What Is EMDR
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) is a powerful form of psychotherapy developed by psychologist Francine Shapiro. It is estimated that half a million people all over the world have been successfully treated with EMDR. It is extremely helpful in the treatment and resolution of the disturbing experineces and trauma that mold and affect many of us. Through the use of bilateral stimulation (eye movement, tapping, buzzers, sounds), the REM state (rapid eye movement) in the brain is activated. REM state is the part of our sleep where we process information from our day. While in this state, the client focuses on difficult feelings, psychological and somatic symptoms or disturbing memories. Rather than remaining as undigested experiences that can be triggered at any time, trauma is allowed to fully process, leading to more positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Since its introduction as a trauma therapy in the late 80's, EMDR has now been applied to a wide range of areas including addiction, personality disorders, and even performance enhancement.
For more information on EMDR, visit these websites:
Recommended reading:
- Emotional healing at warp speed: The power of EMDR by David Grand
- EMDR in the treatment of adults abused as children by Laurel Parnell
Cool Books, Resources, and Links
- How to make the rest of your life the best of your life by Mark Victor Hansen & Art Linkletter. A delightful and inspirational read for adults of all ages.
- Aging with grace: What the nun study teaches us about leading longer, healthier, and more meaningful lives by David Snowdon. This is a page-turner based on the fascinating findings from the study of the aging Sisters of Notre Dame. Dr. Snowdon skillfully weaves science and human drama together in a spellbinding book that will touch your heart and mind again and again.
- The journey through cancer: Healing & transforming the whole person by Jeremy Geffen. Dr. Geffen is a board-certified medical oncologist and he is considered a leading expert in integrative medicine and oncology. His book has been called "the single best book ever written for those with cancer and the peopel who love them."
- Memory lessons: A doctor's story by Jerald Winakur. A very well-written and moving description of a geriatriacian's experience caring for his own father with Alzheimer's disease and facing many challenges in the healthcare system. This is a timely book on many fronts.
- Check out this GREAT online resource for family caregivers at www.toghers.com
- Elsi Dodge is a local author with a beautiful gift; her writing is inviting like an old friend who never fails to encourage and refresh the soul. Check out her website at www.RVTourist.com/blog
Articles on Grief/Loss and Other Human Experiences
Ran Daw Tay
(A moving story about losing (and later finding) a loved one to dementia)
by Joanne Irwin
Winter is not cruel in Chula Vista. December brings warm winds and scattering leaves.
At nineteen, I sat in front of the Chula Vista post office inside my mom's car, a twelve-year-old Citation. Grandpa had died the year before. Grandma sat in the front seat, I sat in the back. I nervously waited for Mom to finish her errand.
"Where's Earl?" grandma asked.
I winced.
"Where's Earl?" she asked again.
I stared at the post office door, pleading silently for Mom to reappear. She didn't. And grandma asked again.
I broke a minute's silence. "He's dead, Grandma."
She wept.
Senility is cruel. My grandma rarely remembered that her husband had died. She would call for him frequently. She would worry when he didn't come home. Someone would have to explain. How many times had my grandfather died? A hundred? More? What is it like for a woman to relive the fresh pain of her husband's death--daily?
Ten years after that difficult day, I was packing my own car for the eight hour drive to Chula Vista. I looked forward to introducing my husband to my grandma; her senility had prevented her from attending our wedding. Since grandma had little short-term memory, traveling to the wedding would be far too confusing for her. Truthfully, senility had stolen enough of her long-term memory that my mom doubted grandma would understand her own granddaughter was getting married.
Mom had warned me that Grandma didn't answer questions anymore.
"Can we take her for a walk?" I asked, struggling to figure out how to spend time with her.
"That wouldn't work," Mom explained. "She'll be happier staying in her room."
"Could I bring pictures of the wedding to show her?"
"She won't recognize anyone," Mom conceded, "but she might trace her finger around the people in the photographs."
I couldn't figure out what we would do together, yet I knew I wanted to see her, and I knew I wanted my husband to meet her. Even if Grandma wouldn't remember that we had come, we would.
