“What’s the worst part about the incident?”
I sat across from my new therapist, contemplating the answer to her question as my mind flipped through flashes of images from that day.
Wind.
Drizzling rain on the windshield.
Singing in the car to P!nk.
A thud.
Glass shattering.
Silence.
Standing on the side of the road.
Tears.
Calling my husband.
It only took a few seconds before I landed on the image that makes my chest tighten and takes away my breath.
“When I saw the tree falling onto my car,” I answered. “I thought I was going to die.”
“And when you think of that incident, on a scale from 0-10, with 10 being the most disturbing, how disturbing is the event when you think about it?” my therapist asked.
“10,” I said without hesitation. I took a deep breath and exhaled.
This was my first of six sessions of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing or EMDR, an evidence-based form of therapy that helps individuals process and heal from traumatic or disturbing experiences. EMDR is too complex to explain all of its attributes and treatment methods fully in one post. If you’re interested in learning more, I suggest exploring the links at the end of this post and checking back on this blog for my future posts on the topic. But for the purpose of this story, I’m going to focus on the brain and how memories are stored.
How trauma gets stored in the brain
Our brain is a powerful organ built with an information processing system for healing and survival. As explained by EMDR’s founder, Francine Shapiro, in her book “Getting Past Your Past,” this mechanism allows us to “make connections to what is useful, and let go of the rest.” This process occurs mostly during REM (rapid eye movement). Have you ever gone to bed upset about something, perhaps grappling over a decision you want to make, and then wake up the next morning with clarity about what to do or feeling less bad about it? It’s because your brain processed it during REM sleep; the brain worked out a solution or what Shapiro describes as an adaptive resolution.
But sometimes, a traumatic or disturbing event prevents that adaptive solution to form. The event can be so overwhelming (mentally, emotionally, physically) that the body cannot process the experience, and instead, the event gets filed away in the brain unprocessed. You can think of an unprocessed memory as a container holding all the emotions, body sensations, negative beliefs and thoughts about yourself that are tied to that memory.
So, let’s go back to my car accident for a moment and think about what was in my unprocessed memory container of that event?
Emotions: Fear, shock, vulnerability.
Body sensations: Freeze response, whole body tensed, chest tightened, like wind was knocked out of me.
Senses (sight, sound, smell, etc.): The pine tree snapping and falling onto my car; the “whoosh” of the tree when it was falling; glass shattering; smashed windshield; shards of glass; P!nk on the radio; the smell of pine needles; silence.
Negative beliefs and thoughts: I’m going to die.
What happened was so overwhelming to my entire system that the memory was never fully processed, and all of that stuff I just listed got filed away in an isolated part of the brain that didn’t link up to anything adaptive that would have allowed me to integrate the event into all of my other life experiences. Instead, the memory remained unprocessed, and as a result, I stayed stuck. Every time I drove or got in the car with anyone, the past felt like the present. A constant loop of “I’m going to die” played in my head. Sometimes I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack. Other times I felt like at any moment my whole body would freeze up in the middle of driving. I was reliving my accident over and over again—and not just in my waking life. It also showed up in my dreams, where I frequently experienced nightmares about car accidents.
What further prevented this memory from being processed is how I responded immediately after the accident happened. Shocked and numbed, I went into autopilot and made phone calls: first to my doctor’s office that I wouldn’t make my appointment that afternoon; second to AAA to tow my car; third to 911 to let them know about the pine tree lying across I-40; fourth to my husband; fifth to my auto insurance to file my claim. And when my husband arrived on the scene, I had him drive me to my friend’s dinner party which I had committed to that evening and he highly discouraged me from going to. “I’m not going to let this ruin my whole evening,” I proclaimed. I pushed it all away.
This traumatic experience also occurred on the heals of a number of other traumatic events that proceeded it, which added to the weight of my symptoms. I would learn through EMDR—both as a clinician in my training and as a patient in therapy—that there was a thread connecting all of them together.
Turning point
My symptoms persisted for more than two years, ultimately leading to a diagnosis of PTSD. I tried everything to cope with the symptoms—meditation, mindfulness, medication, grounding exercises, counseling, yoga. It took the edge off a little, and helped me in other areas of my life, but I never felt true relief. I felt stuck and unable to believe that I would ever find safety or joy again behind the wheel. I gave up and just tried to co-exist with these symptoms. Spoiler alert: That didn’t work either.
The turning point for me finally happened in October 2019 when I was triggered by a video in my EMDR training course, which featured a woman talking to her therapist about being physically hit by a car. I was fine up until the part in her story where she talked about the smashed windshield and identified “I’m going to die” as the first thought she experienced. Watching it, I felt like someone stabbed a knife in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I left the room and walked into the hallway ith no awareness of where I was going. I could hear my friend’s voice calling my name behind me, but I felt like I was in a tunnel and she was on the far opposite end from me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing a flashback and panic attack. I was back in the driver’s seat, reliving my accident. With the help of my friend and one of the trainers from our course, I stabilized in a few minutes using some grounding techniques we learned in class. I had never experienced anything like this before and it scared me. The next day I made an appointment with an EMDR therapist.
EMDR helped me take back my life. Now, when I drive, I catch myself all the time in moments where I am relaxed behind the wheel. My PTSD symptoms are gone. I still have a little bit of hypervigilance, but as my therapist explained, that’s normal, and not something that I would want to completely go away because it keeps me safe. I no longer feel like a prisoner to these symptoms and this experience. And that negative belief of “I’m going to die” that constantly looped in my head while I drove, it’s no longer there. It’s been replaced by the more adaptive belief: I survived. When I say these words out loud or to myself, I feel a sense of peace in my body and a smile forms on my face. I never imagined this could be possible.
Suggested Resources
If you’re interested in learning how EMDR techniques may help you in your own healing, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me through phone or email or schedule a free 10-minute phone consultation with me.
- EMDR Institute, Inc.
- EMDR International Association
- Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro