the slight roughness and she’s funny. Also, also, the actress who plays her does such an incredible job at it! Like yes, give me more Hope!

EMDR progress and gearing up for round 2

A friend I had treatment with at Hansa sent me that photo after I came down with Influenza B and it set back my progress significantly. I was doing great, seeing vast improvement in symptoms and feeling as though things were on the up. Then BAM, the flu just knocked me straight back down. I’m slowly regaining my strength though and have been back on my treatment for several weeks. The momentum I had on my treatment was lost too, and I’m finding the motivation to stick to ALL therapies quite challenging. I’ve been very honest with my Dr about this as my recovery from the flu has been slow and I’m struggling with other debilitating symptoms. Having 90% of my day centred around therapies with an energy level lower than I have experienced for quite some time is bloody hard. Especially when I went hard at it for 3 months straight. So I think I’ve done well considering.  I leave in less than 2 weeks, catching 3 flights to Wichita to go through 2 weeks of treatment again. Honestly, I have spent the last month or so not excited about this. My friends I met on my first trip have all had their second visits and I saw how hard it is. Although progress is made and they had great results, you kind of go back to square one. By that I mean that you will feel like shit again as they start working on your next target areas. First round I got a top 10 list of my “problem areas”. Parasites was my number one. I’ve spent the last 4 and half months “killing” the bad shit that came up in my top 5 and rebuilding the organs that were struggling the most. This time around, hopefully what were top priorities have been knocked off or significantly lessened and a new order of priorities will come up. This means starting to work on those and with that comes the heavy detoxing, herxing and struggles I previously faced first time around. It might be easier this time around, harder, the same, who knows. I just wasn’t pumped to go back to feeling like crap to get better when I have been given a taste of feeling somewhat “normal.” 

My excitement has increased over the last week or so though. I’m excited to continue my progress and get well. I’m excited take my mum and show her the place, meet my Dr, take her to some great restaurants, to wholefoods and have her experience what I did on my first trip. My mum and dad have been my biggest supporters through my entire journey of becoming ill and fighting to get well. I feel my parents will “get” better than anyone else in my life how amazing this place truly is for my healing. They are the only people who have witnessed every doctor’s appointment, every treatment, every test, every piece of bad news and been my carers for years on end.    EMDR UPDATE: I’ve completed 6 sessions now. I can’t give an overall picture of how much it has helped yet, but I can comment on the individual memories we have worked on. It hasn’t been easy and I’m proud of myself for talking about some of the worst parts of my life, really connecting with those memories and letting them go. Our brain is incredibly intelligent and finds all kinds of ways to protect us from our worst memories. You may not realise how much certain instances in your life have affected you as your brain can make that pain and suffering sub-conscious, store it in your organs or cells, but you will never feel it or be mindful of it consciously. It manifests and comes out in other ways though, that’s one of the contributing factors to becoming chronically ill. I spent a few years in my early 20′s struggling immensely with mental illness, suicide attempts, substance abuse, bulimia and self harm. It took me until the age of 24 to realise these were coping mechanisms for sexual assaults I had experienced at 19 and 21 and never properly processed. Consciously I felt fine about it and could shrug it off, but I obviously wasn’t fine. This is why I am mindful to not judge people for their self destructive behaviours, I have been there and what I needed was support through that, not judgement. I even told some (ex) friends of my horrible experiences when I was 19 and 21, hoping for them to understand why i was struggling so badly at that time, and I was met with ridicule. I was slandered on social media and named a “diseased slut” after I had been vulnerable in telling them things I had not openly shared with many. The way those ex friends treated me is something I will work on in EMDR next as it did affect me profoundly to be abandoned like that at my lowest moments. 

