 What is life looking like 18 months on from EMDR? I thought it was time to touch back in and update you on how my trauma is. I talk often about my professional expertise in mental health. In this instance, I'm talking about my personal experience of EMDR and post-traumatic stress disorder. So this is not a professional opinion, this is just me talking about me. So there's like three things, there's always three things. I want to kind of touch in on in this video. One is that my life is no longer ruled by post-traumatic stress disorder. The next is that my trauma kind of makes sense to me now. And the third is that I'm no longer scared of allowing myself to feel things. So firstly, my life is no longer dominated by post-traumatic stress disorder. So if I rewind a bit to the point at which I engage in the EMDR therapy, I had a lengthy hospital stay with anorexia and I was struggling big time with dissociation. I was struggling with suicidal ideation and self-harm a lot. And those things were a pretty toxic mix. I didn't want to be alive really, much of the time and it was horrible. And now things are pretty good. My life is no longer ruled by trauma. So it's not gone. It's not gone, but it's not omnipresent and it doesn't derail me. So the problem before was that my trauma response was so deep and so frequently triggered that it made it very difficult to do other things. So I got to a point where this kind of yet unresolved trauma was basically encroaching on my life all the time and I'd be going into kind of fight flight freeze a lot or I'd be dissociating and it'd be little things, you know, a smell, a sound would just suddenly trigger this very, very kind of emotional response. I had very vivid flashbacks that would kind of, you know, I'd feel like I was there. I was struggling with night terrors and all sorts. It was, yeah, it was tough. And now I do still get the occasional flashback more emotional rather than visual. But I'm much more able to manage those. So every now and then happened today actually, which was partly what made me think about making this video. Every now and then I suddenly have that, you know, oh my gosh, and go into fight flight freeze because of a sound, a smell, some things triggered something in me. But I've now managed to create a situation where I just generally feel safer and where I'm able very quickly to remind myself that I am safe right now. So the whole thing with kind of flashbacks and trauma encouraging on your day to day life is that you feel unsafe. You feel like the thing that made you very unsafe in the past is happening to you again now and it's as if it's current, that threat is current. And now I get that for a moment and then I'm like, no, it's okay. I'm safe. I'm safe. It's okay. I'm safe. And I'm very quickly able to regain, you know, myself and carry on with my normal life. Yes, the trauma stuff is still there. Every now and then it's triggered and there are cues which make me go, but I'm much more able to manage it. So it doesn't stop me doing my day to day life. The next thing I wanted to talk about was that my trauma now makes sense to me. So I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm, you know, not going to go into the ins and outs of it partly because actually I've done a lot of work on this, but not enough to feel comfortable doing that. One day, maybe one day, but one of the things that going through the kind of reprocessing that you do in EMDR was that actually it kind of helped me to piece together my past somewhat. So I don't have all the answers and I also don't really know for sure that the way in which my memories have kind of landed is exactly accurate and true, but I now have a narrative of self and of what happened to me and how I felt at various times and what I did, what was done to me and those kinds of things which kind of makes sense. It's not nice, but it makes sense. I before had a lot of gaps, a lot of questions because I never allowed myself to remember. It was like if it would start to come I would always push it away. So it was as if I was reading a scary book and I didn't want to turn the page and now I'm like got to a point where I can turn the pages and I might not like what I'm reading. It might feel uncomfortable but I can physically do it and I can tell you kind of what that story is and that kind of storytelling narrative making sense took some time to happen. It didn't actually happen all during the EMDR sessions themselves and I think that was work that was kind of ongoing and I remember actually quite vividly the day when kind of some of those final pieces fell into place and it was very much about me allowing that to happen. So now I could tell you, you know, not ins and outs and details but then who can tell all the details of things that happened decades ago. But I have a story I could tell, actually if I could tell it I don't know if I could do that but like I have a story that makes sense and I can understand myself more now and I'm also because I now understand that story, I've been more able to forgive myself for, well, things. And that's been quite important as well like having a bit of self-compassion, being a bit kinder to myself, remembering that I was child and stepping outside of that and reflecting on it as an adult me, kind of forgiving my younger me for the things that happened to me which don't need forgiving actually and again I have to remind myself this sometimes because you get so locked up with those ways of thinking and the different narratives that you've created in your head and some of those were just wrong in my case and it's true for many people who've been kind of victims of abuse and things like that that we tell it wrong and so I've now kind of come to much more of a peace with all that stuff. The final thing I wanted to