Posted by Pfinstegg on January 25, 2006, at 20:09:47
She is so great. We haven't actually done any EMDR, as yet, and probably won't for a while, as i have complex PTSD, with a lot of long-enduring childhood trauma, and she, my analyst and I have not yet started to think about how we should focus on that. For now, we are doing what appears on the surface to be ultra-simple things- but they are really helpful. When I feel very anxious, or in pain, she asks me to use all of my senses to ground myself in the present. Today, she asked me to choose five things in her office to look at and focus on. Then we did five things that I could hear, then five I could touch. I was walking around her office, feeling cushions, lamps, paintings. By then we had gotten to smell and taste- but there wasn't much of either of those, at that moment. She wanted a lot of feedback about how i was feeling in all the parts of my body at each step- what i felt to be helpful, what not (or less so). The way she thinks, people with PTSD tend to spend much of their lives in partial (or sometimes total) flashbacks)- not so much flashbacks to specific experiences, as emotional flashbacks to terrifying feeling-states. She is trying to help my brain learn that these things are not happening now. I of course know that they aren't, but it became much clearer to me that a major part of my brain cannot distinguish past from present. That's what we are working on.
I used some of these techniques, as best I could, from time to time throughout the rest of the day, and it was a so much better day. I can see that I will be able to gain some control over my most agonizing feelings, even as I explore their causes with my own analyst.She's trained as a psychoanalyst, too, and the communication seems to be excellent between her and my own analyst. That is very comforting.
She told me, as I was leaving, "remember that you are an intelligent mammal, and need to live in the present, using all your senses. When you are upset, look around you, hear, touch, smell and taste everything that you can, just as it is happening. We will help you with the past."
I'd love to hear some reactions to this- and to find out if anyone else has experienced anything similiar to it...
poster:Pfinstegg
thread:602813
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060121/msgs/602813.html