There's all sorts of roads to healing. The older I get, the more I realise most of the healing is unravelling layers upon layers of trauma, conditioning, socialisation that renders one a bit of a mess, if one doesn't deal with it. For me, it has always been being bullied as a kid, at a time when I was learning about myself in the world. It's a trauma that has carried through right into adulthood, and the wound has been so deep it's been quite the battle to overcome. All the other stuff feels dealt with - and I've been through some dark stuff - but it's this one that still niggles. I can be fine for months and - bam! - something happens and I'm that young teenage girl again, sitting alone on a bench. It's impossible to know what that experience is like unless you've lived it.
That's kinda why I found myself on a chair with a woman waggling her finger in front of my eyes.
EMDR, or 'Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing' is therapy designed to assuage the trauma associated with painful memories that cause distress - think PTSD, child abuse, car accidents, violence. EMDR is meant to help access and process these memories to resolve them. Negative beliefs can be reformulated, and adverse responses in situations where they come up again via environmental stimuli is reduced.
So sitting in that chair, the idea was that I'd be in that situation again in brief, controlled doses, and focussing on the moving finger, the external stimuls. These lateral eye movements as I followed the finger were meant to help be access the memory, and process the information and form new neural pathways so that they were processed, and new insights gained. It's a kind of densensitisation.
As my psychologist explained to me, severe emotional pain can take forever to heal, but the mind can be given a chance to recover from physical trauma just like a cut finger. Say you keep poking at the cut finger, it's never going to heal. Same with the brain - similiar situations are like poking at the wound. EMDR helps the healing by helping it process information, bringing things into the right order and balance so that healing can take place. It's quite extraordinary.
So there I was, crying my eyes out in the chair.
I felt like I was 15 again, 16, 17. I was right there. I felt so darn sorry for that little girl carrying that big wound. I realised that one of the reasons I went into teaching was to help the little girl who needed people to have her back. There were a lot of revelations that were quite extraordinary - my mind was suddenly making sense of my life in a way that it hadn't really before. It made sense of the way healing isn't about fixing - it's about integrating life experiences.
It's been a long time since that first session, and I'm yet to go back for more (it's quite expensive) - and it has been difficult to articulate. In fact, when I came out, I went straight onto HIVE and wrote it as a stream of consciousness, as if wasn't me but a character I was writing about. It felt so raw and emotional that I couldn't quite admit that this had happened to me.
And what came out was a bit of an adaption anyway, all wet creative licence. But it's as close to as I can get it, and it helped. I've been trying to get back in to see her, but she's booked out til the end of the year, so I'm on a wait list. Why? COVID is throwing up some stuff for people. A lot of people. People need to integrate what's shown up this past year or so.
These layers are deep, and sometimes the wound is part of who you are and allows your best self to come into being. But still, I still need to hug that little girl that won't let go of her the wound mapped on her brain from those tormentors long ago. The experience is yet to fully integrate.
What Happened In the Chair
And what do you see now?
I’m in my bedroom, and I’m 16 years old. On the right side are the windows and the bookshelf and I’m playing PJ Harvey. To bring me your love – she howls and screams and I am so lonely, so lonely. I’m conscious of Mum in the kitchen, cooking us a meal – we’ll sit together and eat and I’m conscious that I am loved. But I’m so alone. Today someone handed around a pack of 24 photographs, printed at the pharmacist. It is full of smiling girls and I sifted through them and there I was, in one photo only, an accidental snapshot. To the left are a conspiracy of girls, poorly but perfectly framed, at least in the way my brain is making sense of how it was, back then – there I am, an outside, eating my sandwich on the periphery, trying to figure out how I can fit in. Feeling devastated when I think I am, but realising it is always betrayal. That’s the way teenage girls are. They pull and push you, promise and poke you, undo you. Oh you smiling girl, I think, where did you go?
It hammers in my chest, as if it’s beneath my ribcage pushing outward. She tells me to let it go. I realise I can’t. I can cry, but my jaw tightens, containing it as much as I’m able, because I have always tried to keep it in. It hurts. I’m gulping tears and sniffing snot. She tells me to let it go. And I am, but realise I’ve never let it fully go, because that mean I would disintegrate, on a cellular level. The deep patterns of the deepest parts of my mind have been working hard to hold this self together. Perhaps lifetimes.
