By ANONYMOUS CONTRIBUTOR
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I hate recommending treatments or therapies of any kind to friends and family, because I’m not a medical professional and if my advice doesn’t work out it can strain the relationship. So, when asked “does EMDR therapy work?” I prefer not to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – I will share my experience instead.
Trauma is a thief
In 2001, at 21 years of age, I was newly married and making a home with my husband in the Hunter Region of New South Wales. I had a new job assessing mortgage applications for a local banking institution and I was expecting to feel content. I was anything but.
Instead, I was experiencing debilitating symptoms of panic and flashbacks to a traumatic incident that had occurred about two years earlier. I was violently raped while travelling in Bali and I couldn’t shake it. My work suffered. My marriage suffered. I was losing friends. I was afraid to go out.
Trauma was systematically stealing everything from me, and I felt completely powerless.
Not all wounds are created equal
The physical wounds I sustained in the attack healed within a few months, and in my naivety, I assumed the emotional wounds would be quick to heal also. I was wrong. Rather than improving, my symptoms got worse. I couldn’t sleep, I lost weight, I couldn’t work, and my husband was not understanding.
A local clinical psychologist diagnosed me with PTSD and recommended Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). I stuck with that therapy faithfully for more than two years, including all of the ‘homework’ (and there was a lot of homework), the exposure therapy, and regular psychotherapy.
I gave CBT a red-hot go, but to cut a long story short, it didn’t work for me.
Trauma begets trauma
My husband ended our marriage very quickly. I spent the next decade ‘existing’ with constant flashbacks and panic attacks. I moved from employer to employer, never staying for more than a year, because I kept thinking a fresh start might help. It didn’t.
I became depressed and self-destructive, adopting a promiscuous lifestyle that included a lot of alcohol, illegal drugs, and miscellaneous male company. My lifestyle was dangerous, and I experienced multiple incidents of sexual assault.
On one occasion I was drugged, tortured, and raped by multiple attackers. I woke up hours later in a boarded-up house in Glebe, covered in bruises I can’t adequately describe. It shocked me. I had to ask a trusted friend from work to change a dressing on my back. When I pulled my shirt up, she burst into tears. That shocked me too.
For the record, pouring drugs and alcohol on a problem is a terrible idea.
EMDR? Never heard of it.
In 2018, almost two decades after the incident that started it all, a random GP told me I should try Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, or EMDR. I asked what kind of experimental nonsense he was recommending… He laughed and assured me that it’s “pretty mainstream” and I definitely had nothing to lose.
I googled it. It seemed ok.
I attended my first session with a qualified practitioner, and she took a detailed history the likes of which I had never experienced. She probed into every unpleasant nook and cranny of my life and background. In a word, she was thorough.
It wasn’t until my second session with her that we began the EMDR therapy. I struggled at first to follow her fingers back and forth while systematically discussing and reliving all of my many traumas. I’m not clever enough with the English language to describe exactly how it felt, but it was intense and at the end of each session I was EXHAUSTED.
We completed a total of six sessions. Each session was exhausting. During the fourth session I came to tears (which is unusual for me) and I needed to close my eyes for a short time, so I couldn’t see her fingers moving left and right. At that moment the practitioner switched to tapping my knees, left-right-left-right. That kept the momentum going.
Each session left me feeling more relaxed and calmer than I had ever felt before. I started sleeping through the nights, and the flashbacks simply stopped. I am now happily married to a kind, understanding person (he’s lovely) and I am quietly building my own successful business.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that EMDR saved my life.
So, does EMDR therapy work?
After six sessions I no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. So, does EMDR therapy work?
Well, it worked for me.