 Hello! It's been a long time since I last recorded a video and quite a few people have been asking how I am and how my therapy's been going and in particular I've had a lot of questions about my EMDR therapy and yeah people have been asking about whether I'd recommend it and that kind of thing and what is it so I thought I'd do a video about that today. I fear it might get a bit rambly so I'll try and keep it relatively short and if you've got other questions about it afterwards then let me know and I'll try and address those in a future video. So okay to start from the beginning so I have a diagnosis of CPTSD which is complex post-traumatic stress disorder and one of the nice approved therapies for PTSD is EMDR which stands for eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy and I had read all about it a long time ago but my therapist who I've been seeing for a long time like as in years wasn't trained in it and I didn't want to start with any therapist and also I thought EMDR sounded a little bit kind of witchcrafty so it involves things like literally your therapist moving their fingers across like this and you're kind of following them with your eyes like this and I just I don't know it yeah didn't float my boat but you know time went on I was still really ill I was going in and out of managing and not managing and nearly dying and yeah in the end thought yeah let's give it a go and my therapist trained up in it so I have this year 2018 finally given EMDR ago and I'm a big fan so in the meantime I've learned loads about it if you want to learn about EMDR then and you're a geek like me I would recommend this book which is the kind of I don't know Bible on it it might not be for you it's really written for the clinician but I tend to read all their stuff as well as the patient stuff anyhow so the basic premise is that if you have post-traumatic stress disorder like me then you have a whole bunch of memories in your head which have not been appropriately processed and that means that you have things like flashbacks and anxiety attacks and things like that when you feel as if the thing which was a problem when the trauma happened whether it was one trauma or many traumas is kind of happening again right now like you relive it you feel those feelings again you you re-experience it and it's really horrible I did a video a while back on a day when I was having a lot of flashbacks and yeah those of you who watched it saw how distressing it is to be going through that for me my flashbacks can be quite like in my face and they can literally send me off course I'll be walking along and it's like being hit yeah it's it's tough so what happens with EMDR is you're essentially trying to reprocess those memories so you're kind of taking everything out the cupboard shaking it up in the right order and allowing your brain to kind of reformat them and then go okay that's a memory it's in the past so it kind of happens fairly quickly actually so a lot of the therapy I've done has been quite long term but with EMDR there's a bit of prep and then you do some sessions and it's quite intense and I think for some people it can be as few as like four or six sessions I'm still going maybe 12 or 14 sessions in but then I had quite a lot untangle and undo and my trauma wasn't one incident it was many but what happens is you work with your therapist first of all to like understand the nature of the trauma you don't have to go into too much detail if you don't want to and then you also learn about your kind of safety behaviors you learn that what you need to do in order to keep yourself safe during the sessions and beyond the sessions so one of the tricky things with it is that it's going to like churn up some difficult thoughts and feelings and memories and you need to be able to keep yourself safe in between the sessions so one of the first things that I learned to do with my therapist for in EMDR was to create a safe space in my head and so for me that was involved my kids and it was a place that I could take myself to really easily I could think of being with them and I could imagine that and I practiced that a lot with my therapist and that was kind of a really good grounding technique for me so if ever than things did become too much in a session or outside of the session then I've got a place I can kind of go back to so you learn you learn to do that and you also do lots of planning for what will happen like when you leave the session what happens if you get flashbacks or kind of suicidal or self-harm ideation in between I use a lot of my dialectical behavior therapy skills basically we drew on lots of other stuff because we knew this was going to be a bit of a tough time and realized it was going to be quite as tough as it was though so what happened was for me and it'll be different for everyone so you may remember this is one story just my story what happened for me was that literally in the first session of EMDR it was like I don't know like a dam got broken down so I have lived my entire I was gonna say adult life maybe life very emotionally blunted so I found it very difficult to manage a lot of the stuff that happened to me and I guess one of my ways of dealing with that was just not to engage emotionally with anything and so yeah I lived everything with a big emotional buffer around me and for whatever reason the EMDR very quickly was able to break those barriers down and it meant I felt things a lot more intensely now that was super tough because actually the the difficult feelings I had were more intense than they had ever felt before I had feelings of sadness I hadn't had feelings of anger lots of very desperate difficult feelings