When I entered the activity room at Brookvale Convalescent, two limber hands scaled down the piano keys. Another older gentleman hunched over his harmonica, keeping time with the pianist. Anxiously, my eyes traveled from wheelchair to wheelchair, searching the faces of residents who had crowded the room for their Saturday afternoon entertainment. Nowhere did I see my grandma.
I turned to find a nurse. Down the hall I asked a young man in a white lab coat if he could help me find Mildred Martin. He smiled and motioned me towards the activity room. I glanced at my husand, shrugged my shoulders and followed. The young man approached a woman sitting five feet away from the musicians. Her entire torso rocked in time with the music. Her back towards us, all we could see was a pink sweater curled around her shoulders, and her white, white hair. When the orderly turned her wheelchair around, I stiffened. A pink nylon hair band held her thinning white hair flat against her scalp. An unnatural strawberry rouge encaked both her cheeks. Finally, through her thick eyeglasses I found a feature I knew; this aged woman clearly had my grandma's gray-blue eyes.
We wheeled Grandma to her room and pulled up two chairs. I reached to hold her hand as I spoke.
"It's wonderful to see you, Grandma. I'd like you to meet my husband Kent. We married in July."
She mumbled something unintelligible.
I shuddered. My mom had warned me, but I still wasn't prepared to hear my Grandma mumble nonsense.
After a long, impenetrable pause I began again. I slowed my speech. I increased my volume. I explained what each of her grandchildren were doing. Sharon, George, Neal...jobs, school, hobbies. I was careful to begin each set of details by clearly explaining who each person was. "Sharon is Virginia's daughter. She is thirty-five. She is your oldest granddaughter..."
My grandmother smiled and opened her mouth to speak. "Ran daw tay. Ran daw tay," she repeated.
My heart stung. Did I think that explaining things more clearly, or speaking more slowly, would cause her to speak more clearly to me? No, not consciously anyway. Yet, her unintelligible reply struck me to silence. I looked to Kent, my eyes begging him to help me carry on this monologue. Her understood. As he spoke I continued to pat her hand; this at least she could understand.
Understand. The word triggered a memory from my college French class. My mind shot back to that off-white lecture hall where I sat at a small desk near the window. With great concentration I could decipher most of Monsieur Bouchard's French lectures. But whenever I was cornered with a question I would stutter a French reply that was marginally intelligible at best. Like me, perhaps my grandma could understand what I was saying. Like my own fractured French answers, perhaps she couldn't reply in words I could understand.
With new vigor I recounted the details of our wedding. I brought out our wedding pictures and pointed out faces of people she would know.
Though I saw no glimmer of recognition in her eyes, she smiled as she outlined the figures in the photos. She mumbled periodically.
I wondered if she understood anything at all. As if to answer, she mumbled "Ran daw tay".
Kent understood the disappointment that squeezed the hope out of my tired eyes. He began the next conversation. "I'd like to read you a psalm, Mrs. Martin, psalm twenty-three." His tenor voice repeated the words she must have heard several hundred times in her ninety-five years. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures..."
She nodded her head and smiled.
"...Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil..."
My grandma's eyes were fixed on Kent.
"...Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."
When he closed the Bible softly, a mist coated her gray-blue eyes.
I knew she understood.
A tap on my leg interrupted my thoughts. "Tell her you love her," Kent whispered.
Of course! I looked intently into her eyes, "Grandma, I love you."
She said nothing, but held my gaze unswervingly.
"I love you grandma, " I repeated.
Still silence, but without taking her glance from me, she leaned forward and lightly kissed my cheek.
Her smile. Her kiss. She understood!
We continued to stare and smile at one another. Through my satisfied tears I glimpsed a tear track running down the strawberry rouge on her left cheek.
Yes, we both understood.
Indeed Grandma, I am your ran daw tay.
War
by Albert Crane
acraneiv@hotmail.com
Hardened nights
Soggy days
Toes ooze
Into gray...
Naked
Muted Mosque
Senses evaporate
Into white light
Searching for life
Seeking a truth...
Awake
Sliver of dusk
The eye deceives
As believers recoil
Under a fading sun...
Despair
Ephemeral vapors
Amid cindered ruins
Defiled by defeat
Sterile eyes open
Death retreats...
Insanity.
