“Okay, well, let’s work on something really disturbing,” she said. “Something you feel strong emotions about.”
“Umm…what’s one that comes up a lot? I guess maybe…there are the times my parents tried to kill me in their cars. They’d swerve near cliffs, threatening to kill us both.”
“And what number would you give that?”
“A three? Maybe.”
“It’s interesting you say that you aren’t dissociated,” Eleanor said carefully. “When you describe some terrible things being done to you, you have a remarkably flat affect when talking about them.”
“Maybe I’ve just processed these memories already! I’ve been in therapy for ten years. It’s not like these are buried secrets that I’ve never told anyone. I’ve told these stories to people a bunch of times in my life, ex-boyfriends, therapists. So maybe in the act of doing that, I’ve thought about how they affected me, and learned things, and then…moved on.”
“Fine, that could be true,” Eleanor conceded, looking annoyingly skeptical. “But we still need to find something disturbing. So let’s try something else. Can you remember the first time you experienced the abuse?”
“Um…well, no. I was so young. I kind of remember when I was five years old, maybe younger…my mom hit me with a hanger, and then afterward, she actually apologized to me. The only time I can ever remember her apologizing for hitting me.”
“How disturbing is that memory?”
“A one? A two? It’s not very specific. Maybe I shouldn’t even be trying to work through this abuse stuff. I don’t know that any of the hitting is actually that disturbing. Maybe I should be trying to work through more, like, abandonment stuff. I do have serious abandonment issues. Or this feeling of failure that I always carry…”
Another skeptical look. Eleanor said gently, “I think that, generally, earlier is better. First traumas can be more formative. But this is guided by you. Whatever you think is best. When you think of the moment of the first abandonment—when your mother first left you—on a scale of one to ten—”
I slumped on her couch and threw my head back exaggeratedly. “Ugh. A one.”
“Well, it looks like we’re running out of time,” Eleanor said. “Give it some thought this week. What memories are actually upsetting to think about? If you want to bring in an example that you really want to work through, we can spend the entire next session using the buzzers to process it.”
* * *
—
In my later research about EMDR and therapy, I learned that you can start anywhere with EMDR, that you can process any memory you’d like to take a deeper look at, even recent ones. It’s not just about finding the most traumatic memory you can possibly dredge up. In fact, some might argue that starting C-PTSD treatment by diving into the back of your closet and chasing out your scariest, most deeply buried skeleton is a terrible idea. You could find a murderous clown in the storm drain of your life, and he could start haunting your everyday existence. You could dig up something that triggers you badly and makes your symptoms worse or is so unpleasant to look at that you just quit therapy and never come back. That’s why many trauma therapists try to set up a strong framework of coping mechanisms before people launch into their foundational traumas. So if you find Pennywise in the cellar of your brain, you can have some solid techniques for how to handle him.
But I didn’t know that when I started working with Eleanor. At the time, as I walked out of her office into a sea of Brooks Brothers suits, I thought, How the hell am I going to find this thing? I thought my panic attacks at work were disturbing. I thought one of my best friends dumping me the previous year was pretty disturbing, too. But my childhood abuse was old hat. Still, perhaps there were less-cited abusive moments somewhere in my skull, the B sides of my trauma history. Perhaps these would hurt.
On the train ride home, my brain fumbled through traumatic events like a hand in a junk drawer, pulling out a stapler, then a fly swatter. What about the time with the Playmobils? Nah, that was a three at most. The time in Malaysia about my homework? That time at Girl Scouts? If I was disturbed, my mind should race and my heart should pump. When my boyfriend says mm-hmm in a way where I know he’s irritated at me for talking nonstop, I can feel my brain pushing down on the gas. Given that, maybe it was a little weird that I wasn’t getting any reaction to reliving the most violent moments in my life. On the train, I closed my eyes and pictured knives and burns and canes. Then I opened my eyes and did a body scan. Hunky-fuckin’-dory. If anything, I was just kinda hungry.
I fumbled for an explanation. Maybe I didn’t remember any of these events thoroughly enough to be disturbed by them? When I thought about each event, I could remember moments, feelings, and images, sometimes I could remember how long things lasted. But I only remembered a few sentences from what were often hours-long beatings. I remembered my mother’s hands, her body, but I didn’t remember her face. I couldn’t remember what she looked like without makeup. I couldn’t remember what she looked like when she cried. Maybe, in order to go back to one specific memory and make it detailed enough to be disturbing, I needed to retrigger myself. And I knew exactly how to do it.
CHAPTER 17
I first watched Mommie Dearest when I was fourteen, channel surfing on the couch. As the movie went on, I crept onto the floor…and then farther back, into the hallway…and then up the steps, until I was watching it from around a corner. Afterward, I had to lie in bed for a while because what I saw onscreen so precisely mirrored my own life. My mother had been gone for a few months at this point, but when I saw that film, she was back. Faye Dunaway, a white actress from a different era, had eerily channeled my mother’s words, her expressions, her ghostly white cream masks. I hid under my covers shivering until my body understood that my mother had not actually returned.
So on a sunny Saturday, two days before my next EMDR session, I downloaded Mommie Dearest. I might as well have lit candles and drawn a pentagram underneath my laptop. My mother’s spirit was the demon to be summoned. I hit Play.