The word “good” can mean a lot of things. Trust me, I looked it up. The definition that makes the most sense to me is: “satisfactory in quality, quantity, or degree.” “Good” is what I call time periods where life isn’t swallowed up every day by periods of sadness. No, “good” feels good. Good feels like a win. Good days are the days that you forget you’re a survivor all together and good days feel like the days before all the memories came back. Good days are days that are satisfactory in quality, quantity and degree. For almost two months I had been almost free of any real flashbacks or panic attacks. The triggers I’d experienced over the past two months were more of the everyday sort…the song from the commercial that makes me hear little girls’ voices from childhood, or a phrase in a library book that takes me back for a second. These are things that the EMDR has helped me to be able to experience merely as momentary setbacks versus the days-long processes they would have been years ago. Other than these pesky little annoyances, for months I’d been “good.”
Inevitably though, after so many good weeks and even months, gradually, the good days started to melt into nights with bad dreams again. The dreams mean there are still targets, or specific memories or sets of memories that are causing me pain. When the dreams come, I know it’s time to “go deep” again. “Going deep” is what I call the therapy sessions where we target memories using EMDR. I call them that because these are the sessions where you must intentionally choose to go to the places that haunt you the most - and the courage to do this requires you to dig deep. Real deep. This part of the therapy is the hardest in the moment and the most trying in between sessions. Recently, I had to go deep again. It had been a while.
This time though, I was mad. The Broken voice -or the voice that speaks from trauma - that voice tricked myself into thinking that this time the “good” was here to stay - that maybe I’d “gone deep” for the last time and this “good” life was not just a reprieve. The Brave, or the intellectual, real world me knows that my healing will most likely never be truly over, and that the “good” times are just that - patches of amazingly free and clear times that should be enjoyed and treasured by me and those who love me as the easy times. So for now I (and those around me) am dealing with the “in- between” state that going deep brings. The processing that my brain endures during EMDR sessions, and for many days and even weeks after, can have side effects. Side effects like a short fuse (not great with a 3-year-old at home), being quick to cry (even more so than normal) and getting over-stimulated really easily by sounds, too much going on, and too much chaos in my surroundings (again…I have a 3-year-old). What this means for me as a parent and a wife is just plain guilt. And also gratefulness. Guilt that I need family to pick up my slack so often with my daughter. Gratefulness that they do. Without a word and with no question - they do. The Broken threatens to make me stop taking care of myself - to submit to the guilt. The Brave, well she knows what is most important. The most important thing I do now is do the work. Let Averie see me do the work. Work my ass off to make a world where she’ll never have to do the work. That is all.