Anyway, in my last 4 sessions we worked on some big things. One was my abandonment issues from childhood. There is one circumstance in my life that I don’t wish to share details, but it has had a really profound impact on my adult relationships in a negative way. Working on abandonment in childhood can be your parents divorcing, someone close to you dying, a friend or family member moving away, falling out with friends and more. When we targeted a specific image of my memory that stood out the most and started processing it with a chosen phrase (I think it was something like “I’m not loveable” or “I am alone”), we began the EMDR process. I’m pretty sure I cried. Which is a good sign because I’m releasing emotions. We uncovered something quite profound in this memory too. That I felt fear. She had me really connect with my young self, even imagining adult me standing next to child me and watching me as a child process what was happening in front of me. This helped me realise the fear I felt in that moment. Fear of the unknown, not knowing what will happen next or what this all meant. You can liken this to parents divorcing and one moving out. A young child might wonder if that parent will ever come back or if they’ll get to see them again. Especially if nothing is said to that child to give them any kind of reassurance. That fear is why as an adult, I illogically predict abandonment from those I’m close to and the first sign of them leaving me, my brain switches to my fight or flight response, a primal instinct that bypasses all logical thought processes and I act out in destructive ways to “protect” myself.  Now, what that entire scenario is called, is a trauma loop. This is when a trauma has not been processed properly by the brain and is stuck in the part of the brain (the limbic system) that assesses threats on a primal level (activating the fight or flight response). This is subconscious and is activated before the logical part of the brain can assess what’s going on. Our thoughts, feelings, behaviours, everything that makes up who we are, are based on an entire lifetime of experiences our brain has witnessed and remembered. Our brain has countless video tapes stored in our subconscious. The problem with a trauma loop, or limbic system dysfunction, is that when a perceived “threat” similar to one we have experienced in childhood or adolescents happens in our current life, our limbic system kicks in. Alarm bells ring in our brain, our frontal cortex (ability to think logically) is completely bypassed and we are sent into our most basic instincts to do whatever it takes to protect ourselves. For example, in my adult life, a very non-threatening situation may occur but due to my sensitivity to abandonment, my brain picks it up as a similar situation to my childhood and does whatever it takes to protect me. Say my partner is flirting with someone else (which I consented to), or we have an argument and he becomes cold. Within a fraction of a second, my brain has processed the situation, gone into survival mode and sent out warning signals. My brain basically goes “WARNING! WARNING! THIS IS WHERE HE LEAVES YOU!!!! GET OUT NOW!” And my primal, uncontrollable instincts drive me to pick fights, lash out, push him away, end it first, anything it can to make sure I’m not “left” first and my childhood memory becomes recreated. Over the top right? Trust me I look like a crazy person when these triggers occur as my reactions are so over the top, but I can’t control them. These reactions really piss me off too because I don’t feel they are “me.” When they occur, I feel a huge rush of adrenaline, I say some really terrible things and you cannot reason with me. I have no remorse for my actions in that moment either. The next day, when my brain is no longer having a meltdown, I can reflect and realise what a crazy person I was.  Anyway, that’s my interpretation of what limbic dysfunction is. I have a bunch of these trauma loops that need processing to get the trapped and destructive emotion out of my body and to stop these episodes of “panic” and destructive behaviours when triggered. After we processed the aforementioned memory, we worked on something more current. I had a recent occurrence, which I also cannot give detail of. However I was very badly treated by someone I was close to and it left me feeling sooo angry, I couldn’t sleep and I was spending a great deal of time fantasising about some really messed up revenge. I explained to my psych what had happened and it was nice to have her agree that this person was in the wrong, but me being angry only hurts me. I know part of me likes to hold onto anger, I get some sort of subconscious satisfaction from it, so it took courage for me to say “I need to process this and let it go.” A third person was also involved in the situation, treated just a badly as I was and their reaction was nothing like mine. Because my anger to this situation was so high, it is attributed to a trigger from my childhood. She asked me how that situation and the way I was mistreated made me feel. I said “I feel like I don’t matter, because I was treated so badly and had no say in the outcome.” My psych said “think back to a time in your childhood where you were treated in a similar way and felt like you didn’t matter.” She eventually helped me remember a time in primary school where I had a teacher who didn’t like me (that’s how I remember it), as I would always put my hand up in class to answer a question and she never picked me. I got so upset by this that I cried about it one day and told my dad. I felt so rejected and invisible by my teacher. My dad went and spoke to her, she then had me answer every question that day and then went back to normal of never picking me (I say never because that’s what I’ve remembered, she may have picked me occasionally, but never enough for me to feel equal to my classmates). 

We processed that memory from my childhood to the point where I no longer had any emotion towards it. Then we moved back to my current memory with the person who recently mistreated me and processed that. My anger of the current memory started as an 8/10, I explained how my facial muscles were tight, jaw clenched, I made fists with my hands and my stomach hurt just thinking about it. Through processing it with EMDR all that tension in my body disappeared. My anger dropped to a 2/10 and we worked out why I was still holding onto that last little bit. I said I felt like this person acted like a 5year old in how they treated me, like a spoilt little shit who didn’t get their way and that pissed me off. So we processed that and I ended up laughing at the image of them acting childish in the memory and I was no longer angry. 3 weeks on from that session and I really don’t feel any anger towards that situation. I feel more of like a “meh,”it happened and I’m not really interested in thinking about it to be honest. 