And what comes up for you now?
I’m pedalling past the milkbar on my bmx and he’s calling that name again. The one that makes me something I’m not – a hole, a shameful hole to be filled with their contempt and ridicule. And I’m so angry I about-pedal, walk into that ‘80’s milkbar past the refrigerator of Lucozades and Ribenas and Big M’s and past the sunnyboys in the freezer to the counter where litres of blue heaven, chocolate and fake banana syrup line up like skittles, where the cold steel of the milkshake machine needs at least a cursory wipe of ice-cream fingerprints, and I order a milkshake container full of milk please, yes that’s right, just milk, no icecream or syrup, and I walk back out into the hot, hot day – the kind of day that curdles milk so it’s vinegary and sour – and walk through a fog of anger toward the group of boys and girls alike, sitting their with their coca cola and redskins, and stare him straight in the eye and say:
‘Don’t you ever fucking call me that again’.
He doesn’t. By Monday everyone has heard the story and look at me with respect. The names abate, the friendships are re-made, at least for now, until I grow too old and too intelligent and too inquisitive about life to want to be in their parochial small minded enclave of babies and marriages and never going anywhere.
But thirty years will pass, and that child alone on the bench is still with me, and I cry for her – her lost innocence and joy de vivre, the moments she realised that people could be cruel, and dark shames could wear away at your insides and cause you to do shameful things to be rid of them.
The unconscious mind simmers, bubbles floating to the surface, the brain reorganising itself.
And what comes up for you now?
The panic and defensiveness wild emotion knocking at my ribcage has solidified into anger now. I’m fucking furious. What happened was unjust and cruel and unfair. I’m rattled by this anger but at the same time there’s a sense of ah! There you are! It’s as if the anger had been hiding underneath that upset all along, and the best way for me to deal with anger was to mask it with sadness and self-doubt and deep, deep sorrow instead. I realise how often I can be angry, as if I don’t know what to do with it. As if I’m not allowed to feel it.
And what comes up for you now?
Beside me is a ticking clock. On the mini sound system the sitar drifts over. I close my eyes and breathe. I am in infinite space. I am outside time. It is all very far away.
And what comes up for you now?
I’m fucking angry.
And what comes for you now?
I’m fucking angry.
And what comes up for you now?
I’m so sorry for her. I’m so sorry for her. I’m so sorry for her. I tell her that she is loved. That she is who she is. That she is who she is. That she is who she is. That she is loved how she is. That she is loved just the way she is. That she is beautiful and loved. I don’t want to let her go. I can’t let her go. She’s been with me lifetimes. There’s that me, isolated, ostracised, alone in a bedroom listening to PJ Harvey. ‘I was born in a desert, been there for years…’
And what comes up for you now?
I like my freedom because I feel safe there. I don't like to commit to friendships because I don't understand the demands. I am alone because I choose to be, but I love and need people too. Everything is duality.
And what comes up for you now?
Space. Infinite space. A galaxy of stars. The wounded healer. The knowing that my greatest weakness is my greatest strength.
And what comes up for you now?
The cosmic joke. It’s all ridiculous. This – investment in the self.
And what comes up for you now?
Kali Durga. PJ Harvey singing
I'll tie your legs
Keep you against my chest
Oh you're not rid of me
Yeah you're not rid of me
I'll make you lick my injuries
I'm gonna twist your head off, see
And what comes up for you now?
I scan my body from head to fingertips to belly to toes. The anger still knock knock knocks at my ribcage but there’s a feeling in my pelvis, wildfire, orgasmic, pulsating womanhood. Ah, there you are my love. There’s a strong sense of the divine feminine, of blood lines and blood and sex. It’s powerful and intense – so intense I gasp. I realise I act from this place, of strength and visceral womanhood. A kickass don’t fuck with me or fuck me but it’s my choice fuck with me. I am so damn strong. I’m milk shakes thrown over the boys in the yard strong. There’s the times I used it in the shameful ways but mostly the times I used it in powerful ways, in admirable ways, in a damn girl, this is who you are way, a grit teeth determined way.
And what comes up for you now?
And now?
And now?
