I can’t even begin to describe what has happened to me in just the past few months. The stress of Covid, lockdowns, social isolation, and being stuck in a place I didn’t quite desire culminated in daily panic attacks. Certainly I always had a high baseline of generalized anxiety, but I knew something was different deep down. The thought of Covid floating all around me, entrapping me in a dimly lit apartment brought me back to two critical incidents in my life: my near-death experience on a surgical table ten years ago, and a sexual assault three years ago.
Friends did their best to initially intervene, from a simple hour in a park, to taking me out to eat in precarious indoor seating situations. I always returned home with fear and separation anxiety. Daily walks and exercise only helped exacerbate the symptoms because I wasn’t ready to face this. Nights wore on me, moments with my heart racing as if the assault was happening all over again as I sat calmly on my couch.
The scales had tipped. I realized something was wrong and if I didn’t take action I would end up in a hospital, the kind you don’t want to be in.
Fortunately I had already reached out to this Neurofeedback specialist last year, but I didn’t go through with it due to high session cost. At the time, I thought I could just wait until I felt unburdened from work to begin. Well, the world moved fast.
We connected fast and after the first conversation we hit the ground running with two sessions a week. I almost felt like I needed three. I was living literally to the edge of each day, as if waiting for the day light of the next.
We started with EMDR because so many active memories and thoughts presented road blocks and conflicts to simple Neurofeedback training. I wasn’t like myself in late 2019, I was in a high fight or flight state.
EMDR was a sledgehammer that smashed through everything right to the core of my being. I felt a laser beam to my amygdala, awakening it to tell us what it stored, what it saw from that scary night, and from all the fearful nights before it. A little bit of a child, a teenager, a young adult, all their experiences coming together to inform and shape the narrative that struck me three years ago.
Nothing really made sense even though it made perfect sense. Why would the child’s screaming parents relate to the frozen man on a stranger’s bed. The magical part of EMDR, is that the pieces do not even need to have any logic or truth, it is just the medium of the English language that we describe how the body has kept the score. Concepts like assault are meaningless to the body, the body only knows what it has seen.
I saw truly how EMDR was so powerful in immediately forcing the body, the mind, the nervous system, to come to terms with what it locked away. My two years spent meticulously crafting CBT defensive logic and coping skills had evaporated in a series of months. I knew then that CBT could have never addressed the “real problem.” It was too complex, too many fingers in different memories, too many triggers to be resolved in an easy breathing exercise or a dysfunctional thoughts log.
After about ten sessions and several follow-ups to tie loose ends, I felt completely absolved of the misery that had plagued me deep down all these years. I couldn’t believe that I had not done this sooner. I felt cheated, robbed, years of my life taken both from the original incident and from not knowing what to do about it. So many relationships and interactions that could have gone better, ruined by a broken mind.
With neurofeedback, we’re now reinforcing those revelations and clearings by finally asking the brain to change. EMDR can be sufficient to let the mind heal over time but I knew that just as easily I could relapse. I wanted complete healing now. I finally know what it’s like to just sit and just be, to be conscientious of others deep down. I can shift my fears, re-assure myself, and for once my body will respond. Not all days are bliss but for the first time my soul feels at peace.