 So today I am going to talk to you about three things, three things. I wish that I knew about EMDR before I embarked on the treatment. They're not all bad. I made it sound like they were all going to be bad. They're not. Spoiler alert. Happy ending. I'm still here. Yay. Yeah, so EMDR. So the context for this video is that I was having a look at some of my old videos and seeing what was popular and weirdly the video on EMDR is my most popular video right now, which was a surprise because it was a long and rambling kind of talk about my experience of EMDR. But I think what the thing is is that I made that video because there wasn't a lot out there about EMDR and clearly a lot of other people found the same thing and so when looking for something, anything, they found my rambling and some of you found it helpful. I'm really pleased about that. So to give this a bit of context, I am going to be sharing my experiences of EMDR as a patient, not as a professional. Being the geek that I am and someone who works in the field of mental health, I have read all the literature. I'm going to say all the literature. I mean, basically, this book, I mean, there's other stuff too, but this is the book. By the way, that was a really perfect example of why my books are colour coded. I get a lot of hate and some love for my colour codedness of my books and it's partly an aesthetic thing. I've grown to really love it and some days when I'm really anxious, it really calms me to put my books into exact order of hue and I know that's not quite normal. But the reason why I started it was because I was recording a series of webinars for Health Education England when I worked at the Charlie Wallam Memorial Trust. Shout out to great charity. And I would, in the middle of these webinars, suddenly want to recommend the book and I could never find the book I was looking for. And the only way I found of being able to reliably find the books I'm looking for is to put them in order of hue because I remember what they look like rather than what they're called or who the authors are. Sorry if you're an author of a book that I love, but I probably do remember its cover more than I remember you and I'm sorry about that. Anyhow, that book I'd recommend if you're a geek and you like to read the detail. That is like the seminal text on EMDR written by the mother of EMDR. So what the hell is EMDR? It is eye movement, desensitization, reprocessing therapy and it is an approved treatment for trauma essentially. So I have post-traumatic stress disorder. That's not quite true. Actually I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder which is even more fun. It's kind of the same thing but it means that you have maybe more complex symptoms and they're related not to one event but to perhaps a series of events or ongoing trauma over a period of time. It's quite common in people who have experienced neglect or abuse in childhood. I won't go into the details of that right now. Anyway, so EMDR, yeah it's the approved therapy and basically I didn't embark on it for a really long time because I was really skeptical because I read about it and I was like how the heck could that possibly work? Because basically you're sitting in a room with a therapist and the therapist is making you look at either lights or their fingers and you're basically just looking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth whilst recalling really, really, really traumatic stuff and that sounded really horrible for one and secondly like well why would that make any difference to me? I've upset myself whilst like moving my eyes around a bit, hmm, yeah, but you know there does happen to be a really good evidence base despite how strange it sounds and really I was getting desperate to be quite honest, I tried everything and my life was still ruled by post-traumatic stress disorder and so I was willing to give this final thing ago and Ditto, my therapist was also kind of skeptical about it as well but he too really wanted to help me, we'd been working together a really long time and despite the fact he's really good and quite expensive, we kind of kept on making good progress and then I would go right back to the start again and get really ill with anorexia or whatever and yeah so we thought we'd try something different. So he went and trained up in EMDR and I, yeah, became his first patient. So yeah, so the point of this video, three things I wish I knew about EMDR before I embarked on the treatment. So the first one, I wish, I wish, above anything probably, I wish I'd known it was going to work. I didn't, you know, engage in the treatment for a really long time, I was really reluctant to do it even when then I agreed to do it, it took me quite a while to actually finally really press go, I did quite a lot of preparing for it and prevaricating and all sorts and I think really I was sort of aware that this was maybe not my last chance at getting better but it was like the one thing that I hadn't tried that was a known entity that was meant to work and I guess I was a bit worried that it might not work and then where would that leave me and I was beginning to feel quite hopeless and so yeah I wish I would have known it had worked. Also I wish I'd known it was going to work because then I think I might have done it sooner, I might have been a little bit more willing and able to put up with the difficulties which I'll come on to that came with the treatment and I think I also might have been a bit more willing to kind of like put my life on pause for the amount of time that it took to do the treatment in the knowledge that, you know, X months hence everything will be rosy, laddy, daddy, daskip off into the sunshine, that's not how it ends actually but you know it was kind of a bit like that, it really did make a big difference and quite quickly after a horrific meh at the beginning, any coffee. By the way I'm really sorry if you can hear in the background a lot of noise so sometimes people talk about how in my videos if you listen really carefully sometimes in the background you can hear birds singing I do a lot of work to try and bring birds into my garden I love them I spend a lot of money on bird food however today if you listen really carefully you can hear the sound of workmen who are installing believe it or not solar panels onto my mother-in-law's roof because South London you know we get so much sun yeah yeah and I don't live with my mother-in-law not that that would be a problem if I did I have done she is fab we happen to be neighbours and yes that is my choice and yes I like it and it's great okay back to the point number two of the things I wish I knew before I had EMDR number two I wish I had known and had a full