Chapter 23: Trauma Therapy

For years, I had been in therapy. Years of sitting in dimly lit rooms, answering well-meaning but ultimately fruitless questions.

"How does that make you feel?"
 

"Have you tried reframing the experience?"
 

"What would it take for you to move on?"

These were the wrong questions. The truth was, I didn’t know how I felt. I had spent so long dissociating from pain that feelings existed in a fog—hazy, disconnected, unreachable.

I wasn’t moving on. I was circling the same abyss, staring down into its depths but never finding the bottom.

Then, in 2018, without any real change in my circumstances, I made a different decision.

I typed "trauma therapist" into Psychology Today’s directory, searching for someone who took Medicare. It felt almost absurd—how could I afford therapy when I was barely surviving? But something in me ached for a breakthrough, for something more than the futile talking that had never taken me anywhere.

That’s how I found Andrea Treimel.

She introduced me to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)—a technique that wasn’t about just talking but about reliving and releasing. I had used trauma-focused techniques before, when I was the therapist, but this was different.

This time, I was the one sinking into the memories.

Peeling the Layers of Trauma

It didn’t take long for me to get an understanding of how EMDR worked. There were details that had to be explained to me. I had heard about EMDR since I was once a therapist. I had worked with survivors and victims of traumatic events.

I discovered that our bodies and minds could respond to pain, loss, and grief in the same way that someone might respond to shock trauma - an event that one witnesses or experiences something so overwhelming that we abandon fight or flight and just shut down. Like we are dead.

It wasn’t hard to think of a memory that had lingered and was causing me problems.

That was the problem—they all lingered. Like ghosts pacing the walls of my mind, flickering in and out of focus. Lynn’s death. The assault. The jail cell. The loss of my career. The interrogation. The childhood years of emptiness.

One memory surfaced first, unbidden.

I saw Lynn, the woman I loved more than I knew how to say. Though, I never had hessitated to pronounce my love for Lynn.

In this memory, she was in our home. Sitting in the room with the larger TV where she was camped out during the day and tragically for the first time she did not come to our bedroom to sleep by my side. Our anger or fights (disagreements) never lasted long enough to keep her or me from our bed.

She was trying to get breakfast in the kitchen but she stopped. Gasping for air!

There was nothing I could do.

I was soon leaving for work. I was abandoning her. Tears ran down my face.

I told Andrea, “I abandoned her.”

A few other brief words were exchanged between Andrea and me. It was nothing like my experience doing trauma therapy where I was receiving an account from my clients, moment by moment in detail.

Here I just gave Andrea a brief account that conveyed the gist of what was happening as I watched a light move from side to side and I was instructed to follow the moving light with my eyes. This woulde go on for an entire hour long session - yes, some sessions were the full one hour.

Another memory. Lynn.

Gently, I was holding her hand… I knew Lynn needed me to let the nurse run an IV line into her vein and up to her heart. It was her lungs that were infected and scarred.

I required so much restraint to allow anyone or anything to pierce her soft and precious skin.

During this procedure, tears ran down her face. They were matched by my own tears. I could not be strong for her. This wasn’t like the way you are supposed to act for a client. I had been by her side a few years earlier and had to allow a needle to pierce her skin. This was different. Her health was much worse.

She was hurting but she needed me to let it happen. I wonder if she was aware of my struggle to restrain myself… I wonder if she was thinking that these were the only times she was hurt with me present. I figured she knew that her gentle, pascifist beloved would not be so peaceful under normal conditions if she were hurting.

It took a while to run the IV line toward its destination.

At one point, I suddenly became dizzy. Fearing that I would faint, I got up and left the room. I walked once around that floor of the hospital, past other rooms and regained my composure, returning to the side of my beloved.

Yet, the shame was there. I had abandoned her. Just for a few moments, but I abandoned her.

A wave of grief rushed through me, and suddenly I was gasping—not in the past, but in the present.

My body was reacting as if it were happening again, right now.

I had been stuck in that moment for years.

During EMDR, a variety of visualizations played a crucial role. At times, I would close my eyes and picture the shame and rot inside me as thick, dark grey ashes, and soot slowly drifting out of my body and into a waiting container. It mirrored the techniques I had used in hypnosis. The container was a freezer that was sealed shut.

This was EMDR. This was reprocessing.

At the time of the reprocessing with Andrea I was vaguely aware that Lynn had died. Yet, she had left me before this. I was too exhausted to explore other traumas… other times in which my mind reacted in the same manner as those who were experiencing big T shock traumas.

EMDR felt like a mystifying ritual—a haunting dance with the relentless light flickering across a mysterious device—while my hands clenched into fists that absorbed raw, untethered anger, sadness, and unresolved pain. My hands were not clenched into fists to fight but to contain the emotions.

