I’ve spent the past 2.5 years in Trauma Reprocessing Therapy, a subject that I’ve written quite a bit on. The reason I’ve written so much on it is that it’s been such a successful treatment for me. I didn’t set out looking for it, in fact, I’d never heard of EMDR Therapy before. I’d found myself in crisis rather suddenly at the beginning of my journey. In an absolute panic, I Googled ‘therapists near me’ and chose my therapist based on her proximity to my house and the fact that she was accepting new clients.

I had no idea she was a therapist specializing in Trauma Reprocessing. In fact, the topic didn’t come up (at least not that I remember) until I was stable and we started mapping out my past instead of addressing what was happening in the current moment. I recall the whole thing sounded pretty sketchy but I was willing to give it a try.

Trauma has happened to all of us. I try to emphasize that these things do not (necessarily) need to meet your or anyone else’s criteria of “trauma.” Traumas can be big or small. They are things that overwhelmed us as they happened – we were stunned into a “fight/flight/flee/fawn” reaction and our brain was unable to fully digest it. It stuck with us. Then, at some point in the future, we find ourselves triggered and our emotional response to it is way out of line. What we feel is the full “fight/flight/flee/fawn” reaction from the original scenario – it lights up instantly and there we are again.

Trauma causes complications in our present because we associate the response to the trigger instead of associating it with the original trauma. For instance, I had a very frightening flashback in the mall a few years ago. It was the smell of the Sbarro and the Christmas decorations that triggered me. The original incident was decades ago. The flashback itself, though, was so frightening and disorienting that I have avoided the mall ever since. I fear it happening again so I do not chance it. These are the things that hold us down in our lives. They are the reasons we give up on our dreams, are unable to function in social situations, or are paralyzed with fear when we have to speak in front of a group. They are the reasons we stop traveling or leaving our kids with babysitters or going to certain places. They are the reasons we believe we are a bad person who deserves bad things to happen, we are a disappointment to others, we are too weak to put ourselves out there in any way. They can completely paralyze a person. Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious – it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” We decide we cannot do something, assuming it is fated in our lives – but it’s not. The answer lies in addressing what started it all. While it was too much at the time it happened, you have grown considerably since then.

Trauma takes up an enormous amount of space in our brains. It is the elephant in the middle of the room. Everything else has to crowd around it. (See image above.) In the past, driving by my childhood home made me very sad. I would only do it if I thought I was in a good enough mood to recover from it. No matter what time of year it was, I would sense the grey coldness of a Midwest winter, all the trees dormant and no warmth anywhere. It would cast a pall on the rest of my visit so, of course, I avoided it.

There were always a few things that came to mind. When I was in the 8th grade, there was a tragedy in our city. A classmate of mine (I did not know her, we were just in the same grade) was brutally murdered by an intruder. He attempted to kill all 3 sleeping children in the house. He succeeded with 2 and the other lived but was permanently disabled. The murderer was not apprehended for months. The girl my age had been sleeping in her bedroom, located in their finished basement, and this is where the intruder entered the house. My bedroom was also in the finished basement of our house. One night, I heard a scraping at my window and felt a terror like I’ve never experienced since. I feared someone was there trying to get in through the window. My light was on so he would have known it was a bedroom and someone was in it. A dark hallway, the garage, 3 flights of stairs and a dark house were between myself and my parents. I was too terrified to leave my room, fearing him being in the garage or waiting in the dark hallway. I was trapped and helpless. Another memory was staring out an upstairs window into a very cold and dark winter evening. My engagement had only recently ended and I’d had to leave college. It was Christmas Eve and everyone was supposed to be happy, in fact there was a small party going on downstairs but I had crept away to cry. Yet another memory was at the end of my eating disorder, I was very ill and very depressed. It was 7am and I was waiting to leave for school and I didn’t know how I was going to keep living when I felt so bad. Again, it was winter. Cold and dark. Because I had suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder all through my teen years, I had many trauma points feeling the full brunt of my depression and hopelessness.

These trauma memories were responsible for the gloom I felt driving past my childhood home. Every time I would see my bedroom window I could feel it. We’d lived there for 12 years. Yes, those are sad and scary memories, but in real-time – even all together – they took up a few hours of those 12 years at most. Bound together in a general feeling of doom, though, was enough for me to avoid the house. It also prevented me from remembering many good and happy times as well.

Through trauma reprocessing, an amazing thing has happened to me, though. The traumas have shrunk to a more realistic size. They are no longer overbearing. The rest of my childhood, once crowded around the edges of these traumas, has decompressed. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten them, they just didn’t have space. They are like – hey! Remember us?! The drive-in movies we went to. My dad, driving me to a church dance through a terrible blizzard because I’d had my heart set on going. My sister and I driving the family van to see White Knights on a snow day, being the only people in the theater. The dance classes I loved so much. My dad planting annuals around our landscaping. We didn’t drink caffeine in our family – RC 100 was the first non-caffeinated cola. My dad iced the cans down and we sat and tried cola for the first time. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted! Playing Ghost in the Graveyard with the neighborhood kids on warm summer evenings. Telling my sister I couldn’t go to sleep yet because there’d been a cliffhanger in my Little House on the Prarie book. LOL. I was me even then. It makes me laugh. My dad taking me on a work trip with him so I could see Laura Inglles Wilders’ home. Packing a lunch for myself and telling my mom I was going to ride my bike to a little town someone had told me about and she was like – ok – and off I went (I didn’t find the town.) The room in the basement that my dad built just for me and how grown up I felt the first night I got to sleep there. These are the things I remember now, and it was worth every bit of sitting in a safe space to briefly feel the traumas again.

What remains is truly beautiful. Having my childhood back is a miracle to me. Being a person of high emotion. there are a lot of things in my life that were too big for me to deal with as they happened. I feel everything big. I have always been this way and wouldn’t choose to be different than I am. I’ve felt both enormous pain and beauty in my life. I’ve experienced both big and small traumas. The negative things that have happened in my life do not even come close to outnumber the positive things. They are not bigger than the love and happiness I’ve experienced, they just got stuck. Every life is made up of triumph and tragedy. Trauma therapy is restoring the balance in my life between the two.