I can dedicate many blog posts to the past few years, dealing with grief, my own mental health journey through all that. But the most dominant thought right now is how much I want to talk about EMDR. See, I took an EMDR course back in October, and I completed the last few items of my training recently. I’ve been wanting to get trained in it for a long time, and the stars aligned (ish) finally and I was able to dive in. I was excited to learn about it, not just to be able to offer it as a treatment for my clients, but also because in order to learn how to do it, we had to partner up in the class and go through it ourselves. I’m a psychology nerd and am all about maximizing my mental health, so I was admittedly nervous but thoroughly excited and motivated to jump in with both feet.
The particular training modality I took focuses on identifying our core negative belief that developed from the traumas and dramas of our life. I went into the training thinking I’ve worked through a lot of my crap, and that’s not to say that I didn’t make a lot of progress in my years of growth, but….holy hell I was not prepared for how deep some of the damage was. After some deep digging and introspection, I was able to identify the belief that has been with me from the beginning, the belief that I didn’t even realize I believed deep into my unconscious.
I don’t matter.
That’s some heavy shit right there. Of course in my adult, thinking, logical brain I know that statement is not true. But our kid brain, the emotional one that governs our body’s physical reactions, doesn’t understand logic and reason. It’s the voice that jumps in with our immediate reactions, even if it’s only for a split second. It’s the gut punch that takes your breath away, the clenching in your heart and the knot in your throat. I’ve worked and learned my way through changing my thinking, but I never realized that there was still a small seed, deep, deep in my soul that continued to have the first say in everything.
The brilliance of EMDR is that it changes that seed, it plants beauty and sunshine and strength right next to it until the old seed is absorbed into oblivion. But you have to see the truth inside first, and FUCK if that doesn’t hurt like a motherfucker.
I’ve got a long way to go still, but I want this change so badly. Some of it has happened, but I’ve come to a rather abrupt awareness after doing this training of how much is still there that needs to change. I still have those gut punch reactions, and even though I try to talk myself out of them, the feeling lingers. There’s still that tiny voice inside that shouts at me, reminds me…I don’t matter. It tells me that no one could really, truly love me enough, because I don’t matter. No one would care to fight to have me in their life, because I don’t matter. How sad is it that there’s a voice inside ourselves that talks that way? I know I’m not the only one who feels that. And I’m trying to fight past that kid brain belief. But dammit if that voice isn’t really freaking loud.