#emdr

I also watched 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

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

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.

Lately, something has shifted. I feel 100% sure I want to be a Hellenic polytheist. Talking through my religious trauma has allowed me to see that spirituality is part of who I am as a person, and many people took advantage of it.

Hellenism is basically the complete opposite of Christianity. Through therapy I’ve been able to see why I feel so much more at home in HelPol.

The actual memory processing could not have gone better. I processed the memory from an SUD of 8 down to a 0 in a single session. It felt resolved. The little part at the heart of the memory felt heard. Most importantly, it was the "warm up" we needed before we tackle the more sensitive and scary trauma memory I have planned for next time.

Things went sideways after we left the session. The memory we processed was about adults in our childhood dismissing our feelings, laughing at our emotions, and teasing us for being ourselves. The core wound was "It's not safe to be myself". Unfortunately, my partner's grandmother is visiting right now and she triggers that very same wound. That was probably why I was able to finally bring it to therapy, but that also made it unsafe to come back from therapy when I was still raw and processing.

It was like I had just told that little part "it's safe now. You can be yourself - oops, never mind, we still have to mask around certain people." It was a confusing mixed message that made all that processing energy from emdr get "stuck" in my body, and that feeling triggered protective parts that wanted to release it like a pressure valve.

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I don't know whether this commonly happens after doing a huge amount of trauma work in therapy, but it was like a colossal emotional crash. My negative self-talk was so powerful, and it fitted in very neatly with my religious trauma about having been born bad - so bad that I was irredeemable. I think these thoughts are common for some people - 'if they REALLY knew me, who I REALLY am when I'm not pretending, or the things that happen in my head, they would never love and accept me'.

I haven't gone into this in the comics because I didn't want this story to get even more complicated than it already is, but this year I have been doing a lot of work with a therapist who specialises in OCD. I have learned that a lot of these intrusive thoughts I have fit into the context of severe OCD, which in itself is of course deeply linked to trauma. I'm still figuring it all out, and having some breakthroughs along the way (for example, the church taught us that thinking about doing something bad is just as sinful as actually doing the thing. A thought crime is a real crime. But what about people with terrible intrusive thoughts? You know the ones. 'What if you pushed that guy off his bike? What if you kicked that dog?' Obviously you would never DO those things just because you had an intrusive thought about them. But you end up caught in these terrible spirals of 'I had a fleeting thought about potentially kicking a dog! I'm basically a puppy-kicker!!!' because you're trained to believe that having the thought is the same thing as doing the bad thing (tip: it isn't)).

I guess all this is to say: I think sometimes in therapy you go in with this particular layer of emotional mess that you want to work through, and even when you do a huge amount of work to process all that, what happens is that you just uncover an even deeper layer which requires its own work. The therapy I've done since finishing I Do Not Have An Eating Disorder has taught me SO MUCH about where that eating disorder came from, none of which is actually in the original book. But we keep doing the work, we keep learning, hopefully we keep growing.

Therapy! What a wild ride.

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