When Memory Processing Develops like a Polaroid Picture
self portrait captured 12/2013
Our inner work does not necesarrily unfold logically or linearly. In the modern age we are used to our technology functioning in this simple and easy to understand way. Our own infomration processing sytem , doesn’t quite operate like a computer. does We are constantly taking in new information, experiences, ideas and storing them ..
For the several weeks prior to my EMDR training I had been reflecting on this photo and the period of my life that it represents. This image has been my google profile picture for the last several years and I never seemed to pay it much mind, yet now, all of a sudden, it seemed to stick out to me as if illuminated by a large, bright spotlight. I’d notice myself rolling this image around in my mind, contemplating how this younger version of myself has led me to the work I find myself doing now; both in terms of my inner self-healing work as well as in the career path I chose as a therapist.
I took this self portrait seven years ago, sick, sad and deep in my creative process. Using self portraits as my medium to portray my feelings to the world without really understanding what it was I was feeling in the first place. Emotions were something I could consciously understand but struggled to feel. All I felt was blah. A coarse, dry ugliness within me, I couldn’t even cry if I wanted to. But, with my photos I could at least portray the special way I saw my world. The way I framed my reality, naturally fixating on the perfect compositions of colors and lines. This was my way of communicating my feelings, or at least the best I could do.
For the last five years, I have felt infinitely more emotionally and physically sound. Finally after years of enjoying the beauty in life and adaptively expanding out of my previous life experiences I have come to a moment of reflection. A moment in which I feel called to remember the path up to this point in order to re-establish my tasks going forward. And so, here was this photo which I held with my recent work of attempting to more intentionally feel my feelings. For weeks I have been looking at this photo, feeling it’s importance yet somehow unable to fit the pieces together.
This weekend I attended an EMDR training- for those of you who don’t know, EMDR is a Therapy which is aimed at reprocessing memories that weren’t stored correctly and thus create negative beliefs and patterns we carry forward in our day to day life. As part of this training we had to experience EMDR as the therapist and as client. I decided to pick something mildly annoying that comes up now and then in my day to day life, not really wanting to go too deep in a training setting and not fully trusting I would have a significant experience. My session itself was interesting but didn’t necessarily feel groundbreaking. I traveled back through memories relating to my mom and being sick and sad growing up and ultimately had a deep intuitive feeling “it is all part of the plan. Have compassion”. I walked away from this experience feeling like my pain had not been linked to a more productive understanding of the situation. I thought “huh, interesting”, and continued on with my day.
It wasn’t until the day after my session, when I threw my back out putting my shoe on in attempt to head to day 3 of training, that things began to click into place. Suddenly I was completely unable to move, in exruciating pain- a pain I woudn’t be able to mitigate for a few days. My phsycal discomfort, inability to help myself, and the mental distress it yielded were suddenly a portal into the connection between my current reality and all that I did not get a chance to feel at the time this photo was taken. The golden thread that connected these two states was that which was being processed in my EMDR session the day prior. It was as if my EMDR session had opened up a door to material that had to be completely felt before it could be healed.
And so I cried, I wailed, I wept, it was a cry I was unfamiliar with, a level of grief that I had not yet enountered on my journey of on-boarding emotions. I felt it all. How my frustration with my mother was at the root due to her inabilty to hold my emotions. How I had shut down years worth on account of having no where to place them, no one to hold them. Now, I was safe enough to feel all that had yet to be felt. It was my responsility to feel it ro heal it. And so I did. I grieved for my 17 year old self, for my 12 year old self, for my 7 year old. I sat with the angst and shut down that I had captured in the image I could not get out of my head. With my tears I cleared. I moved energy out and I moved towards a new reality where I now knew how to navigate big emotions. No onger did I have to shove it down or neglect my process, now I had created a pathway to feeling & healing.
This is exactly how EMDR works. It opens us up to all of the moments & memories that have contibuted to a way of being that is no longer serving us. It allows us to see and be with all of those parts of self, to re-process their experiences. It empowers us to make a new choice, to write a new program & forge a new path forward. It does all of this so beautifully simply by engaging both cotexes of your brain in a beautiful, bi-lateral dance. And so, despite going into my own session a hesitant skeptic, on the other side I had renewed faith in this practice. A passion for its place in my tool kit. Revence for its power.