Breaking the trauma bond with the help of EMDR
Trauma bonds have punctuated my whole life; in fact my very first one was probably the relationship with my middle sister. I put her on a pedestal and thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world and a genius. She took umbrage with my perception of her and in seconds her volatile outbursts could leave me flattened and annihilated. My mother and stepfather frequently had outbursts too; you never knew when another bomb was going to be detonated. But then my sister could be funny, charming, charismatic and erudite; my mother made exquisite food; and my stepfather would buy my art materials when I needed them. They could behave monstrously, but they could be nice too. This was how the intermittent reinforcement was cemented, there would be storms peppered with moments of sunshine and you hoped there would be more sunny days than stormy ones. Like the lab rats experimented on in Skinner’s experiment, the rat would keep pulling the lever hoping for a reward but Skinner ensured that the pellets came with less frequency; nonetheless the rat would keep pulling the lever and neglect everything else hoping for another pellet. Just one last high, one last reward, one final hit of dopamine. Without realising it the rat had become an addict, and without realising it as a child I became an addict, too, addicted to a lethal combination of chemicals, unleashed when I was shouted at, namely cortisol, followed by my reward dopamine if I was on the receiving end of a moment of kindness. But moments of kindness were inconsistent and unpredictable.
The next trauma bond lasted ten years with a girl at school who really didn’t like me and could be cruel, indifferent and a bully, but I was blindly devoted to her and it caused me great distress and sadness when she discarded me, then hoovered me up, gave me a crumb of attention only to devalue and discard once more, it was an insidious pattern. I watched her develop from a vibrant, happy girl, to one who was obese and an alcoholic from the age of 10 to 18. I didn't understand at the time that it was another trauma bond and so a pattern has persisted in my life to this day. When I look back on specific friendships and numerous interactions, there were often unhealthy attachments with typically narcissistic types.
During my session with Dr S I told him about my friend of three years, a fellow, artist, who struggled with emotionally unstable personality disorder. His outbursts left me decimated, but then I focused on his talents in music and photography and believed, as a mental health campaigner, I could not abandon him.
Dr S said, ‘No good comes from maintaining contact with a narcissist. The only person that benefits is the narcissist, you are being used as supply.’
Dr S ascertained that my friend was a narcissist in minutes after I shared a text exchange. I had told my friend that I was doing EMDR and very quickly his texts became rebarbative.
‘You have to delete his number, you cannot allow someone to speak to you like that, he’s a scumbag.’ Dr S said matter of factly.
I thought of the times in the past, since I had my psychosis, when I had erratic outbursts and said things that I would never have said if I had been well, and I was convinced me deleting his number would be tantamount to abandoning him.
‘You are spreading yourself too thin,’ Dr S concluded.
‘You are in therapy, you are trying to get better, you have to focus on the here and now, your husband and children, not saving others.’
My friend reminded me of my sister, just as I had hoped to save her, I hoped to save him, but Dr S was right, I had to reinstate myself. What good would come from having a ‘self detonating fire cracker’ in my life?
‘Charity begins at home,’ Dr S said.
‘He has made you his slave. He has become heroin. You are behaving like an addict.’
All of this was shocking, I didn’t want to be anyone’s slave and the EMDR commenced. I held that thought. ‘Slave.’ The word got bigger and louder in my head to the point where I said, ‘No more.’
Had the penny dropped? I had a high tolerance for abuse, because I grew up in a volatile household but everyone has their tipping point. My husband knew about my friendship and didn't approve, in his eyes my friend was a ‘loser’.
Suddenly I was confused, were there some mentally ill people that you just dismissed as beyond help?
‘Could he ever get better?’ I asked.
‘Yes, with EMDR it’s possible.’
He was a cannabis user, too, and as long as he smoked he would continue to have delusions of grandeur and a strong sense of entitlement. I thought of my other friend, a photographer who was addicted to cannabis. He was on medication and receiving mental health support but still had not turned his life around, and it was frustrating to talk to him. I realised that it did not serve me to listen to him talking about cannabis, it brought me low, he was doing nothing with his life, just frittering it away. I was proactive, productive, a creator and I wanted to be around people who appreciated my talents, who were supportive and encouraging, who were stable and kind. My digital paintings reflected the conflict between the turbulence that I was facing and the desire for calm, there was a stark dichotomy of disparate forces coming into play when I looked at them.
