I sit there, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, in a big blue recliner next to a brown Great Dane and in front of an old woman with large glasses and crazy shoes sitting in a rocking chair moving her hand back and forth in front of my eyes. I'm preparing myself to time travel. “Follow my hand with your eyes,” she reminds me as my tears force my eyes closed. I open them, my vision blurry through the salt water, as I travel into traumatic memories and allow my eyes to twitch right to left. “What did your experience feel like then? What did you learn to think about yourself in that moment? What do you think about yourself now when you travel back into that memory?” These are my guiding questions as I enter into the memories of abuse. I am to: imagine myself within the memory, feel what I felt like during that experience, name the cognition from that event, and then replace it with a new cognition that is actually true. The abuse was not my fault. I am safe and powerful now. I have the capacity to protect myself and to control my life. I do this over and over again in this salmon pink painted room in that large arm chair next to that larger animal with this brilliant woman in her rocking chair wearing Ed Hardy sneakers.
Time travel is a necessary part of a sexual abuse survivor’s healing process. There are many therapeutic modalities for recovery. The one that I have found most effective is called EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR was discovered by a Palo Alto psychotherapist named Dr. Francine Shapiro. While interviewing war veterans with PTSD, she noticed that their eyes twitched while recalling traumatic events. After doing a number of neurological studies, it became clear to her that eye movement and neurological movement were intrinsically connected. Any right/left movement of the body, especially of the eyes, encouraged neurons to move and communicate faster and more effectively. This is why we often have revelations when we’re walking, or running, or swimming. We’re moving right to left, right to left.
Development as a sexual abuse survivor was complicated. My brain formed neurological pathways in my most important developmental years that locked in negative cognitions and replayed those thoughts throughout my life: I’m unworthy of love, I deserved how I was treated, I am to blame for how I was treated, I am responsible to solve the problem. These thoughts are triggered throughout my present experience and restrict me from safe, natural development.
So, I have to travel back in time. I have to go back into these memories, name the repressed cognition, and replace it with a new thought, replace it with the truth. This new cognition creates an improved neurological pathway. This new cognition allows me to let go of the pain of the past and experience the present as it actually is, not how I'm perceiving it to be through the lens of my abusive past.
Until very recently, when I looked back on the past 31 years of my life, I felt really sad. I felt as if my life had been stolen from me. The first 20 being devoted solely to survival, the next 10 to the redevelopment process: to deconstructing and reconstructing my life, my community, and my sense of self. I didn’t know how to get those years back.
Now I understand that I can’t have those years back, but I can still have everything I ever wanted, my development will just be backwards. I didn’t have a safe and exploratory childhood, but I can experience a safe and exploratory childhood by spending time with children now. I wasn’t allowed to dance as a child and dance I so desired to do, but now have explored adult ballet. I spent my high school years trying to be who everyone else wanted me to be, but I experienced high school over again when I had the opportunity to teach young girls to be themselves, to participate in extracurricular activities like school plays and sports, and to win awards for inspiration and leadership. My collegiate years were filled with responsibility to save the world instead of care for myself, but now I can explore my intellectual interests by taking adult classes and traveling the world. My professional interests have been focused on earning a salary that would help me to rebuild my life, where now I can focus on what I’m really passionate about. My body has been sick decades, but now I can experience it healed.
My life wasn’t stolen from me, I just had to give it away for awhile. Now, by going back in time, I have taken my life back, my community back, myself back and look forward to experiencing a new developmental process, living life backwards, earning a second chance. As Sheryl Sandburg states after she lost her husband to unexpected death, she didn’t get to choose the end of Option A, a full life with her husband, but she sure is going to kick ass at Option B. I, too, didn’t have control over the last 31 years of my life, my Option A would not have been a childhood of rape and resilience or an adulthood of recovery. But Option B, whatever I choose it be, will kick serious ass!