In my last session we processed one of my sexual assaults. My psych said sexual trauma is one of the biggest things to process. I will warn you to read on if you are easily triggered by this. I started the session talking about how my anger in general was elevated and I was finding myself irritable, easily triggered and not excited to go back for treatment in a few weeks time. I also said that my mum would be coming with me for treatment and I’m not sure how she will cope with what the treatment does to my brain as it causes some severe mood swings, rage and I can basically become batshit crazy. My psych had an interesting analogy. I don’t believe it fully as I do think toxins in my brain contribute significantly to my unstable behaviours when going through treatment and detox. However, she said that my anger whilst going through treatment might be my bodies way of protesting the treatment as it did not ”consent” to it. Especially since I am triggered from sexual assaults (which I obviously did not consent to), anything my body experiences where it did not give consent, may result in backlash and resistance. I am consenting to the treatment logically, but I do know it may make me sick or create disturbances, so subconsciously or on a cellular level my body may hesitate or be angry about it. I thought it was an interesting way to look at it.  She had me pick which assault was the worst in my opinion. To which I picked the first one, when I was 19. I didn’t notice it initially, but I had shut down emotionally once we started talking about it. I told her it was something I didn’t want to work on and felt my brain going “RUN! RUN!” when she brought it up. If my brain was doing that, I knew that meant it was something I HAD to address. However, my subconscious defense mechanisms had kicked in and I became mechanical and emotionless in talking about it. She had me pick the worst part in the scenario, hold that memory with the phrase “I am worthless” or something like that. She did the first EMDR round and I could tell my whole body was stiff and shut down. She stopped to ask me how that was and I said “I have walls up right now I don’t know how to get them down.” I felt deep down my body wanted me to cry, it wanted me to process and let go of this memory, but the survival part of me was saying NO! and stopping any feeling coming through. Anytime I’ve talked about my assaults I become stoic and matter of fact. I did go through trauma counselling at 24, but I was only talking about what happened and trying to process it consciously. This doesn’t completely free you of the trauma as I still have triggers and my sacral chakra (connected to your sexual organs) functions very very low (which can be due to trapped trauma). My psych said we didn’t have to process this memory today as she doesn’t believe in pushing my brain further than what it can handle and if it’s protecting me, it’s doing it for a reason. In having her explain that, my walls somehow came down and I finally welled up with tears. I let the tears run down my face feeling relief and I explained that I had never cried about this memory before. Once the memory happened I blocked it out and even convinced myself that I gave consent when I really didn’t. I said to her “if I ever cried about this, that would have meant that it mattered and I didn’t want it to matter.” Through my tears I then felt anger towards the people involved, something I again hadn’t truly felt. I always felt a little bit of a “yeah that was a pretty shitty thing you guys did,” but this time I was thinking “you guys are the absolute scum of the earth, what kind of fucked up asshole treats another human that way? I hope karma has royally shoved a fist up your ass and fucked you hard.” It was nice to feel blame on them and not shame on myself for something that wasn’t my fault. Through processing the memory she even had me imagine lining up the men that hurt me and saying whatever I wanted to them. It was hard at first as I often fantasise about revenge but would never go through with it and saying mean things to people, if I ever do, leaves me with guilt once I’ve calmed down. She reminded me that this wasn’t real and it was important to say what I wanted to them in order to heal. It was actually really great. I spat in their faces, kicked them in the balls, called them very horrible names and told them how much they disgusted me. I got a lot of joy out of pretend abusing them, so she was right. 

In the last few rounds we did of that memory, my feelings of unworthiness sat at a 0-2 out of 7. I couldn’t commit to saying it was now a zero. She asked if it was because I was holding onto some anger as people who process assaults sometimes don’t want to fully let it go as they feel the person has then got away with it. It wasn’t that for me. I was worried of not fully processing it and still having some sort of trapped emotion linger and I not know. But she asked me a few clever questions and I worked out I really did feel a zero for the original statement we had created. We did one more round just for my piece of mind and OH! that’s when she said something really great. As I followed her fingers moving from side to side, she said “you’re free now.” For some reason those words felt so profound and uplifting, I thought “I AM! HOLY SHIT, I’M FREE!.” Thinking about that memory now, I don’t think I feel anything negative towards it. I don’t feel connected to it. It’s hard to explain. But the point of EMDR is to move the memory out of the trauma loop and into the memory bank of just “something that happened once,” so the brain no longer processes it as if it’s happening right now. It’s also to reprogram the feelings we had towards ourself in that memory and to feel something empowering and positive. The brain subconsciously thinking something negative or traumatic from the past is happening right now, is how triggers occur and our fight or flight response becomes activated in situations that in reality, are not harmful, or no where near to the extent our brain makes it out to be.  And that’s where I’m at. Thanks for stopping by :)