Fear Was My Mindkiller

Unresolved trauma and how I became a believer in staring at moving lights.

I am immensely skeptical of anything that claims to be an instant fix – a way to immediately solve a thorny and persistent problem. I’m especially skeptical of these kinds of claims where mental health is involved. I find most growth and healing is the work of years, if not a lifetime. In my decade of attempting to figure myself out, I’ve found one (partial) exception to this – EMDR therapy.

I spent the vast majority my first month back home hiding away in my childhood bedroom. I emerged to eat, buy books, buy beer, and exchange a few sentences with my parents. My main focus was video games and sleeping. Every morning for the first two weeks I immediately jolted awake. For the first six months I was hyper aware of any sound remotely resembling a gunshot. All unpleasant symptoms, but as they faded I assumed I was getting back to normal. I thought I had recovered from my ten months in South Sudan, working at a hospital for Doctors Without Borders. Instead, I’d end up living in a state of fear for the next fifteen years.

The exact details of what happened in South Sudan aren’t particularly relevant. I was near and exposed to a lot of violence and I witnessed death of all sorts. I spent many months feeling deeply unsafe, paired with a deep lack of trust in those responsible for my safety. I was never directly attacked, and absolutely did not have as bad of an experience as many of my colleagues had, let alone many South Sudanese. But I was also twenty-six, in way over my head, and had none of the tools I needed to process the incredible range of emotions I was experiencing.

I told myself it hadn’t been that bad, that I had gotten through it, that it could’ve been way worse, that it was behind me. Nevermind that when asked about it my default response was, “Ask me again after I’ve had a couple beers.” And if you happened to ask me once I’d had those drinks, the response became, “I’m not drunk enough,” or my eyes would lose focus and I’d go quiet until someone changed the subject.

My twenties were full of adventure. Over four years living outside of the country, long road trips, random jobs in between. I was introverted, and often preferred books over people, but I wasn’t living a life dictated by fear. My thirties were a completely different story. My life was myopic. I focused intently on the next ten minutes, looking to stay as distracted and safe as possible. Thinking beyond a day in the future was rare, thinking beyond a month in the future was non-existent. I spent a total of a month outside the country, all on trips initiated and organized by others. I worked, drank, and spent endless evenings and weekends avoiding any sort of interaction with other humans. I had become a wildly different person.

In January of this year, I was sitting in my therapist’s office, hunched inward. At this point, I’d be working on my self-awareness for years, and I could tap into the visceral sense of fear I was experiencing. That day, I didn’t want to engage with the world, it just felt too scary to me. I wanted to turn away from everything, to curl into a ball and hide. 

“Where in your life is that fear coming from?” My therapist asked. “Why don’t you look backwards from now through your life, and see if you can pinpoint it?” So I sat there, closed my eyes, and moved backwards through my memories. The moment I reached Sudan, I jerked in my chair, grimaced, turned my head away, grunted with resistance. That was the source, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near it.

Enter EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy.

Imagine dredging up a deeply painful memory from your past. Focusing on the worst snapshot of that memory, the single image that defines it. Working deliberately to bring that memory into your body, into your current moment, to feel as much as you can of it – and when it’s feeling as viscerally terrible as possible, opening your eyes, and following a light moving back and forth, as you attempt to keep that memory as present for you as you possibly can. That’s EMDR. It is unpleasant, deeply weird, and incredibly fascinating. I have never been so bluntly reminded that my brain is a precarious concoction of biological complexity, very susceptible to manipulation and general trickery.

I found myself gritting my teeth and almost growling as I attempted to keep the terrible memories alive. One would vanish, and another – seemingly unrelated – would take its place, then another. It felt like nightmare whack-a-mole, free associating around some of the worst moments of my life. It was exhausting, invigorating, bizarre, depressing – and incredibly effective.

The untreated trauma gap.

Events from fifteen years ago – 4K videos blasting at full volume in my head, complete with surround sound, smell, and complete emotional immersion – suddenly faded into fuzzy black and white pictures. The events finally became memories. Unpleasant ones, but just old memories.

As part of the EMDR protocol, I was asked how vivid and intense a given memory felt in my head both before and after. On a ten point scale, eights and nines would drop down to ones and twos over the course of a few hours of therapy. It was such a jarring change that I repeatedly second guessed myself. I couldn’t believe that such an intense memory could fade so quickly. But even as I write this, I’m probing back to some of the worst moments and only feeling a little lingering sadness and heaviness around them. I can talk about those times now while completely sober, and no longer experience that visceral need to turn away.

The best outcome of all of this, the reason I’m writing about EMDR in the first place, is how my day to day life has changed. Finally processing those events, and allowing them to fade into long term memory, has finally let me return to living in a state of relative peace. I find attending events full of strangers so much easier. Restaurant hosts don’t terrify me as much as they used to. Initiating a hard conversation is no longer impossible for me. I don’t have to spend minutes hyping myself up to get out of my car, go into a store, go into the gym, walk into a holiday party, or so many other things that I used to struggle with daily. I’ve even finally found the courage to start sharing the vulnerable, hard parts of my life with strangers on the internet.

I’ve come to understand that my experiences in Sudan have given me a glimpse into what being in a war zone must be like. Just a small hint of the full reality of that experience. A peek into the dread, confusion, anger, brutality, and overwhelm of being surrounded by inescapable pain and death. Just that taste, and it’s taken me a decade and half to find myself again.

Resources

I am a deeply skeptical person. When presented with the option of diving into some of my most traumatic memories while moving my eyes back and forth, I was at best reluctant. But I found myself swayed by reading Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s deeply compelling description of EMDR in The Body Keeps the Score and discovering the reliance on it for treating veterans with PTSD.

Finally, while I’ve found the courage to write publicly, posting about vulnerable topics on a weekly basis has proven to be a bit intense, so I’ll be posting every other week going forward. And as always, if you enjoyed this please click that ♥️ button and subscribe.