Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, or EMDR, was first discovered in 1987 by Psychologist Francis Shapiro.  One day, she felt anxious by negative thoughts, so went for a walk in the woods. Sure, you might say, sounds like a great way to shed some stress – walk it off. But as she moved her eyes from right to left, taking in nature’s greens, yellows, and browns, she noticed that her level of anxiety decreased. She tried a similar eye movement process with her clients, and it worked. They, too, experienced a reduction in anxiety. That’s how EMDR was born. Initially used to treat individuals with PTSD and other anxiety disorders, it is now used to treat other conditions like depression, schizophrenia and eating disorders.

When you cut your finger, cells race to the site and clump together to stop the bleeding. Your body’s nutrients then heal the wound. If it continues to get irritated, it will become inflamed and may open up again. Once the source of irritation is removed, the wound can finally heal. PTSD symptoms are like festering wounds; the goal of EMDR is to remove what is blocking those wounds from healing.

Here’s how EMDR works: The client recalls a vivid image from the trauma experienced, such as a lying on the pavement after being hit by a car while thinking about a negative belief about the self, such as “I’m going to die.” The client notes the visceral sensations and emotions she is experiencing like a tight chest, shortness of breath and increased fear. She then thinks of a positive image like taking a warm bath, then a thought: “I’m safe.” Following this, the client conjures the negative thoughts and images while undergoing 15-20 seconds of bilateral stimulation: lateral eye movements, where the client follows the back and forth movement of the therapist’s fingers. Even though lateral eye movements are the most common form of stimulation, other stimuli may be just as effective, such as tapping or tones. The therapist who treated me used walkie-talkie like devices that vibrated beneath the backs of my thighs.

The same bilateral stimulation is then used while the client focuses on the positive images and thoughts. Over time, these will become embedded in the client’s memory, blocking the negative images and thoughts – the wounds. Eventually, PTSD symptoms will lessen when exposed to sounds, smells, or sights reminiscent of a trauma or threat.

EMDR is different from exposure therapy, which involves prolonged exposure to a stimulus that triggers thoughts, emotions, and sensations about the traumatic event. Some therapists believe that prolonged exposure is necessary to produce effective treatment outcomes. But others believe that this type of therapy will cause fearful memories to outweigh the joyful ones in people who have experienced extreme trauma, then encounter a particularly stressful situation in the future.

http://www.emdr.com

How do writers transition from one layer (in this essay I use thread, strand, or filament) of a narrative, then successfully return to the main, or grounding thread? In Kathryn Harrison’s memoir, The Kiss, an account of her incestuous affair with her father, there are at least four threads woven throughout the book. The main one being her father, followed by secondary threads: Harrison’s mother, her grandparents, and her struggle with Anorexia Nervosa.

Like forming a braid, Harrison first introduces the main strand – her father – by summarizing the interactions between the two of them during their travels together – then deftly weaves in a secondary strand. One way she accomplishes this is by employing reflection. In the last sentence of the first chapter she says, “These nowhere and notimes [sic] are the only home we have.” The operative word “home” introduces Harrison’s grandmother – the next thread – in chapter two. Harrison says, “My mother’s parents raise me. I live in their house until I’m seventeen” (5).

But she does not let the grounding thread – her father – slip. She goes on to explain that he was not welcomed into her grandparents’ home. The thread further remains intact through dialogue – another strategy in which Harrison weaves together the braid of figures and events in the book. ‘“Where is your dad?’ other children ask. ‘I don’t know,’ [Harrison] answer[s]” (5). This dialogue is the diving off point, which allows her to delve deeper into her past: she tells us that her parents divorced when she was an infant and that she and her mother stayed with her grandparents after her dad left.

She also employs scene as a strategy to weave in the mother thread: her grandmother screams at Harrison’s mother when a date picks her up. But her mother saves snapshots of Harrison’s father (5, 6). We now have the mother thread introduced, along with the father and grandmother – a French braid.

Through scene again, we begin to learn more about Harrison’s mother: she sleeps much of the time, and when Harrison makes noise in an attempt to wake her mother, she ignores her daughter. A theme – rejection – is beginning to unfold between the three filaments – Harrison’s father, her grandparents and mother (7, 8). And when Harrison reflects on her mother’s date, her father remains present on the page: “Though she dates other men … my mother remains romantically fixated … on my father” (9). This follows with a tighter connection to the father: he sends letters to Harrison’s mother, and, as she says, “sometimes, folded in with them, are little ones for me (11).”

These letters segue to other objects, which, in addition to dialogue and reflection, keep the father, mother and grandparent strands intact. For instance, we have Harrison’s mother’s yearbook, in which she reflects on photos of her mother: “Do I know my mother any better than the long-ago classmate … who foretold her future? ‘She will study … French (17).’” The encyclopedia set Harrison includes belongs to her grandparents, which were sold to them by her father, who was once an encyclopedia salesman. Harrison’s mother attempts to teach her daughter French by using flashcards (16, 17, 18).

By including the cards, Harrison reveals her mother’s desire for her daughter to be perfect. Harrison says about her mother, “Once she throws the flash cards down and slaps my face. My mother’s love depends on my capitulation” (19, 20). The mother-daughter relationship in this scene provides us with the first hints of Harrison’s struggle with Anorexia Nervosa, yet another thread:

I come down with an illness no one can define or cure … It goes on for weeks until the day I hear the pediatrician tell my grandmother that I’m so dehydrated I’ll have to be hospitalized … I return to school not just thinner but seemingly smaller … Very occasionally, I dream in French, and on those mornings I wake up ill: I vomit (20, 21).

