My story may sound familiar. From the outside, I looked like I had everything going for me. I had friends and teachers that looked up to me, I dominated the pitcher’s mound as a Fast Pitch starting pitcher. I earned straight A’s with barely a hint of homework or effort. I was voted 8th grade Student of the Year. I had a great home life. I was told repeatedly that I was beautiful. I even had a strong faith in God.
But something very insidious, very sneaky, started to take root inside my mind around 6th grade. Though I was always considered shy, people didn’t know that I was actually petrified to speak to many people unless I felt entirely safe with them. That I felt different. What I didn’t understand was that my shyness was progressing into social anxiety, a disorder that can be physically incapacitating.
I began to feel like something was very, very wrong with me. The intense anxiety was building up inside me while my outside walls blocked any evidence that anything was wrong. I mastered the perfect front. But anxiety has a way of partnering up with depression, and soon the ugly feelings of unworthiness, hopelessness and lack of joy in things I used to love to do started to take over my entire personality, my every thought, my entire life experience.
And I still hid it, until I couldn’t hide it anymore. “It” had taken control of me. And I exploded. I fell apart, and when I mean “fell apart”, I mean I reached a point, to the utter surprise of family and friends, of not wanting to live any longer. I had already begun cutting as a coping mechanism, and the deadly storm of depression rushed into the lives of me and my family as if overnight.
It was so bad, that I could no longer go to school. I literally woke up on a Monday morning and my seemingly “regular” life that I had been faking, crumbled at my feet. I just could not take one more painful breath in this condition and or in this life. I needed help. And I needed it badly.
By then, it was hard to imagine that anything could change. That my life would ever be any different. Depression has a way of convincing you that this is all there is, and my journal entries and drawings continually displayed the suicidal ideations and craziness that had hijacked all my rational thoughts, as did the self induced scars on my 14 year old body.
So naturally, my parents sprung into action, doing every possible thing they could. They read every book, they found the best psychiatrist and therapist. They signed me up for group therapy. I attended bi-weekly CBT and DBT therapy sessions. I attended two weeks of outpatient care, and had all sorts of med cocktails thrown my way.
But I continued my downward spiral, until I wrote my 5 page suicide note. I was ready to leave this world. But I did not go through with it for one reason only. I loved my family and I knew it would destroy them.
It took this suicide attempt for my incredible therapist to recommend I stop CBT and DBT talk therapy with her and enter into a more intense form of therapy called EMDR. At this point, I didn’t care. I let my parents call the shots because they had so much more to lose than I did (so I thought), and I just followed along with my self-hatred and self-abuse that I had made my close companions.
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s quite incredible actually, and has been used for PSTD war veterans. But over the last several years, it has been found to be very effective for any type of stress, phobia or disorder. Without overcomplicated it, EMDR therapy is where you basically sit with a licensed EMDR therapist and work on each individual negative thought, memory or trigger as a bi-lateral sound is pulsating in your ear phones. These sounds travel through your brain’s hippocampus to your frontal lobe, where all rational thinking takes place.
See, the problem with the millions of us who suffer from stress, anxiety and/or depression, is that it causes our hippocampus to shrink. As a result, our emotions and thoughts remain stuck in the lower part of our brain, also known as the “fight or flight” part of the brain. Unhealthy neuropath ways are created in which we experience life and jump to an immediately negative emotion or thought, because we literally cannot reach the rational part of our brains when it matters most!
EMDR allows you to reach the rational side of your brain for that entire hour you are experiencing the therapy. And before you know it, you are creating NEW neuropath ways to the rational part of your brain, and your hippocampus actually INCREASES in size. And it happens in a much, much quicker way than traditional talk therapy.
Since I began attending EMDR therapy, I have been tackling the self-abusive thoughts such as “I am ugly”, “I am worthless”, and “I am stupid”, to name a few. These thoughts are being replaced (through actual neuropath way communication with my frontal lobe) with “I am comfortable in my own skin”, “I matter”, and “I can do what I want”. But unlike talk therapy where you repeat these affirmations until they ring hollow, in EMDR therapy you BELIEVE them. Big difference! I am also learning how to heal myself, as opposed to merely learning how to cope with depression and anxiety. I have a long road ahead of me, since I have to divorce myself from the abuser I have allowed to reside in my head for at least the last 3 years. But, I have already eliminated almost all my medications, bravely lightened my hair and am wearing more fashionable clothing (as opposed to hiding in sweat pants), am slowly talking to strangers while maintaining eye contact, and I have a goal of returning to high school next semester. As a matter of fact, my EMDR therapist will be holding my sessions IN MY HIGH SCHOOL, exposing me to one of my sources of major anxiety while being able to reach the rational side of brain. I have also refrained from self harm for two months!
I can’t wait to see where the next year will take me, and what kind of person I will become as I begin to replace my destructive thoughts and perceptions with healthy, positive ones. I do have hope now. I do have setbacks, but I am able to cope much better. I have also seen my mood start to change, and I am averaging more happy feelings than sad ones, which is something medication was not doing at all.
And don’t be scared. You can’t do this wrong! You lead the session, because your thoughts that are reaching your frontal lobe are driving the session, revealing new “truths”. In other words, your own brain is correcting itself, verses having a therapist or self-help book tell you what you should be thinking.
If you are interested in EMDR therapy, google “EMDR THERAPISTS” in your city. Many accept insurance. You can also watch the 20/20 episode on EMDR on YouTube, or join various EMDR Facebook sites to learn more.