MY EXPERIENCE WITH EMDR THERAPY

I had 13 EMDR sessions. How did it go? I got a headphone and had to close my eyes. I had to recall and relive a specific traumatic event (trauma) from my past. At the same time I got an alternating tone in my ears. The tone was played first in my left and then in my right ear. The sound was constantly “jumping” from one ear to another. At the same time I was reliving my trauma. I felt fear, anger, anxiety, tense and many other nasty emotions. The “jumping” sound was very distracting. My concentration was constantly “jumping” from my emotions to the sound. I felt that spontaneously something was going on in my mind right at that moment. I also felt quite strange at the same moment. I still was in “the movie” of reliving and experiencing my traumatic event again but I suddenly felt a decrease of my heavy nasty emotions (like fear, anxiety, tense and my other reactions to trauma). This decrease went on with every downing tone, step by step from 100% to 80% then to 60% and finally to 20 %. At the end of the reliving my reaction to trauma almost disappeared. But at the same time another nasty feeling or a traumatic event spontaneously showed up. So I started reliving the next trauma.

This way I relived more than one trauma during one EMDR session. I could not do this every week, because it was too heavy for me. After one EMDR session I was worn out. I went home and got some sleep. It took some days (some weeks) before I had regained sufficient energy to do the next EMDR session.

It went very well until I could not remember another trauma anymore. It’s true that I had a lot of heavy nasty emotions like anger, sadness, guilt, anxiety, and stress, but I could not remember where these emotions were coming from. Some situations, someone’s words or acting spontaneously made me feel angry or I felt sadness or I repeatedly got intense feelings of annoyance and anxiety. I did not have any control of these reactions. They spontaneously arised and took control of me. I call these reactions ‘Philippe – reactions’. Actually these are automatic reactions (caused by trauma’s) to a ‘trigger’ in the present. I knew that these reactions came from different traumas (from my childhood) which I could not recall. There were so many traumas that I had to ‘forget’ them to be able to survive. My psychologist said that it is not possible to start with an EMDR session without having a recollection of a trauma. So I had to recall a specific traumatic event in order to have EMDR but I wasn’t able to recall anything at all. Consequently I had to stop with EMDR.

I knew that my ‘forgotten’ traumas are not really forgotten but they had been stored somewhere in a database of my subconsciousness. But how could I be able to access to my subconsciousness, I asked myself. I knew there must be a way to hack into my subconsciousness. And indeed I found a way to manage this. I call it Trauma-hunting, which is a part of my self-developed treatment called Mindfulness Based Trauma Treatment.

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