Talk therapy had never helped.
Too many years of hearing therapists ask:
“How does that make you feel?”
“Have you tried reframing the experience?”
“What would it take for you to move on?”
Move on? From what? From being falsely accused, shackled, humiliated—treated like a danger to society when I had been the one crying out for help? I didn’t know how I felt. Not really.
My emotions were locked behind thick walls. I had spent too many years dissociating from pain. Everything inside me felt numb or vague—a fog I couldn’t clear.
But in late 2018, something shifted.
I searched the Psychology Today directory for “trauma therapist” and filtered by those who took Medicare. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t have the money, barely enough to live. But I needed something to change. I was unraveling.
That’s how I found Andrea Treimel.
A Different Kind of Therapy
Andrea practiced EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I had used trauma-focused methods myself when I was the therapist. But this was different.
Our therapy sessions would last into 2020 - weekly or more often sessions processing a different trauma each time.
Now I was the one sitting in the chair. Now I was the one trying to hold it together. No lectures. No deep conversations.
Andrea barely spoke at all.
Instead, she guided me into memory.
She introduced me to grounding techniques—focusing on a “safe color” in the room, holding small devices that vibrated in alternating hands, watching her hand or a light move from left to right. These were tools. Anchors. Ways to stay present while entering the dark places.
Into the Core Wounds
There were so many memories that haunted me.
Each one felt like it had been sealed away, quietly poisoning me from the inside.
The arrest.
The handcuffs.
The interrogation where my truth was dismissed before I could even speak.
The betrayal.
The loss of my career.
The silence of jail.
The feeling of being labeled a threat when I had always lived my life as a pacifist and so gentle I was incapable of violence. In one session, I went back to that moment with Lynn—the moment I felt I had abandoned her.
She had been gasping for air. I couldn’t help.
I left for work, crying as I walked away.
I told Andrea, “I abandoned her.”
In another memory, I held Lynn’s hand as the nurse inserted an IV line near her heart. Her tears matched mine.
I fought back every instinct to stop them from hurting her. I had to let it happen.
She trusted me to protect her—and I couldn’t.
The shame of leaving the hospital room, dizzy, needing a break…
The moment I slid down the wall in our home, after she had left.
Staring into nothing… in the void.
Feeling like the world had ended.
Andrea had me visualize the grief inside me as dark ash, soot rising out of my body and being locked into a freezer. It wasn’t magic. It was practice. But it helped me name what I hadn’t been able to face.
Reclaiming My Anger
I had always feared my own anger.
False accusations had taught me that any strong emotion could be used against me.
If I expressed frustration, people might think I was dangerous.
If I cried out, they might say I was unstable.
But in these sessions, I began to access something I hadn’t felt in years:
righteous anger—not destructive, but clean.
Not rage, but grief with force behind it.
EMDR let me feel it without becoming it.
Andrea watched silently, with compassion.
I clenched my hands—not to strike, but to hold in everything I was finally feeling. This wasn’t about being a therapist anymore.
This was about surviving as a human being.
Yet we had begun to speak about me returning to work as a Clinical Social Worker.
The Interrogation
Eventually, I brought in the memory I had tried to avoid the most:
The interrogation.
I described it to Andrea.
The officer just inside the boarding house, just a few feet from my room. I had already dissociated from the reality and was entering a state where I was on autopilot. Then another police officer enters. He told me I would be handcuffed.
I was just outside my room, I had stopped bleeding when the paramedics came following my call to 911 but I was still wearing the bloody shirt, bloody shorts, and bload soaked socks and even my sneekers had blood on them. I was revisiting that state of being in shock.
Later, in the patrol car, my friend called. I put her on speakerphone, desperate for someone—anyone—to hear my side of the story. I told her what had happened, that I was the one attacked. Her voice was soft and kind, filled with disbelief at what I was going through.
Then I was in the interrogation room.
“That’s not what happened,” the detective snapped at me.
His words landed like a punch.
He wasn’t asking questions—he was correcting me.
I had come to them as a victim, wearing bloodstained clothes.
Did they really believe I staged it? That I kept a set of bloody garments ready for moments like this?
They had already decided who I was.
And I couldn’t fight back.
Because in that moment, I was just a man in handcuffs.
A man being stripped of his dignity.
Later, I was placed in a padded suit. Suicidal, they said. But that wasn’t it.
I was terrified. I was broken. Andrea encouraged me to bring in resources. This could be anything. In this case, I needed protectors. I wanted Jessica Jones, the superhero with superpowers. Pusing and throwing aside police officers and forcing them to feel ashamed about how they were treating a victim!
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!”
In the Shadows
Later sessions blurred into each other.
Sometimes I brought in heroes in addition to Jessica Jones, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Fictional characters who did what I couldn’t: speak up, fight back, win.
Other times, I relived memories of clients who had confided in me.
Dark, disturbing memories—real or imagined—about abuse, fear, and helplessness.
At one point, I saw John F. in the background of one of my waking dreams.
Not hurting me, just standing there—watching.
It was its own kind of violation.
The Silence of Jail
Jail wasn’t just confinement. It was abandonment. No one visited. No one fought for me.
No one even looked me in the eyes.
I lay awake night after night, thinking:
“This is who I am now. This is how it ends.”
Andrea coached me to find a way to change the way these events shaped the thoughts that I had about myself.
Even now, years later, I can’t fully describe what it felt like to be forgotten.
To know that one’s innocence means nothing to the system.
I Survived
Andrea guided me through all of it.
Session after session.
I called in “resources”—people who had loved me:
Lynn. Celta. My maternal grandparents.
Superheroes. Symbols of strength, protection, nurturance and safety. I learned that I could survive remembering.
I learned that I was still here.
I hadn’t been erased.
And for the first time, I began to believe… maybe I wasn’t lost forever. However, I don’t want to overstate how far I had come in healing. I was still suffering.
What Healing Can—and Can’t—Do
Healing didn’t fix everything. Realistically, that means the healing was not as complete as I needed.
The shame still lived in me.
It always had.
Yes, I was the victim.
But the label of “perpetrator” had been stamped on my life like a brand. And EMDR couldn’t erase that.
I still couldn’t talk about it with most people.
Only a few—Thomas, Elee—had ever heard the full story.
I wanted someone to see me for who I was and to find a lasting relationship. Elee had left and divorce soon followed. I knew I was gentle, calm and loving but I had felt that with the loss of Elee there wasn’t going to be another chance. Regardless of the quality of the relationship, the fact that she believed me, believed in me, and my story, meant the world to me.
But the world still saw someone who had been convicted. And that conviction carried more weight than truth.
EMDR helped me process what had been locked away.
It gave me back parts of myself.
But there were things even healing couldn’t change.