For the past nine months, I’ve been working on EMDR therapy.
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing, and can only be conducted by trained professionals.
The idea behind EMDR is that we store emotional memories (or T/traumas) in the body when we are unable to process them effectively — usually this is the case when we are young, or when the emotional burden exceeds our ability to cope.
These stored emotions show up in our everyday lives as highly charged responses to current stressors that remind the body of the original stressor.
For example: my Grandpa died when I was seven and I vividly remember my father sitting on our old brown couch to tell us. It was the first and only time I’d ever seen him cry, and his vulnerability was too much for me. Now, every time I see an old brown couch or witness a powerful man being vulnerable, my body moves into a reaction of discomfort or even fear. These associations (ie. an innocuous brown couch) may be so subconscious that we have no idea they are happening.
In EMDR, we reconnect to the memory of the original emotional wound and reprocess it by using bilateral stimulation to “rewrite” the emotional experience with a current sense of safety and groundedness.
Admittedly, I started doing EMDR skeptically, in the hopes that it would help my anxiety, which seemed to be attached to everything.
The first few times, it was just okay. I didn’t notice anything.
Then I had a session where I started talking about my grandparents, and I started crying out of nowhere. The tears kept coming, and I was overcome with sadness. But it wasn’t scary sadness — just raw, present emotion. I cried until I was exhausted. And then we did some grounding work and I moved on.
Things shifted after that.
I noticed something calmer in me, at times when I normally wouldn’t have been calm.
Yesterday, I had another session like that.
I mentioned that I keep getting triggered by something my daughter does, and that in certain moments I find myself spinning with frustration, unable to stop myself from feeling angry and powerless and resentful. I can feel that I’m in it, but I can’t get out of it.
My therapist had me free associate back to a related memory, and I noticed my mind going back to an event that occurred in 5th grade, when I was ten years old.
We did some reprocessing.
This was not a new memory — I have told this story in therapy many times before, and I think of it every once in a while as a non-event.
But yesterday, I suddenly felt the well behind my eyes.
I felt SAD. And angry. But mostly sad.
And I started crying.
The tears kept coming, like a faucet. I wasn’t sobbing, I was just feeling sad and leaking water from my eyes, as if the tears had been there this whole time and were finally able to get out.
This lasted for about fifteen minutes, and then washed away.
The session ended and I felt exhausted. But also like I had done something.
It feels like something leaves, and something opens up where it had been closed.
And why am I telling you this?
Because I think this is what sometimes happens in body image attacks.
I believe we have emotions that get stored in our bodies that are reactivated when our mind perceives something similar in our environment — so, for example, when we look in the mirror and feel the criticism of a parent, or the imagined rejection of peers, or the “other”ness of our body (as our culture has implanted so deeply within us), and it reminds our body of something older.
Our nervous system gets thrown back to an associated memory when that feeling of criticism, rejection, or other-ness was too big for us, when we felt it but had to stuff it down to cope.
These emotions want to get out.
I think body image healing can be a gateway to understanding what is locked inside, and inviting healing on a larger scale.
EMDR is not necessarily the answer for everyone, but I do believe that some level of seeing body image meltdowns as an accumulation of emotional suppression can help alleviate the responsibility of the body to carry the burden here.
It is about our body, and it is not about our body.