Author's Note: One day, long about 1982, I was watching a documentary on the survivors of the holocaust. I had never before seen such graphic pictures or heard such wrenching stories of physical and emotional suffering as this piece gave me. I began to cry uncontrollably. For several days I wailed, cried, sniffled, wept, sat morose and didn't eat. I was consumed with pain. I felt the depth of carnage was beyond the human condition. I was literally transformed by what I saw and what I remembered. My memory served as a weeping board... my thoughts could not leave the images of bodies stacked thirty deep in trenches with hundreds if not thousands standing at the rim waiting to be shot and fall in the heap with their brothers. It was beyond the pale.
That experience led me to write the poem I have enclosed during the first Gulf War. I couldn't understand how the Iraqi people could tolerate another war after living through the most ghastly of human tragedies... that of the Kurds being slaughtered by chemicals and Shi'a being mass murdered such as had the Jews several decades earlier. But even more to the point, how could a woman conceive a child she knew would be raised to die. The killing continues. The child is born. The child is loved. The child is nurtured. The child is taught and the child dies. It is so painful. So numbing. That in order to get through another day... here in America, thousands of miles from the front, we need to put this out of our minds and go on living. How? So we send our young men, barely able to shave -- and our young women, who have yet to experience love, to the front lines to watch and report and die in the face of these overwhelming circumstances. Thus, I wrote WAR. From the cradle to the grave…or is it really?
A Path to Healing from Grief and Loss
by Elsi Dodge
www.RVTourist.com/blog
Do you remember when Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit got lost in the fog? In House at Pooh Corner, I read, they were having a rest in a small sand-pit on the top of the Forest. Pooh was getting rather tired of that sand-pit, and suspected it of following them about, because whichever direction they started in, they always ended up at it, and each time, as it came through the mist at them, Rabbit said triumphantly, 'Now I know where we are!' and Pooh said sadly, 'So do I.'
As I deal with grief and loss, I know exactly how Pooh felt. How did I get back here again? I thought I was past this! But, struggle as I may, it seems I return to where I came from, over and over and over.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, the main stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance) would be fine, if they came with a linear-sequential
timeline. You know, something like three months, eleven days, and 27 minutes for each stage. Then I could mark it on my calendar and make plans: Sorry, I'd better not come for dinner next month; I'll still be angry then.
I could even handle the clichéd one-full-year-of-grieving. Or two, since Hospice points out that the second year is the same loss with less support. Any schedule, as long as I could count on it! I'm looking for a sign like the one on Interstate 70, coming down from the Colorado mountains: Warning, truckers: two more miles of steep grades ahead. How about: Warning, griever: two more months of sorrow, and then you'll be all right.
But no, it's much more like a labyrinth. I seem to keep looping back, not getting anywhere. There's no clear direction. I go around, and back, and over, and under, and just as I see the light at the end of the tunnel, the path forks and I'm back in that blasted sand-pit again. It feels hopeless.
And then I remind myself of the Children of Israel in the wilderness, after leaving Egypt. The Promised Land was, at worst, a two-week walk away. It took them 40 years! Were they lost? Abandoned by the Lord their God? Being punished?
No, God led them the way He wanted them to go, taking them around dangerous countries, training and guiding them so they would be His people when they arrived. They didn't see it like that, of course, but it's true from God's point of view.
If I had an overhead map of my walk through grief and despair, would it show that I'm hopelessly lost, bad, alone, and abandoned? No, it would probably show the Lord leading me to circle around to stay away from the lions, helping me avoid the poison ivy, and taking me on a side trip when the bears are defending their cubs. The trail isn't straight, but it's safe, and it's the way I need to go.
So I appreciate those who remind me, repeatedly, of three basic facts:
1. This isn't meant to be fun.
2. It's totally normal.
3. God's in control.
It's a difficult process, at best. This is miserable, but there's no avoiding it. No one's going to give me a map. There isn't a GPS to help me keep track of my progress. I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, until I get there.
I'm not alone in my feelings. When I'm working through the grief process, whether death or divorce or losing a friend, I re-read Grief Observed. C. S.
Lewis, arguably the greatest Christian mind of the twentieth century, kept a journal after his wife died. I find great comfort in watching him roll from ‘I'm at peace with God over this’ through ‘Clearly God hates me or this wouldn't be happening’ to ‘There isn't a God’ and back to ‘I miss her but she's in a good place.’ If he repeatedly dealt with all those conflicting emotions, it must be okay for me to have similar feelings.
