First EMDR Session

I had my first EMDR therapy session last week.  If you don't know what EMDR is, I'm not sure I can explain it very well. Basically you bring up issues you are struggling with and through rapid eye movement, create new paths to help you resolve the issues.

I didn't know what to expect with this or how I would react to it, but I've been dealing with this crap for so long I didn't really care. I just want to stop feeling miserable with every thought I have.

First I picked a negative feeling that I experience frequently (feelings of worthlessness and not being good enough) and brought up experiences that have triggered those feelings one at a time.   I processed the experience by talking through the thoughts I have about it while I rapidly follow my therapists fingers back and forth with my eyes.

Let me just tell you this exercise left me DRAINED for two days!  It was emotionally painful and exhausting. I felt sick to my stomach, my eyes hurt and it made me dizzy to type on a computer screen the day I did the therapy. I'm not going to lie, it freaking sucked!  For two days, almost everything I did or thought created an intense emotional reaction. At one point I started balling when I put on a pair of shorts.

My therapist noticed a couple things. She noticed that I would get stuck at the same spot with each experience I processed. Before I would find the positive in the experience, I got stuck at the bottom of the negatives. This happened with four of the five things I processed. The last thing I processed, I couldn't pull myself out of. This was the struggle I have with losing weight. I can't do it. I self destruct and tell myself horrible things every time I try.

The other thing my therapist observed is that I have intense negative emotional reactions to every feeling I experience - good or bad.  If I'm having good feelings, I talk myself down from them and if I'm having bad feelings, I let them have free reign in my head.

I'm not doing the best job of communicating what an impact this therapy had on me. I wish I could. I wish I would have written down what was going through my head that day, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I've been meaning to write about for a week, but this is the first opportunity I have felt strong enough to do it without falling apart.

I'm not looking forward to my next session. As a matter of fact, I'm dreading it. I have a feeling the closer next Tuesday comes, the more anxiety I will have. This experience was so difficult I question whether I want to do it again. But, when I look at the alternative of continuing to feel like crap every time I try to experience an emotion, it's about as equally painful as the sessions. The only difference is that going through these sessions will hopefully help stop all the awful emotions.