appreciation of the fact it was going to get worse no like worse worse worse really worse before it got better so for me I did not embark on this therapy until a point at which I was relatively well now this is the spectrum I'd been incredibly unwell on and off largely incredibly unwell if we're honest for the preceding few years and had at the point of which I embarked on the EMDR therapy I had been discharged from hospital maybe six months previously having reached for the first time in my life a healthy weight and that was good and things were going quite well I was beginning to enjoy my work again I was beginning to have fun with my family again I had new hobbies climbing you've probably heard me mention climbing I was climbing and I was learning piano and I was yeah life was really kind of peachy and particularly in comparison to where it had been in the previous few months and years and so things were going yeah pretty okay now we kind of knew I needed to be really strong before I embarked on the trauma therapy so there's a few different things going on here so one when you're really underweight with anorexia which I basically was chronically for decades actually but particularly underweight in those previous few years and more so at some points than others but when your brain is really like starved and your body's very underweight you can't really do processing of complex thoughts and engaging with complex therapy you're essentially trying to use a brain which is starved to do complex things and it doesn't work so like yeah when you're anorexic and this is with no disrespect to anyone who is struggling from the illness and maybe you will recognize this in yourself if you're trying really hard to get better you're basically you've got the kind of cognitive capacity of quite a small child because your brain is totally totally totally starved and it can't do complex things it's really back to basics and it does strain things as well I mean anorexia does make strange thoughts happen anyway every so yeah the brain thing is bad when you're when you're very underweight so it's not good so I needed to get to a healthy weight in order for my brain to work properly so that was important the other thing was I needed to be like in a stable and supportive and good place so that you know if this threw up some tricky stuff because I was after all going to finally be exploring some things I'd never explored before I needed to know that that was going to be okay and that I'd be able to manage that that I was in a place both like literally and metaphorically to deal with the fall out there and so I prepared for all this and I waited until things were going relatively well so I actually you know full on knew hey things are going quite well now let's engage in this hideous therapy it was an active choice I didn't realize though at all how much worse things were going to get before they got better and I say it's a thing I wish I knew I guess part of me maybe if I'd have known I mean I was probably the most suicidal I've ever been I don't know that's a tough one to call I was I was actively suicidal quite a lot of the time like had to put really really careful safety plans in place talking about which I will link to a really good safety planning website by my good pal and amazingly respected colleague Alice Colking in the link below because it's a really good way of planning if you are worried about yourself or someone else and suicide it's really really straightforward I'll link to that anyhow back to the point so yeah had to put really good safety planning in place around suicide so imagine the scenario I've just got back into my role of wife of mom a friend of co-worker of everything and then I embark on this therapy my choice and I basically have to step back from all those roles because hang on a minute I'm back to managing one minute at a time all over again and it was honestly it was hell it was just a complete I mean and actually in a way because things had been so much better and I've had a little bit of a taste of what life could be like and in many ways it was my first taste of what life could be like really yeah that made it all the more sour going back to this really difficult place however it was really super temporary so it didn't feel super temporary at the time but looking back at it now it would be coming up to a year soon actually and it felt like it was going on forever but it was actually a period of weeks and my therapist during both the individual sessions and over the course of the sessions as a set of things he talked to me always about how like if you're sorry I'll tell you the joke in minute if you're in a car in a tunnel and you need to get through the tunnel like you might be scared and your instinct might be to pull over to the side but actually the best way to get through the tunnel is just to keep steady keep your foot on the gas and keep driving and that's the best way to get through sorry my laughter was because actually that wasn't the analogy my therapist made my therapist who's known me for years made the analogy of being in a train and going through a tunnel and that doesn't work for me because I am absolutely absolutely not able to go near trains because I have really awful obsessive compulsive thoughts around them get me into trouble sometimes and yeah could end up being really dangerous so yeah but yeah you know you laugh or you cry anyhow yeah so I wish I'd known it was gonna get much worse before it got better maybe more than that I wish I'd known that that that worse would be like I needed to know the extent of that worse perhaps so I could have better prepared for it I needed to like fully know like you're really gonna have to take a step back from everything prepare for that properly not the kind of semi-preparing that I'd done but also I needed to maybe know that would be really temporary so like you know you need to take a step back from everything for like a month six weeks it's it's you know in the scheme of my life it's a really short period of time felt like a long time at the time was a short time in the scheme of things and it now feels a distant memory the third one the third thing I wish I'd known about EMDR before I embarked on the therapy which would have really helped me and perhaps made me engage sooner and more willingly is that I wouldn't actually have to talk about anything I didn't want to talk about say for me the the trauma therapy was particularly terrifying because there was all this stuff that even with my therapist who I had by this point known for an incredibly long time and who I trusted implicitly but there was stuff that I hadn't even talked with him about stuff I'd never said out loud stuff I'd never really even