#emdr

It has. it's been very hard and I feel like I'm going at a snails pace because of how often I need to take a break from it to focus on other things, but it really does make an enormous difference.

Something I wished I'd known at the beginning is that when your therapist asks you to "rate the distress" of the memory after you've processed it, saying that it's a zero doesn't mean that you're saying that looking at the memory is pleasant, or that what happened in the memory is okay. A distress rating of zero just means that looking at the memory doesn't make you feel that distress in your body anymore.

Even after a memory is processed, thinking about it still makes me think things like, "Oh my god, that was horrible! Things like that shouldn't happen to anyone!" But I don't panic or feel sick or have other intense trauma symptoms. Usually I just feel sad or angry, and that's normal when thinking about something awful that happened.

I also watched 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

The ending nearly made me cry. I had to fight from screaming with glee.

I don’t think cartoons were necessarily reductive when it came to handling specific scary situations that I didn’t otherwise have the tools to process (I also didn’t understand some things, I’m noticing upon rewatch), but I’m noticing that when there’s room for it to just be horrifying, or for the characters to have bad things happen to them without there being some kind of mandatory happy ending or lesson. It’s effective in helping me identify things. (Holy run in sentence. Sorry, idrc and I’m kinda spacey)

It weirdly feels like a safe trigger. I guess something I deal with alot now, is denial and amnesia. So being exposed to certain things that are terrifying in a controlled and safe environment, helps a lot.

Sorry for not having the proper vocabulary for this stuff, I’m still learning with the resources I currently have at my disposal.

The Walten files: faces of grief was a gold mine for this lmao. Not for what happened, specifically (aside from the obvious), but for the visuals and the portrayal of grief. I cried a lot while watching this movie, it was bizarre but it felt really good. It is by far one of the most realistic or relatable (TO ME) portrayals of grief besides midsommar.

I remember this feeling when I was younger where at any moment people were going to get mad at me and either hurt me or hurt my feelings.

It made me have zero idea how to communicate because any attempts usually got me in trouble. Existing got me in trouble so I became suicidal. Using my brain to see discrepancies got me in trouble and gaslit so I started heavily dissociating and partnering that with any drugs I can get my hands on. I had zero idea how to treat people nicely because I kept putting myself around people who treated me like shit because that was normal.

I’m the complete opposite of who I was before. I’m lucky I chose therapy in my early 20’s. I literally only chose it bc Girl, Interrupted made me want to play something out and I actually benefitted from it.

Now that I’m a mental health therapist myself I see women only getting these basic communicating and self-love skills in their 40’s. It’s never too late but my goodness who we could be if we learned this stuff as little girls.