that made it very hard to manage and then I had to be really really careful in planning not to be alone and I had to also specifically think about how to keep on top of my eating because the anorexia was keen to flare back up but on the other hand I also that same week for the first time experienced kind of really happy feelings and feelings of love that I had never experienced in quite that way before and I remember feeling really overwhelmed with kindness of others at one point so one time in that week I went climbing as I do often I went climbing because I just was really struggling to cope and I turned up at the climbing wall and our centre manager Gareth kind of you know basically took one look at me and you went I'm aware of what's going on I follow you on social media so you know do you want a cup of tea and hug and he's like you're in your safe place now have a cup of tea calm down and then and then climb and and it was a really simple thing he did and a kind of thing he would do for anyone and the kind of thing that other people have done for me before but that time it I don't know registered in a in a whole new way and yeah I was overwhelmed by that kindness so yeah it was a week of that very first week in particular was a week of massive highs and massive massive lows so then when I returned to my therapist I had to do a lot of planning around safety planning making sure that I carried on eating making sure that I didn't self-harm that I wasn't at risk of suicide because all those things felt like very very real possibilities again which was frustrating because I had got to quite safe place and I was managing okay and so this felt like a massive backward step but I was also able to see that clearly things were moving and that this would be difficult like really difficult in the short term but I had to work through it and that then things would begin to get better and and weeks on now I'm able to say that that certainly was the case so in terms of like how it works in a session what happens is you you kind of you decide on a specific traumatic memory event feeling that you're going to work through and you think about how that makes you feel you think about how it feels in your body and what sort of negative self-beliefs that it brings to mind so for example one of mine would be I was raped and so it might be you bring to mind the most difficult part of that scenario and then you would think so what negative self-beliefs did I feel I learned for me I guess the the most difficult ones there were that you know that this was my fault and I was I was weak and I shouldn't have let it happen I deserved it you know there were lots of feelings that that kind of went with that and and you do some kind of ranking exercises and you do some ranking exercises also around like how intense those feelings are then you also think about what you would like to believe about yourself rather so rather than the beliefs you have you think about what you'd want to believe so in my instance you know I was a child I was overpowered so I was 14 and the person who raped me was 19 and physically much stronger than me I was an anorexic 14-year-old yeah I yeah anyway I'm not gonna sit and justify it I was yeah it wasn't my fault that was something I need to be able to believe and there are a series of others and so then what you do is you go through the very strange reprocessing process I find it very strange there's different ways you can do it I think for some people they do tapping for some people they use a light bar my therapist has one now but I prefer the way we learn which was just literally following his eyes and so literally what happens then is he will sit there and he will make my eyes follow his fingers as I do this and this triggers REM sleep type movement with your eyes and kind of triggers the reprocessing process and you basically use it and you do that and you allow the thoughts that need to come to come and it can go off in any direction and sometimes it's it's quite a clear narrative sometimes it's you know it can be can go off in all sorts of strange direction but you just sort of let it happen and every now and then the therapist checks in with you and says what are you getting now what are you feeling and what's happening and you I think the idea is that you communicate back in my case I tend to get so distressed when I'm caught up in these memories that I'm not really able to communicate much at all sometimes I cry every now and then there's a moment of respite and I can say something like it's getting better or something but but often it's just very hard that the good thing about this therapy is you don't have to actually say and it's not really about what you're saying it's about what's happening in your mind so the thing that my therapist will always remind me is this is all old stuff it can't hurt you now you're safe and if we need to return to my safe space but the ideal is that you just keep driving through so I think of it like when you're driving your car on the motorway when it's raining really really heavily and you feel like you want to pull off onto the hard shoulder and but actually you know that it's raining so hard that somebody might career into and actually you're safer just really holding your nerve following the tail lights in front of you and just driving on through until the rain passes and it's the same with these really difficult thoughts and feelings and memories and the EMDR you just keep going you just keep going you just keep going and it usually does after a while you begin to come to a place of safety and then in the memories become more easy to manage and I don't know how that works for other people