EMDR WOW

To illustrate the power of EMDR, I’d like to disclose my own healing experience. Actually I’ve had a few amazing EMDR experiences, but the most recent feels like the most powerful. Because of childhood mother-daughter dynamics I’ve spent most of my life feeling like what’s inside me is threatening. As a child I sensed that connection was scary for my mother, so I stayed away emotionally. I knew subconsciously that disclosing, sharing myself would frighten my mother. So I hid.

Recently I’ve been feeling 1) that I’ve been “coming into my own” — finding success in love and work, and 2) feeling physically like I’m falling apart! I set out time this morning to become my own client; I put my hands on my body to sense what was going on physically and emotionally. I did not back away from the feeling of anxiety that I felt in my gut/belly. After a while I realized, understood, that what I was fearing was that I would hurt someone by disclosing/sharing myself. I realized that subconsciously I feel that sharing myself would poison my mother/partner/friend/other.

Then the EMDR; I brought up the feeling of being poisonous, bilaterally tapped on my thighs, and KNEW that the truth; that what I have to share, what’s inside me is love, enlightenment, and caring. Not poison! EMDR helped me FEEL the truth and overcome my irrational fear. Wow.

Revelatory rant

I’m going to try something new. Baring my soul here; because I need to. No lovely pictures, no call to action, just venting. But I do hope that you might learn something or gain some insight about yourself….

My own healing goes hand-in-hand with the healing I try to bring to my clients. I learn how to “work with” myself by working with my clients, and I learn how to work with my clients by working with and on myself.

So, here’s what I learned recently and what may resonate with some of you.

I have spent most of my adult life untangling my relationship with my mother. I have realized that on a subconscious level, she wanted me to fix her. She thought that a girl child could unlock her heart. She soon realized, though, that that wouldn’t work. She was too fearful to connect; what was comfortable for her was to detach. Because that desire was never articulated, it took me a while to understand it. I did understand it, as a child, on a subconscious level however. Because ultimately I could not unlock her heart, because she was too fearful to connect, what my mother needed from me was for me to be silent, to disappear. So I disappeared. I’ve spent a lot of my life treating myself like my mother treated me — subliminally silencing myself, or shaming myself for having feelings and desires.

What I do with my clients and what I tried with myself recently was this; instead of shaming my own wounded child, I listened to her. Instead of treating my subconscious urgings as the enemy, I dialogued with it. What I realized was that my shaming part (the part of me that sounds like my shaming mother), is, and has been care-taking my mother! I have internaized my mother/daughter dynamic inside myself. I have an inner little sad little girl and I have an internal mother that silences that sad little girl.

I now FEEL the love and compassion I felt for my mother, that unfortunately drove me to negate myself in an attempt to comfort her. Sacrificing myself to save my mother? A Christ-complex?

What will help me going forward will be to know myself as a deeply empathetic and loving person, not as a dysfunctional, self-censoring, stuck person. To empathize with myself, know that I loved and wanted to heal my mother. I will stop blaming myself for shunning myself; I have shunned myself (subconsciously) to please my mother. How loving (but sad) is that?