EMDR and Emotional Freedom Technique

EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique are two types of therapy that I have used with positive results. I worked with a woman who was certified to use EMDR, through an entire year to eradicate several very difficult memories and flashbacks that had caused me unrelenting emotional pain for two decades. Through systematic attention to proper technique and unraveling the layers that were attached to one particularly violent event, I was finally freed from a flashback's hold. It doesn't normally take that long to work out of a flashback. It normally takes fewer than 5 sessions to resolve things. I'm just a stubborn subject! I am forever in the debt of Cathy A., my EMDR therapist, for persevering with me. For those who think that EMDR is like hypnosis, as a first hand participant, I can say that it is in no way like hypnosis!

EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique, what I prefer to call "tapping for calmness," is a great technique to learn to help yourself wherever you are to remain calm and quickly stop reactions from within from overwhelming you. Its based on the ancient knowledge of energy meridians in the body. By tapping with one or two fingers in a sequence over meridian points, mainly on your arms, trunk, neck and face, and repeating calming, assertive messages, you can change the negative feelings to more positive ones. I think it would be a great technique for anxiety prone kids to learn - they'd see that they could have control over something that they thought was beyond their control.

You can learn more about both of these techniques by clicking on them in the Resources for Recovery list.
I especially encourage those who suffer from PTSD to seek out a trained EMDR practitioner and start getting relief!

Fight, Flight, Freeze or....Fragment?

WARNING: POSSIBLE TRIGGERING MATERIAL HERE FOR MILITARY FOLKS

When reading about PTSD the usual stuff mentions the natural responses to a perceived threat to physical survival: fight or flight. The more detail-oriented writings also include Freeze in the choice of natural responses, such as when animals in the wild will freeze like a statue, when they sense a predator is near. Their predators see best when there is movement. Freezing or playing dead will let the predator not see them and move on to other prey.

I think, though, that there is a fourth natural response to threat, and that fourth is fragment (or dissociation.) A person in a situation, say a soldier in a fire fight, runs out of ammo, his fellow soldiers have perished around him, he cannot escape for all the ammo of the enemy flying around, and he damn sure can't freeze and still survive. His fourth option is to select the element or elements in his experience that are impeding on his ability to act (a thought, his grief over the loss of his friends, or perhaps sensory data -smells, sounds, the way the light shines on something, etc.) These get chopped up, fragmented and moved to separate places in their mind for later review and reunification. It needs to be moved so the task at hand can be done, and personal survival assured. If the review and reunification cannot be done soon, and more situations are encountered which also require fragmenting for survival, then PTSD takes hold.

Yes, dissociation is at the beginning of the spectrum that includes PTSD. But somehow it is still seen as an aberrant response, instead of a natural one. I recall hearing that some large animal keepers explain elephant rages as PTSD. If we would think of fragment as a fourth response to the threat of physical survival (trauma) then animals, being a part of the natural world and having that basic survival instinct too, may indeed have occasion to develop PTSD. I think Fragment should be added as the fourth survival response. What do you think?

Cellular memory?

No, not cell phone batteries. I'm thinking about biochemical cellular memory, and to what extent its possible that cellular processes are conditioned along with the cognitive and emotional processes. My abuse began in early infancy. At that age a human is finely tuned to their body and its every subtle detection of temperature, pressure, vibration, taste, smell, sound, light, and internal pings and pangs of hunger, thirst, and gastric events. Babies bodies are just one big cellular recorder!

I find that there are certain foods that when I eat them trigger some inner disturbances and flashbacks.
Usually its sugar. If I eat too much, my baby part starts to jabber internally. (She also jabbers when I'm stressed or when I feel I've made a mistake that could be trouble for me.) But its really curious that sugar would trigger that part out of silence. I'm building off some other writers ideas and publications that discuss sugar and chocolate as drugs- chemicals that alter mood. And also using what I read in Candice Pert's book, Molecules of Emotion. If I remember it right, she posited that emotions have a chemical signature. So, stay with me, if sugar and chocolate alter mood, could it be that their chemical structure is the same or similar to certain emotions? By eating the sugar, I am bringing into my body the chemical structure that matches the emotional or cellular memory that was laid down at the original abuse time. Like nicotine and other hard drugs restructure the brain, the emotions during traumatic events also do it, so that whatever resembles or matches those emotions will cause the same response or reaction.

