River of Time by Naomi Judd & Marcia Wilkie

Author:Naomi Judd & Marcia Wilkie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, Psychology / Psychopathology / Depression, Self-Help / Depression, Medical / Mental Health, Psychology / Mental Health
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2016-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

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Through an additional therapy called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), I delved into the traumas that came from feeling a lack of attachment. EMDR is a therapy technique that uses the natural way our eyes move in REM sleep to process traumatic feelings and memories that our brain is unable to process during sleep, which is when we are usually able to resolve our feelings about an experience. However, if the experiences are extreme and traumatic they get stored in the nervous system and repressed from our consciousness. They are still there, inside of us, along with every sight, sound, and smell associated with the traumatic experience, and can replicate the original stress response every time they surface. These unprocessed emotions and memories create disturbances in the normal function of emotions. EMDR is seen as breakthrough therapy in unlocking the traumatic memory and moving it out of the nervous system and into a normal memory that isn’t fraught with the original feelings of danger.

As it turns out, I have many, many memories that I had locked away because, for much of my life, I had no way to express my emotions to someone I could trust. Most of my memories were heavy and traumatic, but they don’t have to be. Even something that appears to be a simple life experience can hold a feeling of trauma that gets suppressed. For example, it could be an incident as fleeting as being embarrassed in front of the classroom once as a child. No one else remembers it, but you may have stored it away and it still affects your belief system about your intelligence.

I was able to process some traumas that I had remembered for many years, but whose ability to affect me I thought I had gone beyond.

The worst memory to process through EMDR was finally dealing with a horrible time when I was so desperate to have the feeling of being loved by someone, I unwittingly put my children and myself in a path of danger I honestly didn’t see coming. My shame about this time period, in my mid-twenties, was so overwhelming I had pushed it far down into my subconscious. Even though I had spoken of it in public once or twice, in sympathy with women who needed sheltering from abuse, it was as if I were telling someone else’s story, certainly not my own. I had never processed the lasting trauma of being punched, hit, and raped by a guy on heroin whom I dated in 1972.

Unbeknownst to me, he had bipolar disorder, which I had no clue about until years later, when I had more understanding of various mental illnesses. Early on in the relationship, he was full of love and passion, a talented artist and poet, and very protective and attentive to Wynonna and Ashley. In my fantasy, he was a charming knight in shining armor. Then, after a period of time, the gate started to swing in a different direction and he became full of jealous rage for a day or two.

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