I'm not in control here. I need to remember the concept of the “new normal.” That is, as little as I like where I am--grieving, facing loss--it is where I
am. I can't go back and undo or change what has happened. So I really have only two choices: I can camp on resentment, or I can step into the “new normal” and wait to see what God will do with it. (For further discussion of the “new normal,” read Heaven Is Real by Don Piper and Cecil Murphy.)
Still, I don't like this. I want a shortcut, a guarantee of a quick way through the quagmire of my feelings. Of course, I'm not going to get that. So I might as well just keep going, knowing that this is part of the human condition. God is in control, and I ought to be able to trust Him, no matter how I feel at any given moment. Now, where did I put that map?
Working through Grief and Guilt
by Margaret Van Andel
Margaret.vanandel@gmail.com
My Mother passed away in August 2005. In May, my four siblings and I learned she was declining at the age of 74. Her neighbors contacted us since Mom wasn’t going to ask for help. Being the organized adults that we had become, we immediately set up a schedule for all of us (four daughters, one son) to take care of Mom. My twin sister, Cathy, was the first. She could only stay one week, but saw Mom discharged from the hospital into her home on oxygen. Mom was suffering from cancer, her third big bout with cancer (the first being ovarian cancer, the second melanoma), and had a tumor near her larynx and possible spots in her lungs.
I felt this was going to call for long-term care, so I arranged to stay for four weeks. My strength is administration, so I got Mom on all her medications, set up schedules, recorded her food intake, got her on financial aid, got her affairs in order, took her to radiation daily and to all her other medical appointments, cooked her meals, etc. At the same time I was working my job remotely, doing more than 40 hours, which was my norm. I dropped everything to go running to her side whenever Mom rang her bell. Sometimes she just wanted to share a TV show with me, which made me angry to be interrupted by something so trivial.
There were several horrible times, like being at the Doctor’s office and hearing him say that Mom had 3-6 months to live. Wait, we weren’t giving up yet – why was he? My other sister, Betsy, was busy exploring medical options. Mom, however, knew her time was ending, and she wanted me to help the other kids understand that. Through daily emails to the family and sometimes to her friends, I kept everyone informed. I know the other kids were angry with me for accepting Mom’s decision, at least until they got their turn to be with her.
So, where’s the guilt? I wish I could say that I had been loving and caring all the time. Instead, being human, I got frustrated at being cooped up caring for my Mom. I took it out in little ways that I’m not proud of. Sometimes it was pushing Mom really fast in her wheelchair or getting frustrated when she wouldn’t eat. Even just not taking the time to sit with her and watch her TV shows!! You can’t imagine how much I regret the time spent in pettiness instead of love! I wanted so much to be like my other sisters who hugged and rocked my Mother.
When Evana offered a grief and journaling class at my church, I knew I had to attend. I was bursting into tears at random moments, driven by regrets. Journaling helped me break out of my cycle of guilt. Although we were instructed to journal about anything, after a few weeks, I knew I needed to push my journaling towards what was going on inside me and my memories of my Mother. I knew my Mom forgave me – she had said again and again how much my time with her meant to her. I also knew my God forgave me, but how could I forgive myself??? The journaling helped me do that. I can’t give any formula, I just know that I no longer burst into tears and self-loathing. I came to accept that I am human, with human failures, and I can accept that. I’ve learned things that changed me for the better.
I Am the Shell and You, the Sea (A Song of Praise to My Creator)
Carol Andre Ihle
I am the shell and you, the sea
I am the sound you left on me
The voice you give, give I to Thee
I am the shell and you, the sea
Your love still falls so timelessly
Like the quiet waves of a queit sea
You gave to me the vision to see
Your crystal notes falling on me
You gave to me the vision to see
The raptures of your melodies
Gentel are your tapestries of light
when I am tossed far from sight
Gentle are your rhythms of night
That wash again my colors bright
I am the shell and you, the sea
I am the sound you left upon me
The voice you give, give I to Thee
I am the shell and you, the sea
Note: This poem has been re-printed here with permission from the author.