So Many Sessions

My ability to get in touch with anger was new. I can’t describe every detail of the weekly hour long sessions that lasted for about 18 months. That would fill a book in itself.

Within the searing memories, I was forced to confront emotions long suppressed. Shamed by Ana’s false accusations, I had buried my true feelings deep, terrified that revealing anything resembling anger (frustration) would somehow expose me as capable of harming someone.

Seated in a leather armchair, I noticed how Andrea's eyes focused intently on my face, searching for any hint of emotion. The therapy session had an intimate air, with the soft glow of a few ligthts bringing out the colors throughout the room. Despite the intensity of Andrea's gaze, I found my reactions surprisingly muted, as if my emotions were hiding just beneath the surface.

I recalled a lesson from my hypnosis training, where a colleague shared a memory of using EMDR and seeming to lose control of the reactions of her client.

Of course, there were many sessions where the nature of the trauma varied. It wasn't always about the sheer intensity of terror, like the heart-pounding, adrenaline-fueled moments when someone brandished a knife and I had to dash away to save my skin. That particular memory was unraveled in a separate session somewhere during these eighteen months of therapy sessions.

Often, I would step into the therapist's softly lit office with a mental image of a specific event, a pressing sense of what needed to be unpacked in that specific session.

Occasionally, I would invoke a resource—a figure from my past who had enveloped me in love and warmth. Sometimes, that resource wasn't even real, but a character from a fictional universe—like Buffy from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," with her fierce strength, or Jessica Jones, with her unyielding strength from the show bearing her name.

This next session begins with me relaxing and going back to the moment when the reality of Lynn leaving and not being there was most poignant.

Instead of a flashing light to follow with my eyes, I held something in my hands that vibrated in an alternating pattern sometimes vibrating in my left hand and at other moments on the right and so on - a pattern not unlike the movement of my eyes following a light moving from one side to the other.

In this memory or reliving, I started by relaxing and then I saw myself inside our home. Boxes were everywhere as I entered our home. Lynn wasn’t there. I was supposed to get whatever I wanted from the home.

I wanted Lynn. I wanted this to be home.

Overwhelmed and not knowing where else to go, I entered the back room. I moved my back up against the wall and slid down the wall. I was staring at nothing in front of me. I was looking into an abyss.

I had drifted away in my mind. I felt dead. Like the world was dead. Lifeless.

How would I resurrect myself from this place. Andrea’s voice asking me what is happening. I said, “Life is gone from this place, from me.”

My resource for this was Celta. Her eyes were filled with love as they once were. Anything is possible in dreams. With imagination.

I could feel her love filling me with some life giving image of love like a glowing light or clear mist.

Andrea guided me to let myself imagine this loss as filling me with soot and ashes, like a great fire had consumed everything. Andrea guided me to let all that decay and rot rise up out of me and to imagine a container - a freezer.

The ashes rose up out of me and into an open freezer door that would soon be sealed shut.

The Interrogation That Broke Me

I knew that there was something big that we had not processed. Until I came in and told Andrea it was time.

I need to go back to the interrogation and when I was first arrested after Ana attacked me.

The next image was not a memory I wanted.

The memory gripped me and would not let me go, would not let me escape.

I started with the scene of sitting in my room while a lady police officer stood over me. I was describing this to Andrea.

Then he tells me that he has to put handcuffs on me. The image of me in handcuffs still carried enormous shame, despite knowing it was undeserved. I was the victim! This session, I described the events as they unfolded.

I am in the police car and my friend calls. I fumbled to get hold of my phone and answer it. I want the police officer to hear my words. My friend’s voice is soft and comforting as I explain how I was attacked and this person said I attacked her! She could only say how sorry she was that this was happening to me.

I never thought to put her on the visitor list, to call her and tell her to come see me.

I was then in a room being questioned. I had moved into this without updating Andrea and so she had said “What’s happening?” and I explained.

I am re-enacting what happened. Then one of them says, “That’s not what happened!”

What was he talking about? Part of me wanted to ask him if he was there, which he wasn’t.

The words hit like a slap. I was disoriented and thought I should just go over the exact chain of events as if I had reason to believe that there was reason to be confused about what I had described in great detail.

I had come to them as a victim of a brutal assault, and still wearing the bloody clothing. Part of me was incredulous. Did they think that I kept a bloody outfit - bloody shirt, shorts, socks and sneakers ready to put on when I needed to appear to be the victim!

It didn’t matter what I said. They had already decided.

I saw their faces, the disbelief, the way one of them looked at me with something close to disgust.

