Healing C-PTSD: Using EMDR to Discover the Roots of My C-PTSD, Part II

Part II:  Discovering the Roots  (For background information, please see my previous post, Part I.) 




As you heal, life becomes more and more beautiful!

 

As I have researched EMDR on the Internet, I have read comments regarding the efficacy of the treatment.  Some folks claim that EMDR is a sham, that it does not do a bit of good in reducing the emotional load of trauma memories.  Some folks claim that EMDR is the only therapy that has helped them.  And some folks claim that it may be of some use in defusing trauma memories but that it is not the “miracle cure” that the EMDR Institute and Francine Shapiro seem to think it is.  My position is that EMDR in combination with Ego State Therapy is helping me to reclaim the self that I was born to be, the self I was before my parents taught me otherwise.  I describe my most recent session here so that you may witness my experience and, if you wish, use what I say to inform your opinion.   

When I began my EMDR session on Monday, April 29th, I had no idea as to what my work during the session would reveal.  I hoped that I would be able to defuse my childhood sexual abuse experience, but I was not sure that would happen.  As I was to discover, however, my work on Monday revealed much more than I had hoped, for during the session I identified the taproots of all my abuse, including the domestic abuse I endured during my twenty-year marriage. 

At the beginning of my treatment on Monday, my therapist suggested that I imagine the living room and the couch of the neighbor woman who had sexually abused me.  We planned to move from the living room into the neighbor’s kitchen, the room in which she had violently sexually abused me, when I felt I could do that.  However, we didn’t get out of the living room, for as she tapped on my knees, the word BOUNDARIES came to my mind.  And with that word came so many other thoughts as we advanced through the session.  By the time we were finished with an hour of EMDR, I understood why I had been abused by the neighbor, by my parents, by my husband, and by others.  I will summarize my understanding below in three words:  

LACK OF BOUNDARIES! 

In recent years, a lot of parents and schools have taught children about “stranger danger” and saying “no” to people who attempt to harm them.  In other words, many of today’s children are learning that they have boundaries and also have a right to protect those boundaries.  In addition, those same children are learning that they are worth protecting.  After all, it's natural to protect something of value from harm. When I was a child, little girls were often not given permission to protect themselves.  In the first place, people did not talk about such topics as sex abuse, rape, and kidnapping.  Thus, often the context for teaching little girls to be assertive in protecting themselves did not exist.  In addition, many little girls were not taught that they were of value and were worth protecting.  In some respects, girls and women were still regarded as second-class citizens in the 1930s and 1940s, the decades of my childhood.  That fact plus the fact that my parents made it clear to me that they had not wanted a girl when I was born—indeed, they had not wanted a child of either gender—led them and me to believe I was not worth protecting.  

In my case, even if people had talked about abuse and sex crimes, I could not have protected myself because most of the time, my parents did not allow me to use the word "no."  My parents espoused a Nazi-like authoritarian philosophy of child rearing, and I was punished if I did not comply with all their demands.  My mother believed that babies and small children had to be taught “who was boss” so they didn’t believe or feel they were important.  To her, breaking a child’s will was an essential element of child raising, and showing love and positive attention led to a child feeling too important, too valuable.  If a child felt important, according to my mother, that child would become spoiled and would become a tyrant in the household.  Thus, I learned that I was not valuable and not important—and not worth protecting from harm.  

If you have read the posts in which I describe my childhood abuse, you read that my mother would put me out to roam the neighborhood after breakfast.  I was the perfect prey for the neighborhood predator, the woman next door.  She was an adult, and I had been taught that adults knew best and could do whatever they wanted to do to me, and I was too afraid of punishment to say no.  My mother didn’t want me in the house, and the neighbor woman invited me into her house and paid attention to me.  So I always accepted her invitation, hoping that she would not put her hands where they didn’t belong.  And when she did, then I froze and couldn’t run out the door.  On my final visit, her abuse was so violent that I did manage to break free and run home.  I sneaked into my house and hid from my mother until I was able to leave my hiding place.  I never did tell her about the abuse because I was certain that she would blame me and punish me. 

I grew from being a child with no sense of value and no boundaries into an adult who had no protective boundaries and no sense of self worth.  If a woman has no sense of self worth, then why would she protect herself?  And because I had been taught that everyone else knew what was best for me and everyone else was right and I was wrong, I fell for the first man who told me that he knew I wanted sex whether I knew it or not.  I married the second man who showed any interest in me.  My twenty-year marriage was a nightmare of sexual abuse and psychological abuse.  The nightmare ended only because I caught my husband doing the same thing to my daughter that he was doing to me.  I knew that my daughter did not deserve the abuse, so I reported my husband to the authorities, saw him prosecuted and sentenced, and got a divorce.  

I have spent the past thirty years trying to make sense of the mess I have called “my life.”  On Monday, April 29^th, during my EMDR treatment, many of the puzzle pieces fell into place. I now can trace all my abuse back to the fact that I had never been taught that I was worth protecting and, therefore, that I had never been taught to protect myself by saying “no” to a potential abuser.  In addition, until I caught my husband in the act of abusing our daughter, I had thought that he, like all other adults in my life, was always right and I was always wrong.  Finding him using our daughter for his own selfish purposes caused me to re-think that belief, but I continued to believe that I was worthless—until Monday’s EMDR session.   

Now I understand that my parents, in addition to my former husband, were wrong.  I am still trying to wrap my mind around that one!  And now I am in the process of re-thinking the entire matter of my value as a human being.  I have always considered other people as being valuable, and now I feel as if I’m in a department store fitting room, trying that concept on my own self, looking into the mirror to see if it fits, trying to decide if it is comfortable.  As with most changes, this new concept may take me a while to adopt, but I’ve taken the first step.  One step at a time—that’s the only way to go.  For me, at least.  One step at a time.  

Somewhere in my brain, I’m processing the material from that recent EMDR session.  Chances are, I’ll be working on it a while.  After all, I’m 74 years old, and for that amount of time, I’ve believed I’m worthless.  It may take a while to forge the new neural pathways that will change my attitude and cause it to be reflected in the way I think about myself.  Thanks to the EMDR treatment, I know now that I feel worthless because I was TAUGHT to feel worthless!  When I came into the world, my brain was new, ripe for learning the lessons of life.  Unfortunately for me, my parents, both public school teachers, taught me the wrong lesson, a tragic lesson.  Now it’s up to me to erase their lesson and teach myself the correct lesson—I have value, and I am worth protecting!  

To conclude, I firmly believe that if I had not had this EMDR session, I would not have had the insights that surfaced on Monday—the insight that my parents failed to give me the tools I needed to protect myself from people intent on taking advantage of and harming children and women.  Now that I understand that it was my parents’ failure to do this and that it was, as people say, about them and not about me, I can go about the work of rebuilding my self-concept.  I am sure that this process will involve more EMDR work.  So—full speed ahead! 

Here are a couple of Scottish proverbs to help you along your path— 

“Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.” 

“Twelve highlanders and a bagpipe make a rebellion.” 

 

(This one may not be relevant to healing C-PTSD, but I thought it was worth throwing in.  You never know when you might need to make a rebellion!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos taken at tulip farm in April of 2013.