Emdr gave me my life back and ability to heal on my own.

I was told I would never heal and to get over it. I tried to for year's and I actually really did.

I did really cool things when something was happening.

EMDR if there's an event won't bring it up if it doesn't need to be worked on?

It's super bizarre. I was assaulted for instance at age 17. My brain didn't register it nearly as bad as the hospital visits I had as a child.

Was so weird. Emdr was really like mind blowing to me because it really won't process something that has been processed already.

So like if it's not there, it won't find it.

I directly want to say and this may be abrasive, owning victimhood gave me dignity. It also helped me gain clarity and awareness and genuine insight about why I didn't like myself.

PTSD and trauma used to be seen as weakness of the individual strictly because some people got it and some didn't. Definitely any trauma isn't someone feeling sorry for themselves. It's genuinely really very similar to just a body rejecting foreign material.

Now that trauma has moved out of the mental ill health paradigm, it is very much seen to be a sign of the actual body system rejecting foreign material.

I personally like emdr because I have cptsd and I have therapy trauma and was a victim of high profile crime. I've never in my life after doing emdr ever been okay with someone telling me I was feeling sorry for myself. Emdr provides a lot of situational context awareness and foresight and hindsight awareness so I've noticed after doing it for cptsd - there was like a year where I was just too injured to see any level of it working.

Around one.five year's in I can actively say I've never met someone who didn't have trauma. But honestly emdr is so helpful even just as a skill.

I struggle with having to process a lot and had issues with folks calling me codependent because I actually process externally, and via images. So I process by speaking about subjects.

It's led to a lot of people making assumptions about trauma they never should have and it put in genuine danger where folks would take advantage.

I'm still doing emdr and these are the things it helped with.

Attempted homicide. Sexual assault. Long term victim blaming. Therapeutic abuse.

What it helped with weirdly in everyday life, I once saw my relationship issues started at age 2/3 because I went to the hospital when I didn't want to. I fell of my bike at age 6 and for some reason that was causing issues in my life with driving a car. I didn't like ice cream and was told to eat it as a kid and that actually was a weird thing that came up in processing. I realized I had been in survival mode - always.

My entire job industry was built on making folks enter survival mode, and then encouraging them to stay there to work.

I changed jobs. I've started sculpting and painting but all those skills I had as a kid they just didn't have linked neuropathways. So whatever reason my brain couldn't focus on what I liked and then when these incidences went away I got those skills back and my brain actually developed them and bunched them for me.

Like for example, I was sitting at home the other day and made a sculpture. I've never sculpted a day before in my life. But I made one and it was actually very very good. It was genuinely a bit shocking and I ran to my therapist like - what's happening!!

And she said it was normal when processing early memories and proverbial memories as well when we just can't be ourselves.

I started flamenco dancing after doing 6 months of emdr on something entirely unrelated. I just woke up genuinely one day and was like - no this would be really good life choice based on what my body knows.

( I don't really know what my body knows, the insights don't come from external validation).

A lot of the emdr insights come from internal validation of the entire memory base. With multiple traumas that need to process you also get cognitive rewiring of positive resourcing around that time.

It works really well for musicians, artists, creatives, athletes as well.

The process has been genuinely horrible at times. Like genuinely horrid. But it's made me realise out society doesn't actually know much about the brain or trauma.

Emdr is one of those skills that can stop intergenerational abuse really profusely as well.

I did it after court and trial. When I did it I wasn't focusing on crime information, but it showed me very very clear detailed insights that I had, that no one ever could have validated. And when I went to the police, I used the insights from emdr to actually get vindicated entirely.

It helped solved my actual case without focusing on the case because there was weird offshoots of insights.

Emdr heals folks but it's more that it's a modality that provides insights rather quickly. Folks naturally process this way anyway, it's more that it just does it at a very high high speed and very easily.

About six months ago I could see my actual entire relationship history unravel from age 2/3 but main first visual memory age 5 at preschool.

I've not been attracted to anyone I used to like anymore. Like it was very obvious to me after working on unrelated beliefs that my entire way of relating to relationships was off due to what I even saw in society at that age.

So my brain processes the actual dialect from 1998-2001 very strongly.

Whenever I date or break up with someone now. I do emdr for ten minutes each day for 4 days after.

Holy shit has it saved me from like just, making shitty choices.

But like I would blame myself or even not get the breakup or would miss things sometimes in relationships even non-toxic things. And I didn't get why?

Now I just do emdr. Like whenever I question something relationship orientated that feels off, I just do emdr and it saves me like 2-3 months of healing because it'll actually show me why it didn't work out - probably wouldn't work out. And then it shows me why I think that way.

Then it processes out to like a new form and understanding and I've seen it a lot now - I have much higher ability to step away from just dodgy people, or even people who don't get me. So like just casual semi-i don't want you in my life for no reason bar not wanting you and that's cool kinda folks.

Like it's just not worth it.

But yeah even the relationship emdr is entirely different to the trauma processing emdr.

They have different protocols for like - different things.

Like even if I want a break from someone I'm dating or if they're blaming me or I can see something is there issue in a conflict, and I know I'm getting a shift of it onto me. I excuse myself, do emdr.

And then come back with a wicked comeback based on genuinely year's of knowledge and insights because I just can't deal with specific conversation rhetoric, It's exhausting when you know something but can't explain why. It's helped with that for me a lot.

Definitely have done emdr 4 or 5 days even on just two or three conflicts on a relationship where something felt a bit off - but I didn't know what? So I would go to therapy and do two 1.5 hour sessions following by like 30-40 at home on day 3/4.

And my brain will go - yeah... The rate this is progressing I won't want this in four months and will be able to explain why. Like I just don't stick it out anymore.

And it's made me redirect to safe people. Safe people are very easy to spot.

I saw a guy the other day who was very attractive, and I was like taken aback.

I'm not a people pleaser after my first experience processing prior to emdr. But it was very adamant even that the attraction I had was based on genuine respect and care.

I've been in situations in the past where I've been cornered and asked out. Told to feel ashamed of even just admiring someone or showing it when it's open. I felt always ashamed to show genuine attraction to men I liked.

To the point, I have never dated a man I liked. I didn't even know that. Like I don't know how I didn't know that. But I've literally nearly married two men and all of them fit the same profile of power and dominance. They would actually cause pain and I felt that the trauma from that and them being nice was like love. Or even care.

It became super clear in emdr that I only liked them because they abused me. Very neg based manipulation. Very subtle ' I can put you down to bring you up'. Subtle covert manipulation.

My earliest memory of covert manipulation was when I was 6 playing with my babies. And I was blamed for not being attentive enough to my dad.

...

Literally never my fault or job. That shit is everywhere.