I’ve been overwhelmed for a few weeks. That’s no secret. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends. Balancing more than I can carry. And quite frankly, I popped a little, in a controlled kind of way.
All this anxiety and overwhelm and feeling buried under a mountain of feels and annoying habits that make me avoid the feels– I’ve finally had enough. It’s time to deal, recognize and change what might be making me more anxious and overwhelmed than I need to be.
As many of you know, last year I started EMDR therapy to treat my PTSD. When my therapist introduced me to EMDR, I was very skeptical. Despite years of therapy and trying everything, I had never heard of it. Surely if something worked on complex PTSD the way that EMDR supposedly did, everyone would know about it, right?
Well, not necessarily.
EMDR absolutely transformed my life. It is the most effective form of therapy I have ever tried. And that’s coming from someone who’s tried just about everything: talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mindfulness, decluttering, float therapy, and various medications, to name a few.
Which is why I wanted to do a post on it.
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I think I had what they call a breakthrough.
Since my breakdown two weeks ago… things have been eerily good. A few days after the PTSD flashback that sent me into the waves of grief that I had been avoiding, I felt lighter– calmer even. I’ve felt like more myself than I’ve felt in a while, as if my perspective went through a literal shift. It feels weird to feel so okay, so good that I was actually concerned that I’d have nothing to talk about in my therapy session.
I’m a little suspicious of it. But maybe that’s normal.
PTSD doesn’t go away in the same way that an anxiety attack can go away with a Xanax. PTSD likes to hide under layers of “I’m fine” and “Look at how good I’m doing now”, but underneath the surface, and perhaps far below that shield, it waits for an opportunity to remind you to deal with your shit.
That can sometimes take the form of a breakdown. And sometimes the things we do to breakthrough, like therapy and EMDR, make break us down further until we can begin to build ourselves back up.
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