The Therapy That Changed Everything
When trauma recovery can happen through processes like EMDR, do therapeutic relationships even matter?
Everything I’ve been taught about mental health says relationships are the most important part of recovery. The relationship between the therapist and the client is where the work is. Where the magic happens. All that changed when I had a type of trauma therapy called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).
When I sat in front of my EMDR therapist for the first time, my heart sank. She was cold and reminded me of an old teacher I’d hated. When she looked up from her iPad it was usually to look for her coffee. Her style was business-like and I couldn’t tell whether that was to mask her anxiety or her boredom. As I was taking this in she told me one of her first tasks would be to “install a sense of safety” inside my brain. Install, like a Windows update. I thought then that I’d been duped, this was snake oil in therapy form.
The installation of my sense of safety went like this: I had to think of a safe place, associate it with a word and think of that word. Then while I was thinking of the word and the place, I had to hold two alternately buzzing lights, one in each hand. Without moving my head I had to look from one light to the other as they flashed. I felt stupid doing it and even stupider for believing it could work. In the middle of the process, I saw her swipe something on her iPad. In the corridor outside some workers from the business upstairs joked loudly. After a couple of minutes, she told me to stop and that was it.
It didn’t seem like very much but in that unsafe room with that disconnected therapist, change happened. Huge, life-changing change.
After that first session, I was hungry like I’ve never been hungry. I walked straight into a supermarket and bought a huge bag of nuts. It was finished by the time I reached my car. I drove immediately to Mcdonalds, I ordered two Big Mac meals and devoured them.
I got home and went straight to bed. I slept for 14 hours.
The next morning nothing felt different. I stopped at a coffee shop without any idea that when I left I’d be walking out in tears. My order was complicated and involved the kind of interaction that would normally give me so much anxiety my brain would seize up. I would be overwhelmed and stutter, my thinking would be jumbled and blocked. But that day there was no flood of anxiety, just a gentle stream of single thoughts. Thoughts that turned into words and flowed one after the other out of my mouth. My brain felt clear, focused, clean even. It was beautiful. I knew then something fundamental had changed.
Before I was out of the door I was crying. I realized that for the first time in my 38-year-old life I was fully present in my body. Until that moment I’d never felt the connection between my mind and body without the static of trauma in between.
The relief was profound, the unburdening of a massive invisible load. Sometimes I still can’t believe it happened.
And so now I’m left with this stark challenge to what I thought I knew about mental health recovery. If such massive change can happen using such a mechanical process, are our brains just machines that we can transform if we know which buttons to push?
Are the theories about safe and compassionate relationships just indulgent fantasies by therapists looking to keep themselves in a job?
At their most fundamental our brains are machines and trauma has a clear biological impact on them. It makes sense that a quasi-mechanical process can effect change in the brain. But for me to get to the point where EMDR made that change I needed to have all my social needs met. I needed a stable place to live, a positive support network, a community. I needed relationships. The foundations I built my recovery on.
Mental health difficulties are mental, physical, and spiritual experiences. It makes total sense that we need different tools for each aspect of them. Our mind is a very different thing from our brain and the problems they present need different solutions. The challenge is knowing which solutions to use.