for me what normally happens is that when I start a session then I'm very much on my own in a very difficult and dark place and as I work through the session then I tend to find that I've got people with me my children my husband my best friend other people might be there too and I realize that I'm not alone anymore and I'm not helpless and that tends to be how that process goes yeah so it's been different for different things I mean I've had a lot of different traumas I needed to work through some which were more sort of generic around sort of neglect and ongoing abuse whereas others were about specific incidents and yeah those were processed differently there's still some more work to do on some of them so it's not like you do a memory once and then it's it's done you sometimes need to revisit and revisit and how much you do that is kind of up to you and your therapist but for me it's been good I mean yeah I now feel like I still get some flashbacks and I still have days which are really tough but actually those days are getting fewer and less yeah fewer and further in between and I'm having less night terrors my life isn't dominated by the PTSD now which it really was even though life felt like it was much better before I started the therapy and actually life was very much dominated by by the PTSD and I yeah I feel like I'm getting control of that now and that there is a way forward I think it will always need active management but yeah it's been yeah two or three months of a really really tough therapy with really careful planning in between but it's making a huge difference I think for me one of the biggest differences has been that so part of it's about being able to have a better understanding of some of the things that happen so I struggle with dissociation and so that's kind of kind of absenting myself almost like literally when things are very difficult so that's something that happens often to people who've experienced trauma from a very young age so it can happen to me still now very occasionally but I had that issue like the night of my rape I had had lots of flashbacks but I'd never really been able to piece it all together and actually through this process I have been able to put together a clear narrative of how it worked and I never knew that I had the whole story in my head although it all made sense once I put it together what I don't know is how much that is about me actually remembering and how much of it is about my brain trying to make sense of something and filling in the gaps but it doesn't actually matter because what I end up with is something which is kind of more tangible more dealable with and actually something I can talk about without crying and breaking down and yeah I can talk about it I yeah I can yeah yeah the fact I can sit and yeah say out loud so kind of say it on Twitter sometimes but I don't often yeah out loud talk about the fact that yeah I was right I'm not able to deal with a lot of the other stuff that came out that yet that's you know for another time but anyway progress so I did say this might get rambly I fear it has there's a bit about my experience with the MDR as I say it's just my experience so today I'm sharing as yeah personal as a person a personal experience rather than as a professional I would suggest that if EMDR has been suggested to you as a therapy to think really carefully about it I found it to be very positive very powerful but I have found it that during the initial period at least I had to plan very carefully I needed to really not be working but to have a very clear timetable so that I wasn't alone make sure my eating was all fully supported I lent more heavily on my medication than I had done previously and I had to have very very clearly timetabled times to enable me to manage so my climbing my walking my piano playing my singing all those things became even more important than they have been before and obviously having supportive people on the end of the phone yeah just having that support in place was key but yeah I definitely would do it again and I'm continuing to work through it so grateful to my therapist for training up and and yeah grateful for the chance to finally tackle some of this stuff so yeah there you go EMDR my experience of EMDR yeah any questions if there's stuff I haven't answered because like I mean it's a massive topic then do feel free to leave them below and I'm sorry I don't respond to all the comments that come in on my videos it's just because there's so many of them especially on some of the videos and some not always able to but if you have specific questions about EMDR then post them on this video then I will respond to those or else tweet me at pookieh yeah cool and yeah anyone else who's kind of going through the same thing then good luck keep going and just remember like the car driving through the rain just keep going keep going keep going keep following these tail lights ahead of you and you'll get there I heard a lovely quote the other day Wendy Mitchell who wrote a beautiful book about early onset dementia called somebody I used to know she talked about how when when you're struggling in like fog or in my case like very very heavy rain when you're driving it's much easier and you feel much safer when you've got the tail lights of someone in front of you to follow and she kind of felt that she was able to be those tail lights to other people because she was sharing her story of early onset dementia so yeah I guess I want to kind of yeah borrow that and hey maybe I can be your tail lights if you're thinking about going through this similar kind of therapy yeah so it's tough but it's totally worth it okay okay see you next time bye