I need to work on this a lot more to be clear about what I am really thinking. I just know that for me sugar intake has the same result as other stressful triggers. I know that the cells in my body react instantly, faster than cognition, more like part of the involuntary nervous system. There's a new scientific field that studies this stuff - psycho neurobiology, or something like that.

Quitting your job- enlightenment or just another cycle in DDNOS?

As creatures of habit, we grow used to situations that are less than comfortable, less than tolerable, because the stability and predictability are more assuring than change. In the last 6 years I have become more in need of stability and predictability than I used to be. Getting older, I suppose. It also has me tied to the habit of enduring (employment) situations where I later find myself feeling trapped, and needing escape. This becomes a constant hum internally, with a part of me screaming deep inside- a separate little piece of feeling existing, a token of one of my real feelings, disconnected so that it can't rise up and become audible. With DDNOS and PTSD, I'm not really sure if I'm seeing clearly or reacting to something that resembles situations in the past. Situation(s) that because they happened so often and were so traumatic, were sort of fused into my nervous system and lead me to see negative when others may not, see danger where others may not. I end up doing a head trip on myself, engaging in the same second-guessing that my abuser employed to control me.

Enduring. So, instead of anyone hearing my inaudible screams, people at work see my smiling or scowling face engaged in completing the current task at hand. And instead of doing anything to get out from the unpleasant situation that triggers my need to scream internally, I stay put. Endure. Tell myself that I'm an adult now, and adults sometimes have to be places and among people who aren't so nice to be around, like upper level management, and crazy customers. There are bills to pay, and a pet to feed - job brings in money for those things. And I keep enduring because I hesitate to over-react to something that society in general would call "normal." I know the truth of the situation for me emotionally, but don't know intellectually where the line is before I should give up, and walk out. This habit of enduring is a carry-over from childhood, when everything had to be endured, and nothing was to be heard, seen, admitted to, or discussed. Keep it all under wraps, protect yourself by enabling and protecting the abuser. Stockholm syndrome, home-brewed.

If the only feeling I felt is trapped, it would have been easy to walk away. But there are also other feelings-of satisfaction for completing tasks, self-esteem about being able to multi-task, pride in helping others and belonging to a group. Its not all internal screaming. So that makes it more difficult for those of us who did not get to learn the full range of human feelings at the regularly appointed developmental stages. In my teens, I only had about three feelings which I knew how to identify internally: sadness, shame, and righteous indignation, well, OK guilt, too - four. It was only after years of psycho-therapy that I was able to expand my range of recognition to include how it was to feel happiness. I was 23 years old the first time I could feel and identify my feeling "happy." Without skills to discern your own feelings, delay in acting for one's own best interest is the norm, and is detrimental to success.

This conflict I've been having between the internal scream and the other positive feelings continued over three years. For two years I have been applying at other companies to have an external excuse for escape. No bites. Then one bite and an interview that bit back! No external power was going to make a decision I needed to make myself. And then it happened, as it inevitably does, on its own timetable, the "seeing clearly" moment finally hit me. I saw the future to be a repeat of the past three years. Nothing would change except that I'd be asked to do even more work with the same pay and no one to delegate to. My subconscious shined a clear bright light on the situation, and said NOW, now is the time to say enough. Now is the time to go. So I calmly updated the resignation letter that has stood ready in My Documents, and handed it to my supervisor. Three weeks and I'm gone. Without other work, without a plan. And it felt great- a huge relief! The internal screaming stopped, and cheering began. I smile all the time now. It has revived me. Somewhere inside there is a sober voice saying "you know this might not be easy? Are you really ready for the consequences?"

