My (Terrible) Experience with EMDR
Disclaimer: I don't know why I need a disclaimer because what I'm about to say is fairly obvious. My experience with EMDR is just that, my personal experience. EMDR has received a lot of media attention (which means nothing, but that it sounds too good to be true) and this article by Scientific America claims that it is better than doing nothing, but that "no shred of evidence exists" that it is better than actually talking to a trained therapist. There is also evidence to suggest that the eye-movement component is not even necessary for it to work. I am not a trained psychologist, but my trained psychologist says that it isn't evidence-based. The bottom line, in my opinion? Pass.
I don't like language about "fixing" me or "shutting things off" about me because it is just me! Sure, I'd like to feel safer or healed, but someone doing something funky to my eyes, ummmmm, no thank you! But my mom didn't listen. So there I was, being dragged as a college student to some woman trained in EMDR. My therapist, by the way, did not approve and does not think it is a well studied or even legitimate therapy, but my mom didn't care. She wanted to help her child and had read other adoptee blogs talk about it (though whether they actually went to it themselves was unknown) and dammit my mother was going to force me to try!
I was with this EMDR woman and she asked me to follow the pencil with my eyes. My mom was in the waiting room and yes, I was 19 years old, but I really wished my mom were in the room with me. I didn't like any of this "going in your mind and moving things around" talk, and I didn't trust this woman who I literally just met to poke around in there if it did do something.
The woman asked me to just follow the pencil with my eyes, find some happy place in my head, then follow her finger with my eyes. Then she kept nettling me about how I was a "nonbeliever" and how it wasn't going to work if I didn't believe EMDR would work. I also never told her I was a "nonbeliever," and I definitely didn't think my believing should have any affect on a real legitimate science.
The brochures were plastered with veterans with PTSD and young autistic kids with smiling faces. It seemed legit. But I did not want to be there. I didn't know this woman and the longer I was there, the more I didn't like her. The entire thing was just creepy and when I watched Get Out a year or so later, it was just like that teacup and the teaspoon woman sending the guy down to the sunken place. Creepy.
After my mom dragged me back there two more times, with me insisting I did not want to go, my mom finally finally finally gave in and I never went back. Why? Because the last session, the EMDR woman had me play with little kid figurines in a little zen table sand pit in front of her, and asked me if the little tiny turtle toy I had put on the sand was "lonely and had no friends." It was stuff you might have little kids do, but certainly not me at 19! And my mom was angry that she was paying this lunatic to do EMDR therapy and she was wasting our money and time with children's play therapy, which I did not need thank you very much, and more importantly, was not what she was paying for.
I had to talk with my mom a lot afterwards about her continually bulldozing me and my decisions everyday with little things and even bigger things like these. I should have the right to say NO and the right to refuse some type of creepy, hypnotic mind treatment. I was agitated and pissed and upset and my mom was being her normal bulldozing self. After a lot of therapy with the actually normal, good therapist, I realized that this feeling I get which I call "irritated" is actually a kind of trauma-induced paralyzing fear. It is all the feelings of fear and anger and sadness and utter helplessness and all the frustrations of having your mouth duct-taped shut.
When my mom was able to understand that I was scared of going to the EMDR lady, she was extremely defensive saying that I didn't seem scared and if I was scared why didn't I say so? She wanted to give me relief in the most direct and fast and easy way she could possibly think of: paying for some (shitty) miracle treatment because money can do anything! Her desperation for me to be "healed" made her feel like her cause was enough justification to force me to do things I absolutely positively did NOT want to do. So why couldn't I say "Mom, I'm scared"? Well, it's not that easy. For one thing, it isn't like normal fear. I know what normal fear feels like. The fear you get when you watch a scary movie or wake up with a cockroach on your face, true story. This isn't like that.
It is primordial fear. The fear the baby feels when its life is ripped from them, when the birthmom is taken away, when needs are not met in the orphanage. My therapist says that it wasn't too long ago when people and even prominent therapists believed babies were blank slates, but much of recent research points to a kind of pre-language language that babies are able to think in and then consequently forget when our human language sets in. I believe this fear and this feeling is fossilized in many adoptees in many different ways. It is encoded into my bones in a kind of other worldly language that is nearly impossible to describe and also impossible to even communicate with someone unless you're even aware of it and have thought about it long and hard--and probably with a great deal of therapy from a trusted and reliable therapist or friend.
But it is not like normal fear, and that's part of the reason why it's really inaccurate and embarrassing to say "I'm scared" about things that don't induce the kind of "scared" you're used to. I know all adoptees don't feel this way. But for me, this is true.
Anyway, I hope that you take away from this that babies have ways of processing the world around them that is inaccessible to grown-ups and in many ways inaccessible to the person themselves. This doesn't mean the feelings or primordial feelings just poof disappear, though. It means that they affect things in other ways that you may not be aware of or able to see.
It also means that they can be "triggered" by events that may seem surprising to you. Sometimes it is hard for people to understand not all adoptees are the same or are bothered by the same things or are affected by seemingly normal things. It also means that adoptive parents may want to "fix" their kid, but that language is extremely toxic because there's nothing to "fix" about a person. If you want to help the healing process, there's no special way to cheat the system and do some magic in their mind via hypnosis. I would steer clear from those directions and never never never ever drag an adoptee to any sort of treatment, therapy, center, program, or professional that claims to give adoptees any sort of relief without the express and full consent of the adoptee.
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