In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about a form of therapy called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a strange process reminiscent of hypnosis, where a patient revisits past traumas while moving their eyes left and right. It seemed too simple, almost hokey, but van der Kolk passionately sang its praises. He told the story of a patient who came out of a single forty-five-minute session of EMDR, looked at him, and said that “he’d found dealing with me so unpleasant that he would never refer a patient to me. Otherwise, he remarked, the EMDR session had resolved the matter of his father’s abuse.” Resolved! Here was a form of therapy, van der Kolk said, that could help “even if the patient and the therapist do not have a trusting relationship.” Then again, he said that EMDR was far more effective for adult-onset trauma, and it cured only 9 percent of childhood trauma survivors. But at this point, 9 percent was better than nothing. Nine percent was a beacon I couldn’t afford to ignore.
I found exactly one EMDR therapist in New York City who took my insurance. She was located in the financial district, near Wall Street, but her office was the size of a large gas station bathroom, with about as much appeal. There was paper everywhere. Hastily stuffed manila folders stacked several feet high formed a ring around the entire room. Her air-conditioning was spotty and tremendously loud, so she had a couple of pink plastic dollar-store fans, about six inches tall, on the floor, swirling hot air around our feet. “Eleanor” was a tiny, frail-looking woman with a large, frizzy nest of gray hair around her face. She had a persistent dry cough and was a few minutes late to every appointment. But she charged $30 a session—and since apparently I didn’t even need to like her, she’d suffice.
During our first session, Eleanor scratched on her notepad through the quick and dirty version of my life story. “Wow,” she said, shaking her head. “You’ve been through a lot and come across the other side with such resilience. You’re really impressive.” I liked that the tone she took wasn’t pitiful but that she acknowledged the severity of what I’d gone through. I could work with this. Then she described the basics.
EMDR was developed by psychologist Francine Shapiro in 1987. She discovered that when she was walking through the woods, her upsetting thoughts dissipated when she moved her eyes back and forth, scanning the path around her. She then conducted studies where she waved a finger in front of patients’ faces, directing their gazes left and right, while asking them to revisit their most harrowing traumas. She reported that subjects who received EMDR therapy had “significant decreases in ratings of subjective distress and significant increases in ratings of confidence in a positive belief.”[1]
EMDR therapy is referred to as “processing,” and in EMDR circles, specialists stress that processing does not mean talking. Talking gives us knowledge about why we are the way we are, but that knowledge isn’t enough. Processing, on the other hand, allows us to truly come to terms with our trauma and resolve it—to rewrite the memories in our brains with a healthier narrative. This seemed abstract to me, and I didn’t really know what it meant. But it sure sounded good.
Nobody is exactly sure why EMDR works, which makes it easy to discredit. One theory is that EMDR mimics the way the brain processes memories during REM sleep. Other research suggests that these eye movements tax our short-term memory, dimming the painful vibrancy of past experiences and making them easier to revisit with a sense of clarity. Whether or not either of these theories is true, many studies keep showing real results: Somehow, this weird process is surprisingly effective in helping patients recover from trauma.
In the years since Shapiro invented EMDR, technology has improved beyond the finger-waving. There are now EMDR light units that kind of look like the scrolling LED light-up signs advertising beer at corner stores. And for people like me—people who feel more comfortable keeping their eyes closed throughout the EMDR process—there are now little machines that hook up to vibrating bullets that you hold in your hands, with headphones that play sounds in one ear, then the other.
In her Manhattan office, Eleanor handed me an EMDR machine with buzzers and headphones. It would play a noise in my left ear, while buzzing a vibrator in my left hand—then play a noise in my right ear and buzz my right. This wasn’t hypnosis, she emphasized. I’d be in full control of my faculties and could stop or change course whenever I wanted to. Then she pulled out a worksheet that consisted of a series of questions, and as we went through each one, she marked down my answers with an eaten-up pencil.
“Have you ever found yourself in a place with no memory of how you got there?”
“No,” I responded.
“Have you ever found yourself dressed in clothes with no idea how they got on you?”
“No.”
“Have you ever felt like you were able to watch yourself at a distance, as if you were watching a movie of your life?”
I knew what Eleanor was trying to do. She was trying to figure out how dissociated I was. When I was first diagnosed with C-PTSD, though many symptoms were familiar to me—depression, aggression, yadda yadda—I was relieved to find a couple of symptoms that did not resonate. Mainly those of dissociation. “Dissociation is common with complex PTSD,” I’d read. “Dissociation can manifest as flashbacks, out-of-body experiences, trances, amnesia, and episodes of time loss.”[2] I was somewhat unobservant, sure, with a tendency to trip on the edge of carpets a lot, but the word “dissociated” seemed strong to me.
An extreme form of dissociation is dissociative identity disorder (DID), brought into the mainstream by United States of Tara, a smart but short-lived Showtime series starring Toni Collette. Whenever she was triggered, the main character, Tara, would disappear into different alter egos—a perfectionistic housewife, a hard-drinking male Vietnam vet, a flirty teenager. Each time she transformed, she’d completely black out, and when Tara came back to her own body, she could not remember the damage her “alters” had wreaked.
That wasn’t me. I didn’t black out. If anything, I was proud that I remembered so much about my trauma, that I could recall the viscera of the most violent moments of my childhood.
After a few more questions, I interrupted Eleanor. “Look, I’m obviously messed up in a bunch of different ways, but I don’t think I’m really that dissociated.”
She nodded patiently but finished her worksheet anyway. I answered “no” pointedly to every question.
Then Eleanor said we should settle on just the right memory to focus on during EMDR. It should be an early moment of trauma that I felt was critical to process. Did I have any ideas?
I flipped through my Rolodex. “Well,” I said, “there are kind of a lot. Like, there’s the one involving the golf club…” I described the incident in all of its gory detail.
She listened patiently, and when I was done, she asked, “On a scale of one to ten, ten being most disturbing, how disturbing is that memory?”
How do you give a numerical value to how you feel about your parents trying to kill you? I guessed that maybe near-death experiences should automatically qualify as nines, but when I sat with it—when I imagined that actual golf club whooshing toward my head—I felt nothing. “Um. Like, a two, maybe?”
Eleanor cocked her head. “A two?”
“Yeah, like, I’ve thought about that memory a lot, I guess. I think I’ve processed it. Because it’s not really that disturbing. I tell people about that one a lot. So, I dunno, I’m not upset right now thinking about it.”