thought about how it would sound out loud you know and and things I was really terrified of voicing and yeah I was really really scared about all of that and actually with EMDR or certainly with the way that my therapist did it with me I didn't have to say anything I didn't want to in fact you know I spent most of most of my sessions more or less entirely mute there was some prompting and there was a lot going on in my head but actually I didn't say very much at all and that was largely because I was so traumatized I was barely able to to get the words together but there was a lot of work that happened both during and around the sessions that that allowed me to process I mean it's it's literally as it sounds it's a reprocessing therapy so it's about bringing these things to mind it's not about saying them out loud and evaluating them it's basically like with trauma you it's like your memories are a jumble of trying to think what's the really great analogy my therapist always use so it's like the cupboard you've got a cupboard full of tins and everything's all in a jumble and so that you know you open the door and the tins keep falling out at times when you don't want them so like I'm walking along down the street and the tiniest thing happens and I'm into startle mode because something has prompted this kind of you know this memory and made me feel like I'm in danger right now when actually the thing that I'm worried about happened 30 years ago or something and so what this therapy does is it takes all the tins out it puts them probably in color order in my case I'm thinking I don't know so yeah it puts things back in order and they don't all fall out at unopportuned times and yeah you can go visit the cupboard and pick out the tin you want when you want it then but it's not going to tumble out at the you know when you don't want it to basically so yes you're more in control of those those thoughts those feelings those memories so yeah I didn't have to talk about anything I didn't want to actually what I found was as I worked through the therapy that I began to want to write about some of these things and I made some really big breakthroughs where I would write stuff down and then I would choose to share it with my therapist and the outside of the sessions mainly I did begin to talk about some of this I mean I did talk about it with my therapist too but a lot of those conversations happen actually like out of the therapy so I would talk to my therapist but often I find actually then I'd want to explore it more I started to want to talk about it I say one it wasn't like hey I've got this story I want to tell it was more like I kind of felt a need to or I wanted to explore I guess it's hard to explain so many of the very difficult thoughts and feelings I have of self-hatred and self-loathing and all those sort of things are tied up with some of what happened to me and I guess part of what I needed to do was test this out in real life so to see whether actually other people were as horrified by me as I was and so my husband and my good friend Joe both listened as well as my therapist when I needed to talk about this stuff and Joe I don't think you watch my videos Joe but if you do thank you and sorry a bit for no you would tell me off for saying sorry so I'm not going to say sorry so just thank you for the time for the time I was going to say the time I cried in public with you that's happened many times the British Library cafe time when I cried a lot for a really long time it was you know there are moments which are kind of pivotal and that was quite a pivotal one for me I mean I cried a lot it was really bad I mean yeah I don't think I've ever probably cried so much in my whole life but but it was it was incredibly cathartic and you know what I found out that day that Joe didn't judge me for what had happened to me and what I'd done and and and that kind of thing he didn't judge me he was still my very good friend that day the next day forever and I needed to know that and you don't find that out by keeping those thoughts in your head and guessing and making assumptions about what other people think of you you find that out by actually telling them this stuff in real life and discovering that yeah my husband still loves me yeah my best friend still my best friend it's all good and that all sounds really easy and nice now but at time it was hard so you go there those were the three things I'm sure I have like a hundred more but I'm aware that I've already waffled for a really really quite incredibly long time and this is partly I think because I've spent the last few days in bed with flu and I haven't really spoken to anyone for days and not I don't talk to that many people all the time anyway really and I am a bit of a recluse I know I come across as like really and yeah sociable and everything but I I yeah I don't talk to people much but I do talk to people normally more than not at all and yeah the last four or five days I've basically been asleep or watching YouTube videos yeah so sorry about the warbling I hope it gave you a bit of an insight I'd love to hear your experiences of EMDR what are the three things or even one thing what do you wish you had known before you embarked on EMDR or you're thinking about it what would you like to know what's the kind of you know the thing that's maybe holding you back or the thing you're wondering about or your your kind of worrying about because again you know we can answer more questions and I can answer them both from a you know my personal experience point of view but also from the point of view of having spoken with quite a lot of people now who've been through this kind of therapy but also from having done you know quite a bit of research into this and being able to talk about it from a relatively well informed point of view to and devoting my own feelings from it if we wish to okay I hope that was somewhat insightful and interesting and rambling and I'm sorry but you know thanks for watching and and yeah actually I find quite often that my more rambly more personal videos get more views than the ones where I try really hard to keep them succinct to make them really practical and on point so thank you for watching genuinely and do please consider subscribing I'm trying to get better at putting out regular content on my YouTube channel tune in on Tuesdays and Fridays and yeah maybe by the time you're watching this I'm one of those people who goes I recently hit a thousand subscribers I did and I'm proud and but when you're watching this maybe I'm like at you know 10,000 and I'll go oh remember the days when I only had a thousand maybe you're the you know one of the early one or whatever shut up pookie yeah I'm done bye