touch in on is that I now allow myself to feel feelings and that's a huge thing for me so I was someone who never cried. I didn't do emotion, didn't do feeling, didn't really do happy or sad and I mentioned that in a previous video that one of the things about the EMDR was it began to unlock all these feelings and whilst in some cases that was really hard because I felt was left feeling very suicidal because I felt sad and angry and difficult stuff in ways I'd never felt before but I also began to feel kind of joy and happiness and contentment in ways I never had before so I was like a growing woman in my 30s having to learn to understand and feel feelings for the first time like a small child and that was quite hard work but I've made really good progress with that and I now am really aware of the importance of allowing myself to sit with uncomfortable feelings as they arise and to actually kind of work through them and allow them to happen. I think I've begun to really understand that when we don't deal with difficult stuff if we don't allow ourselves to really feel it and work through it then it goes it's got to go and either you're taking action to numb it out or you internalise it somehow or it comes out as anger or there's all sorts of different things that can happen not many of them positive so a great example of this would be recently Lyra my daughter was having a tough time at school and she was really unhappy and I was struggling to get her in every day she didn't want to be there she was really really miserable and it was really emotionally draining and I felt like I wasn't able to fix it for her and I really wanted to and it was awful but we were able to resolve the situation and this was only you know a matter of weeks but it felt like forever because when your child is unhappy it's the worst thing but after a few weeks we were able to resolve the situation and when I put down the phone to her new school who just offered her a place where I knew you know this was the first step to things changing and I put the phone down and I was with my husband and I just let it out and cried and I've been holding it together till then because I needed to because that was what was needed in that moment but then it was okay and I was able just to just let it go and I had yeah a few quite tearful days after that because I realised you know there was a lot of different feelings it was yeah big big stuff going on there and it was really important for me to to to feel that stuff not to look it away and it was yeah and I yeah just generally become a lot a lot better at that it's been a process I've had to learn to cry I used to fear feelings generally all of them I think and now I don't I allow the difficult feelings and I allow myself the chance to work through them and I'm compassionate towards myself about that but also I now allow joy happiness the good stuff too and I don't deny myself those things which again for a really long time I think I didn't allow the good or the bad feelings so yeah so the long and the short is things are infinitely better um than they were at the point of which I was doing the therapy or when I just finished things have really moved on I've grown and changed a lot and there are other things that have been going on alongside this so I also received my diagnosis of being autistic and I've learned to better understand myself from that point of view we've had big changes with regards to family and work and you know it's not I wouldn't say that how things are right now are all directly as a result of the EMDR but in terms of my day to day life no longer being ruled by post-traumatic stress disorder and all the various ramifications of that I think that EMDR played a really really cute role in that and loads of you ask a lot of questions about EMDR and I would love to hear more of your questions and also your advice and guidance so a lot of you have commented on my old videos saying that you were embarking on EMDR I'd love to hear how it's going for you and yeah what advice you would give other people what you've learned about it what it's meant for you whether it's made a difference to you and whether there are other things that you found helpful too so some people said they've tried it and it's not worked for them and I'd love to know well did you find something that worked differently and that was supported for you for me EMDR was something I put off trying for a long time I honestly just thought it sounded completely bizarre and wasn't prepared to try it at the point in which I gave it a go I think two important things had happened there one was I I kind of got to the point of desperation because my life didn't feel worth continuing with at that point despite the fact I had all these you know amazing things lovely home lovely family lovely everything um but I couldn't manage day today so there was that that kind of like desperation but there was also the fact that I was prepared mentally and physically to engage with what was going to be a really hard therapy and I was giving myself permission to move on from the difficult stuff allow myself to process it and move on and allow it to be part of my past rather than part of my present so yeah wow that got deep didn't it yeah so there you go update on EMDR I'm sure I haven't answered all your questions do please ask them you know leave them in a comment below I'll do another video um if you have questions that I've not answered but just remember that I'm talking about this from a personal point of view rather than a professional one I'm glad I did it if I could go back in time if I could I change it part of me feels I wish I would have done it sooner but part of me acknowledges that I wasn't ready sooner so maybe I wouldn't change a thing actually yeah okay see you next time bye