The Love That Split the World(23)
She nods fervently. “Call me Alice, and believe me, I’d love to. So let’s think about this. You did EMDR. Tell me a little bit about that—what was the memory you used?”
I feel suddenly naked, if not totally transparent, as I grudgingly launch into the story. “My birth mother showed up when I was three,” I tell her. “I was sitting on my mom’s bed while she was in the bathroom, drying her hair, and I heard the doorbell ring. I went downstairs and opened the door, and a woman leaned down and held her hand out to me.” The memory’s foggy, even now. I can’t even see my birth mother’s face, just a blur where it should be. “She asked if I wanted to go for a walk. I said yes. So we went down the sidewalk.”
I remember asking, What’s your name?
She smiled and said, You can always call me Ishki.
Ishki. I whispered it once aloud. We didn’t talk any more; we just were. I wonder if some part of me understood who she was. If I knew even then, years before Grandmother came, years before I’d pore over the Internet for clues about my past and find that word associated with at least two different tribes, that ishki means mother.
“According to the reports, we walked for twenty minutes. By the time I returned, after she pointed me back toward my house and got into her car a few blocks away, there was a swarm of police cars with flashing blue and red lights crowded in and around my driveway.” I was afraid—terrified, actually. “And when I ran down the street to meet my mom, she was crying.” I felt so ashamed, so utterly guilty for scaring her like that. She scooped me up and held me tight, whispering, Baby, baby, I was so scared she was going to take you.
Before the therapy I hated to think about that memory. It made my stomach tense and my skin crawl. Whenever my mind wandered toward it, I distracted myself.
Alice looks up from her furious scribbling. “So how did the process itself go?”
“The therapist made me choose a negative self-belief, something that might explain why Grandmother had showed up.” I’m not wanted. I don’t belong. I didn’t bother telling Dr. Langdon I didn’t really believe those things. Counseling always went better if I nodded my head a lot. Back then, I’d thought she was a total hack. “Then she made me choose a positive self-belief to replace it with. She made me sit on the couch, and she sat across from me. She moved two fingers in front of my face, side to side, up and down. She said I didn’t need to understand it—I just needed to let my eyes follow her fingers all the way to my right peripheral, left peripheral, up and down, without moving my head.
“While her fingers moved, she asked me questions. About the negative self-belief, the positive self-belief, other things like that. I answered her, repeated after her when she told me to”—feeling incredibly stupid the whole time—“and when she was done, she told me to go back to that memory, and feel it fully. Before we’d started, she’d asked me to score how anxious the memory made me feel. I’d said a seven out of ten. After the process, I said five.” I’d surprised myself. “Then she sat forward and repeated the process again. The fingers, the questions, the scoring. We did it three times, and when she asked me to go back to that memory the last time, I told her, honestly, I only felt about a one on the anxiety scale.”
Recalling it now, it sounded like hocus-pocus. And yet, afterward, Grandmother, the man in the green jacket, all the flickers in my bedroom had been shut out for nearly three years. And, still, when I think about that memory—no anxiety. “I don’t know how, but it worked.”
Alice’s eyes glitter with excitement. She leans forward, touching the back of her head. “There’s a part of the brain called the amygdala. It stores things that you’re unable to process—like trauma. Before we’re eight years old, our minds have very few cognitive processing skills. So everything we’re unable to work through at that young age gets stored up in the amygdala, as general associations or a roughly pieced-together idea of cause and effect—a warning for future events. When we dream, our eye movements signal to the amygdala that it’s time to work through that backlog.
“Now, the emotions and sensations of an event are stored almost exactly as they were experienced. Strangely, the same chemicals that imprint them on the amygdala can actually impede the formation of memory in the hippocampus. You might have no conscious recollection of what happened, but that won’t stop it from messing with your brain. When those stored connections are triggered, you revert to the childlike mentality in which you first experienced them. That’s essentially what a panic attack is— the full experience of fear without the tools to reason through it.
“EMDR allows you to access those connections while you’re awake. The eye movement triggers the amygdala, while the questions trigger the memory. It allows your adult self to have a conversation, of sorts, with your child self. You explain things to your child self so that the unhealthy thought pattern, or cause-effect association, can be corrected.”
“But why that memory? I mean, nothing happened. I took a walk.”
“The separation of an infant from a parent can be traumatizing, in and of itself, even if you continue receiving the appropriate love and care from a new relationship. During infancy, all we know are our biological mothers. They’re our entire world, our whole sense of stability.”
Alice’s gaze makes me feel like I’m being X-rayed. I sometimes think the whole world knows my history, and I’m the only one who can’t see it.