I had no idea what they wanted me to say. The questioning went on.

When I was brought in front of the magistrate, after refusing to sign the bizarre confession that seemed to arise our of nowhere, I was to freaked out. I couldn’t face this. I said I was suicidal.

This only made things worse. I was stripped of many of my clothes and put into a padded outfit. This only compounded the shame that I already felt layered upon fear and desperation. They took me to be photographed in this state.

Bring in some resources, Andrea said.

This time it was Jessica Jones. She always did the right thing. She was there tossing and pushing the bad guys who were hurting me. She shouted at them, “Leave Bruce alone! What is wrong with you!”

The Nightmare of John F and Secondary Trauma

I began to describe the events in which I was being brought into the detailed trauma stories of my clients. I had used hypnosis which does create an empathic resonance of shared experience. However, for so long I had been able to help clients to maintain a distance from their trauma memories.

I had tools such as what Neuro-Linguistic Programming provided by having them project the memory onto a screen that is far away to keep them from getting pulled into reliving the trauma and being overwhelmed.

Before I fully appreciated what John had been doing, I was noticing that some of my clients were getting worse. This reached a climax when Lynn started getting sick and my internal resources were already drained.

Clients were reporting that they needed a session. John couldn’t get them grounded. Why was John involved in their lives in this way? They were having panic attacks or flashbacks.

Recalling this in my session, I saw a vague image of John F. I had tried to erase him from my memory.

This had to be continued into another session.

Andrea guided me to look around the room, her therapy office… focus on a color that symbolizes the sense of safety. I was grounding myself in the here and now.

I didn’t go into the details of these very disturbing traumatic recollections that were being described by a few of my clients. The flashbacks were filled with imagery used to frighten very young children.

I wasn’t sure what could have actually happened and what was part of their imagination. It seemed that they had been exposed to suggestions on the internet or elsewhere and they were transformed into actual memories. Who could have come up with material this disturbing to infect the minds of others?

I found myself at other times re-experiencing a frightening experience or more than one that happened to me… something with a sexual component.

In waking dreams, John F stood in the shadows as I lived through the horror that I felt… In one memory, I was unable to move. Frozen with someone on top of me.

There in the dark shadows of a dark room, John stood just watching. Was he waiting for his turn to hurt me?

I can’t begin to cover every traumatic memory. I was discovering a new love for myself, a sense of self-compassion. I began to tell Andrea that the more I came to love myself, the less likely I can have any kind of relationship or contact with my parents. I had deserved better.

The Long, Dark Silence of Jail

The experience of being in jail was obviously another significant trauma to be processed.

It was not just the walls that trapped me in jail.

It was the absolute isolation.

No visitors. No one fighting for me.

I was forgotten. The guards walked the floors like robots devoid of humanity and compassion. I don’t think I would want to have such a position as a guard, knowing that some innocent and vulnerable person like me would see any guard doing what must be done as if they were inhuman just for completing tasks required of them.

Every night, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering how long I would be here. Wondering if this was my new reality forever.

I thought about innocence—how society claims to protect it, but in reality, no one cared.

This is what I had to process.

For so long, I had been holding my breath.

There were so many other traumas to be processed. The sudden loss of Celta with the next year spent crying all the time. The time spent in Wilmington, dragged down there for a court date when justice had failed me… when Wilmington was no longer the joyful home it had been.

Breaking the Cycle of Trauma

Session after session, I faced each memory.

Each wound that had festered, buried beneath layers of toxic shame and survival.

I learned to bring in resources—Lynn, Celta, people who had loved me - my maternal grandparents. Superheroes.

I learned that I could survive remembering.

I learned that I was still here.

That I had not been erased.

That I was not lost forever.

And for the first time, I allowed myself to feel what had been trapped for decades.

For the first time—I began to heal.

Throughout the process, Andrea repeatedly asked me what it said about me. Was this a question about toxic shame? I thought I was overcoming the shame and despair.

A tremendous amount of healing had been occurring for the first time. Yet, somehow, deep down, I knew that in many ways nothing had changed.

I still hadn’t tried to talking to hardly anyone about this. My best friend Thomas heard my story. Elee had heard. Yet, I was so ashamed of the image of someone hearing my dark secret.

It didn’t matter that I was the victim and did not do anything violent. I was the one who had been charged and convicted. The system had failed me and created an undeserved cloak of toxic shame that I wore everywhere.

When I had tried to volunteer to work with children, I had not been trusted.

There were things that could not be changed with the process of EMDR therapy. Perhaps, there were things I forgot to bring into the therapy room, not knowing how EMDR might have helped with those elements of my lived experiences.