Dare I say it I needed normal people in my life, not dysfunctional ones and this predilection for the dysfunctional stemmed from childhood. Did I want to be dysfunctional or functional? Of course I wanted the latter.
Dr S continued with the EMDR focusing on the analogy of the friendship being like heroin and as he moved his fingers I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to be a heroin addict, I am not a junky, I will go zero contact, I will no longer respond.’
Dr S went even further and said the abuse I had received during the friendship, had left me with battered wife syndrome and a diminished sense of self, this was also shocking. But it reminded me of how I felt as a child when my stepfather hit me in public, or my sister and mother shouted at me in a public place, my self esteem would shrivel to the size of a pea. I always felt that I had done something wrong and that I deserved it.
My friendship with the artist, accompanied with his volatile outbursts, replicated these seminal childhood relationships and subliminally I knew all of this. In fact I had tried repeatedly to break contact.
My husband, by contrast, was stable, solid, responsible, patient and consistent. I didn’t get the same chemicals from my bond with him, but I did get a sense of security from an attachment with someone I had known since I was 19. And of course it had not been easy for him to see his wife go through a roller coaster ride of mental health struggles, often I had seen him as the enemy but that was no longer the case. It was like a dense fog had lifted. With the right treatment maybe I was going to finally turn a corner. Certainly he was happy with my progress, I owed it to my family and well being to stick with the treatment.
Maybe this would be my last ever trauma bond?
I told Dr S that everyday I did my writing, art, music and exercise. I also tried to be present with the kids, my focus was on being calm, fostering a stable environment at home and so far I had achieved this. I didn’t believe that I could have psychosis again, or raise my voice or have an episode. In fact, I didn’t recognise who that person was. I was returning to the person I was before the psychosis.
Dr S said it would be a long road but that all the dots could be joined together from childhood, and there was still much to investigate and unpick. My life was filled with so much trauma, how would it be possible to process it all? The bilateral stimulation that came from EMDR activated the left and right hemispheres of the brain; these memories would become less potent as they were processed. I saw EMDR as a method of breaking down and diminishing the power of unpleasant memories and when I got home I decided to try it myself. I took a recurring and unpleasant memory and then I analysed and focused on one aspect of it. For example, when I was in London, I met many famous people and often it made me feel uncomfortable and inadequate, I couldn’t deal with such interaction and yet at the same time I wondered if they were better than me because they were richer and more successful. Instead I said, ‘I am me, I like my simple life, they have skills, but so do I, do I want to be them? No I am happy painting, writing and composing, my heroes are the underdogs, the ones that never got any recognition but carried on regardless.’ Then I held onto that idea and did the EMDR. I did this repeatedly with memories that have kept on recurring for decades until I felt giddy with mental exhaustion. Dr S said that I might have vivid dreams as a result and sure enough my dreams were filled with random recollections of trauma. There was so much of it and it was shocking that I had endured and survived it all, but that was the point, I had survived and I was still standing.
I read online that it was possible to do EMDR on your own, I realised that there were things that I didn’t want to share with Dr S, they were too harrowing and sometimes his response was not gentle, he was tough with me, he did not mince his words and I was just too sensitive. I felt judged by him in many ways, judged by everyone and of course I wanted to hide it all, hide everything that had happened but that was not possible, I had to face it.
Thankfully my relationship with my mother is healthy now, she acknowledges that when my sisters and I were growing up she could be irascible and identified that it stemmed from her relationship with her father who was always screaming at home, it left her terrified and unwittingly she emulated this model of parenting. I have learnt from the past and don’t shout in front of the children, they are happy and vibrant and thriving, there is no need for patterns of childhood to be repeated.
EMDR seemed to be the right treatment, I would stick with it, bit by bit I was getting stronger and yes, my artist friend, despite his talents, I would have to let him go. He would be my last trauma bond and my brain would recalibrate and no longer be addicted to the chemicals that it had fed off for most of my life. It was not going to be easy - that’s for sure - but with patience and persistence and support and critically, EMDR, it was possible to break the trauma bond for good.
