It’s been a while. I had decided to move all my writing over to Substack, but I changed my mind, and I am coming back here for the more personal/intimate stuff, because maybe I can anonymise this eventually?
Trigger warning: I am going to be talking about domestic abuse and shit like that…
Anyway… I am not back to write about me finding a pseudonym or anything like that (if you want to know, I already have one!), I am here to write about some memories that have resurfaced because of EMDR.
For those of you who haven’t heard of EMDR, it’s a type of therapy that is used to help people with ingrained trauma. It’s really effective, and pretty simple when you think about it. It involves bilateral stimulation of your brain to allow you to process memories (or at least that is the very selected, edited highlights!)
It’s bloody amazing… But it also stirs up one hell of a shit storm, and this week’s session did just that.
One of the things that I wanted to work on was the trauma I have suffered at the hands of abusive partners. I’ve written about some of it before, but this session was different somehow. Probably because around 13 years of marital abuse were condensed into a ninety-minute session. Let me tell you here, and now, that is a LOT.
I am a seasoned user of therapy; I’ve had shit loads of it over the years. CBT, talking therapies, you name it; I have probably done it! But the problem is, if you have deep-seated trauma, talking about it doesn’t shift it. EMDR does, but we didn’t process anything this week, and that is why it was hard.
Not really the content; I’ve talked about my exes before. Whilst I think they hold no power over me, they do. But recounting the memories, the abuse and the scenes was not the issue. My therapist’s jaw was dropping further with every sentence, so you know it was deep stuff; but somehow that was ok.
No, what killed me was being told that I have PTSD.
And, before I carry on, I know this to be true.
I work in a CIC now, and we’re a trauma-informed organisation. I understand about trauma. I have studied neuroscience. I know things about brains. I know all of this, yet when she said I had PTSD, my heart stopped.
Me? PTSD? Nah… Except I do, don’t I?
This smorgasbord of abuse was over the course of two relationships, and the way they metered out their aggression was different. No 1 was all about my intelligence, the fact that I was stupid (I am really not; my IQ is a fair bit higher than average); No 2 was all about sport and his team winning… But the outcome for me was always the same.
I was terrified.
I STILL struggle to watch a Spurs game. I struggle with England games too, even the friendlies. Because they were all flash points. I used to leave my own house on a Saturday morning and come back later in the afternoon to either a drunken rage, or an explosive rage later in the day…
I look at me now, and I think that I am quite streetwise for a 53 year old female. I rarely get intimidated by men. I stand my ground. I can hold my own in a discussion on politics, football, music, you name it… But…
If someone insults my intelligence, I come out swinging, not just a little bit, but full-on fight mode. The same if someone starts shouting at the football in a certain way… I WILL lose my shit. I shout. It comes out like machine gun fire. I have no idea it’s happening, then all of a sudden I realise, and then have the deepest regret you could ever imagine.
For that split second I am transported back to one of those two relationships, and I am terrified of what will come next. I do the only thing I can, and that is to defend myself with my words. But the problem is that I am fighting a ghost. The situation my brain sees, isn’t the one I am sat in.
It leaves the person with me in as much shock as I am; and I hate myself for it.
That is PTSD in action.
I am currently reading The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, MD. The opening chapter talks about him working with veterans from the Vietnam War. Their experiences, albeit completely different to mine, result in much the same behaviour.
The thing to note here is that we’re very good at minimising our own trauma.
I did it in my EMDR session, when I was discussing the book above (it was recommended by my therapist). She set me straight for doing that, which was quite right. Just because I wasn’t fighting the Viet Cong doesn’t mean I couldn’t be traumatised.
Every single day for 13 years, I was living in a war zone behind my own front door. I lived on adrenaline for all that time, and it took it’s toll on me.
So as I sit here now, listening to Headhunter, I am taken back to a time, in the early 90’s before I got married… The funny thing was, in the session before, we discussed another abuser. It wasn’t a long relationship. He kinda came and went really quickly. It was around the time that I would have been dancing to Headhunter on a weekly basis.
He was my first abusive relationship.
He would only have sex with me when he was drunk. He told me that I needed to lose weight. I needed to go to the gym so that I would look like Red Sonja. Admittedly, Brigitte Nielsen was bloody hot in that film, but she’s not really the point, is she?
I wasn’t massively overweight. I was fitter than I had ever been (leaping around a dance floor for hours and walking everywhere does that to you), so he had no right to say those things.
But in my early 20s I had no idea that it was abuse.
We processed that memory, and instead of listening to his abuse, I walked off. My red hair flowing behind me (because it was long and wild back then).
My brain voluntarily changed the script on that one!
That one event holds no power over me anymore. The result is that there is more congruence between the external version of me and the internal one. I have noticed I am walking taller, I am saying sorry less, and I don’t feel like I need to be someone else to please others… That’s got to be a win!
I don’t think there are many more EMDR sessions to go. Just this week’s information to process, then one or two more to cover one more thing. That is the big one. The thing that I never really talk about. But we’ll save that for another day. Then I feel like this round of EMDR will be done. I am sure there’s more to come, though; there always is, right?
… and because we always have to have some reference to the song…
One, you lock the target
Two, you bait the line
Three, you slowly spread the net
And four, you catch the man
… it kinda works for EMDR too!
Not Middle Aged 