I'm scared

My thoughts don't sound very eloquent in my head but I feel I need to at least spill them out on the screen.  Perhaps I can clean them up later.

EMDR involves reliving traumatic experiences in your life while retraining the physiological reactions in your body - a person is basically making new neural pathways.  It has been shown to be effective for PTSD in numerous studies and I DO believe it will work for me because:  a) as much as I've tried to ignore, I do have a number of what most most people would describe as "traumatic experiences" in my life (Ugh!  I hate to think of myself as "that person") and b) I have had a few instances recently where I was able to recognize myself having a physiological response to someone else's actions and I can recognize that it is not about me just being emotional but, rather, how my brain learned - starting at the age of 2 - how to react when there was "danger" around me.  The only problem was I'm not a very good judge of what is dangerous because, in my house, danger came out of nowhere.

So my decision for this week is to decide which traumatic experiences I want to start with...

Do I start chronologically working forwards from childhood?  Or backwards?  Or with the most traumatic experiences of them all?  Or maybe begin with the "little t" traumas?  With such a menu to choose from it is hard to know.

As I reflect on this decision I realize that the incidents in my life that would seem to be the most traumatic aren't the ones that cause me the most pain.  Why is this?  Is it like this for everyone?

Logically you would think that having my feet beaten with a board all day for leaving my toys on the stairs and ultimately being lifted and thrown across the room like a rag doll would be one to start with but...the part of this that is traumatic is the feeling I had this day, and many others, of being summoned from my room and not knowing what awaited me.  It wasn't the actual beating that was traumatic, it was the uncertainty of not knowing what was going to happen or when it was going to end.  So there's my first one to re-experience. 



The second trauma I have chosen to relive in an effort to retrain is the sound of my Mother crying and begging my father not to hurt her.  She took the brunt of his anger.  As long as I stayed in my bedroom and was quiet I generally was safe.  I want to get rid of the anger and helplessness I felt when I peered through the floor vent and tried to see what he was doing to her.  The VENT is really fixated in my memory as a traumatic visual.  It was a symbol of being cut off from what was going on downstairs.  I can still feel the cold metal against my face as I tried to see and listen.  I can still hear the sound of it opening and closing.  I can still remember how to open it s-l-o-w-l-y so he wouldn't know.

And third.  Can I stop here?  Can I be done if I work through these three?

Third is the moment when I asked Shawn, when he was in the middle of a black out, "Would you ever hurt me?"

And his icy reply was, "Why would I fuck up my life like that?"

That trauma was different than the others because it was one specific event.  It was instantaneous.  What followed that statement was not traumatic!  It was that instant that I realized, "This man could hurt me."