Harrison then loops back to the grounding thread of her father through startling reflection: “Do my father’s accomplishments cost him as dearly as mine do me” (21)?

Harrison, Kathryn. The Kiss. New York: Random House, 1997. Print.

In Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, the focus remains on the author’s identity struggle as she faces years of cancer treatment in which one third of her jaw is removed. How does she take us on her conflicted journey of needing to be accepted for who she is versus succumbing to society’s notion of acceptance?

She implants particular objects that carry the story forward: the hat she almost never takes off, and the turtleneck her mother encourages her to wear to hide her balding head and disfigured jaw. The mirror, her reflection, is Grealy’s nemesis: she says she is an “imposter” when she looks in the mirror (220). And she avoids looking at the details of her face: “Though I had looked at the scar running down the side of my still swollen face, it hadn’t occurred to me to scrutinize how I looked. I was missing a section of my jaw, but the extreme swelling, which stayed with me for two months, hid the defect (62).”

By employing phrases – “I tried to camouflage myself by sitting in the middle of the group,” and “I felt as if my illness were a blanket the world had thrown over me” – Grealy evinces her identity struggle. She does the same through metaphor: “Our house was falling apart,” and “Our home’s drastic state of disrepair” (35, 80). Her house is in disarray like that of her body and emotional state.

By narrowing in on the transformative events – surgeries, hair loss from chemotherapy, becoming a teenager and growing into a woman, interactions with men – Grealy maintains an integrated story of identity. In doing so, the reader is brought into her world, a world colliding with emotions: fear and anger, longing and loneliness, humiliation, denial, sadness.

But ultimately Grealy moves toward self-recognition: she matures from a 9-year old, unaware of what it means to have cancer and naïve as to how to cope with significant deformities, to an adult where she becomes mired in the conflict between acceptance of herself as she exists versus the desire to appear pretty in order to be accepted. She does not achieve complete resolution on, and off, the page – complete resolution is asking a lot of the writer who has suffered any kind of illness, or trauma. But, while at a café with a new lover, Grealy “experiences a moment of freedom,” and arrives at understanding (222):

As a child, I had expected my liberation to come from getting a new face to put on, but now I saw it came from shedding, shedding my image. Society … tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else, only to leave our original faces behind to turn into ghosts that will inevitably resent and haunt us (222).

And so, as Grealy says, “I looked with curiosity at the window … to see if I could recognize myself (223).”

Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Print.

Traumatic brain injuries are a subset of acquired brain injures, which are not the result of trauma, but occur after birth: hypoxic brain injuries (lack of oxygen to the brain), and anoxic brain injuries (no oxygen to the brain).

In a diffuse axonal brain injury (a type of closed traumatic brain injury) the skull is not broken, but the brain is violently jarred and collides with the skull, causing tissue swelling. Since there is no opening to relieve the swelling, there is increased pressure in the brain, damaging neurons, the core cells of the nervous system. As a result, the communication network between neurons is impaired (think of a downed cable or telephone wire), and basic functions like speech, and  breathing might be affected.

A concussion is caused from direct impact to the head by an object, or sudden movement or momentum from shaking, like in whiplash. Neurons stretch and blood vessels tear, which can cause contusions – bruises on the brain. The individual may or may not lose consciousness. Shaken Baby Syndrome, also known as Abusive Head Trauma and Shaken Impact Syndrome – is a form of whiplash where the aggressor vigorously shakes the baby. Most of these cases occur when babies are between 6 and 8 weeks old, since that is when they cry the most. The trauma may cause them to experience vomiting, seizures, irritability, and poor feeding.

In an open brain injury, the skull is fractured. If it’s pierced, say, from a gunshot or knife, the skull splinters, and fragments can hit brain tissue, causing further tissue damage (a penetrating injury). Even though cell damage can occur in an open injury, there is less chance of brain swelling and therefore increased pressure. That’s why doctors consider them less dangerous than closed head injuries. But, because there is an opening in the skull, bleeding into the brain can occur. And the individual is at high risk for infection, most commonly meningitis – an infection of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal column.

Frontal lobe injuries affect the front part of the brain. The frontal lobe controls motor skills, thoughts, emotions,and personality. The left side of the lobe controls verbal communication, and the right side controls non-verbal communication – the arty side of our brains. The right lobe also plays a role in negative emotions, while the left lobe involves positive emotions. The area of the frontal lobe that is damaged will dictate how your emotions and personality are affected. Once a cautious person, you may now find yourself to be more impulsive.

So I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the brain is susceptible to injury. Weighing a slight 3.4 pounds, and encompassing more than 1 billion neurons with an infinite number of connections, the brain is a delicate mass of tissue floating in a fluid environment, much like a fetus in a uterus.

http://www.msktc.org/tbi/factsheets/Understanding-TBI/What-Happens-During-Injury-And-In-Early-Stages-Of-Recovery

http://www.braininjuryinstitute.org/Brain-Injury-Types/Open-Head-Injury.html

http://kidshealth.org/parent/medical/brain/shaken.html