I still feel too good to begin the analytical deconstruction of this momentous action. I know it is inevitable that I will one day in the near future have another bright light moment where I ask myself "why did I think it was such a good idea?" Truth is, 'this quit your job, and do something else', is part of my cycling. Cannot stay in any one full-time job for more than 4 years. Can do longer if its part-time and I can change locations or departments yearly. If I am stable in a job, then I move my home a lot. Last year I bought a condo, now that it is the stability, I am compelled again to change my job.

I know that this need for change is rooted in my need for chaos, to keep things moving so that the serious hurt and full power of my past won't take center stage. Keep something active in an extreme enough way that I will focus my "survival" energy on it, and not have to have unsolvable psychological and emotional things rise to the surface, causing trouble. Yes, I've only grown to a certain level in all the years I've had therapy. Feel that my choice always has to be survival over healing, for the healing process requires falling apart, and as a self supporting single person, falling apart isn't compatible with making a living. DDNOS does not qualify for disability!

Fighting the diagnosis

In the early 1990's, after already having been in various types of therapy with other therapists for six years, I went with my therapist to see a psychiatrist who specializes in treating people with Multiple Personality Disorder. I did not believe I had MPD (did not WANT MPD), and was less than open to being assessed for it. At the time, I came away with the general explanation from the Psychiatrist that I indeed DID NOT have MPD, and that my current therapist was perfectly capable of helping me cope psychologically and emotionally. I remember the psychiatrist explaining that there is a spectrum to Dissociation, and that I was in the spectrum, but not very extreme, somewhere around PTSD - post traumatic stress disorder. I essentially grabbed onto that, and rejected everything else.

Ten years later I was cleaning out some old personal medical files and came across the written diagnosis that the psychiatrist had given my therapist, and that my therapist, at the end of our time together, gave to me. The diagnosis was DDNOS. Not PTSD, but higher in the spectrum than that. Definitely of the dissociative persuasion, prone to fluctuations in self-concept and recurrent cyclical changes in self-identity brought on by external influences. Wow. Ten years of denial! I breathed deep and acknowledged that the shrink had been right, and I just had not accepted the label.

I can see that this DDNOS has been a real obstacle to the therapists that have endeavored to help me over these last two decades. There are parts inside me, ego states, really, while not full-fledged individual personalities, are solid enough to prevent change to the internal system. The cycling through of these ego states was more fast and frequent when I was in my teens and twenties. By my thirties I had learned, for better or worse, how to avoid sending myself into another merry-go-round of identity changes. That was done mostly by insisting that no matter what cycle I was in, all parts had to participate in the tasks of the day, artist needed to do business stuff and science stuff, scientist needed to be social, etc. I also imployed the limiting coping mechanisms of isolating and self-imposed depression. More on that in a future post.

My definition of cycling through is the experience of having what I'm doing for a living, what I'm focusing my energies on, how I see myself and my future suddenly just lose all their meaning. What I thought I was dedicated to was just an illusion, and no longer had meaning to me. Alot of the time this would be precipitated by some kind of disappointment. Not the kind like others letting me down, but more like a belief I had embraced was suddenly shown to be hollow and corrupt. That little shock would hit me like it was a lie that had been exposed, and I no longer had grounding. It would take me a few days, maybe several weeks and then I'd be focused on some other idea or value (ie, how noble artistic endeavors are) and then set about with great energy, almost obsession to "become" that image. Until something came to shatter my belief, and then I'd move onto serious work, like business or science. Then social work. Then back to one of the ones I'd had before. Merry-go-round, each ego state and "focus" real at the time, and remembered. No losing time for this gal. As a younger person, I'd get so upset about this cycling, because I wanted so much to just choose a career direction and stick with it. My internal system wouldn't allow it. Each part needed an opportunity to express itself.

Of what I've described above, some of it, like the sudden loss of meaning, can be labelled as a type of depersonalization and derealization which are two terms used in dissociative spectrum. DDNOS folks do a smattering of this, and a dab of that to patchwork together a way to deal with life. I am sure that each person is unique, and so that make DDNOS not easily defineable.
If there are others out there with this diagnosis, what smatterings and dabs do you use to cope?