Alice looks up from her furious scribbling. “So how did the process itself go?”
“The therapist made me choose a negative self-belief, something that might explain why Grandmother had showed up.” I’m not wanted. I don’t belong. I didn’t bother telling Dr. Langdon I didn’t really believe those things. Counseling always went better if I nodded my head a lot. Back then, I’d thought she was a total hack. “Then she made me choose a positive self-belief to replace it with. She made me sit on the couch, and she sat across from me. She moved two fingers in front of my face, side to side, up and down. She said I didn’t need to understand it—I just needed to let my eyes follow her fingers all the way to my right peripheral, left peripheral, up and down, without moving my head.
“While her fingers moved, she asked me questions. About the negative self-belief, the positive self-belief, other things like that. I answered her, repeated after her when she told me to”—feeling incredibly stupid the whole time—“and when she was done, she told me to go back to that memory, and feel it fully. Before we’d started, she’d asked me to score how anxious the memory made me feel. I’d said a seven out of ten. After the process, I said five.” I’d surprised myself. “Then she sat forward and repeated the process again. The fingers, the questions, the scoring. We did it three times, and when she asked me to go back to that memory the last time, I told her, honestly, I only felt about a one on the anxiety scale.”
Recalling it now, it sounded like hocus-pocus. And yet, afterward, Grandmother, the man in the green jacket, all the flickers in my bedroom had been shut out for nearly three years. And, still, when I think about that memory—no anxiety. “I don’t know how, but it worked.”
Alice’s eyes glitter with excitement. She leans forward, touching the back of her head. “There’s a part of the brain called the amygdala. It stores things that you’re unable to process—like trauma. Before we’re eight years old, our minds have very few cognitive processing skills. So everything we’re unable to work through at that young age gets stored up in the amygdala, as general associations or a roughly pieced-together idea of cause and effect—a warning for future events. When we dream, our eye movements signal to the amygdala that it’s time to work through that backlog.
“Now, the emotions and sensations of an event are stored almost exactly as they were experienced. Strangely, the same chemicals that imprint them on the amygdala can actually impede the formation of memory in the hippocampus. You might have no conscious recollection of what happened, but that won’t stop it from messing with your brain. When those stored connections are triggered, you revert to the childlike mentality in which you first experienced them. That’s essentially what a panic attack is— the full experience of fear without the tools to reason through it.
“EMDR allows you to access those connections while you’re awake. The eye movement triggers the amygdala, while the questions trigger the memory. It allows your adult self to have a conversation, of sorts, with your child self. You explain things to your child self so that the unhealthy thought pattern, or cause-effect association, can be corrected.”
“But why that memory? I mean, nothing happened. I took a walk.”
“The separation of an infant from a parent can be traumatizing, in and of itself, even if you continue receiving the appropriate love and care from a new relationship. During infancy, all we know are our biological mothers. They’re our entire world, our whole sense of stability.”
Alice’s gaze makes me feel like I’m being X-rayed. I sometimes think the whole world knows my history, and I’m the only one who can’t see it.
I sometimes think they all know, and all I’ll ever get is what Mom told me, a logistical play-by-play of how the adoption went: She and Dad tried to get pregnant for a long time. Once, they thought they had. She miscarried; they were heartbroken.
Down in Alabama, on a reservation, an eighteen-year-old girl found out she was pregnant. Before anyone noticed her growing baby bump, she ran away, up to Kentucky, where her boyfriend’s family lived.
Meanwhile, Mom and Dad got a call from a friend of a friend, who’d gotten a call from a friend of a friend, whose nephew’s girlfriend was having a baby.
That baby was me.
Did they want her, the friend of a friend wanted to know.
They needed time to think about it, Mom said.