headspace | emdr: patient’s perspective [part three]

Hey guysss.. ❤️ I had my real first EMDR session last Wednesday, and boy was it tiring! I drove back to Melaka right after the session, and had been sleep-wake up-eat-sleep for two days after, much to my psychiatrist disappointment since he told me to exercise more. Hehe. Oh well, exercise can wait. But seriously, if there’s a picture to summarise what I’ve been up to after the session it’d be this one.

 

Art from Google.

Here’s the link to the [part two] of this series.

 

So what happened that day. I drove from Melaka to meet a Carousell buyer and Kak Aishah that morning. We spent some good time together eating (most of it) and shopping (Sephora, of course) in Mid Valley. Then I sent her to LRT Bangsar and went to The Mind Faculty at around 3pm. Oh, heads up. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I can’t remember much about what happened during the session. It was a one-and-a-half hour session, but I can barely remember anything specific, isn’t that weird? So I’m using some external materials to jog my memory back to the session.

 

This entry is going to be a long one, so I’ll break it into parts. 🙃

 

I sat on my usual spot in the consultation room, had a small talk with the doctor talking about how my life is doing right now, how studying is going, the medications, etc. The doctor totally rolled his eyes when I complained about the taste of the medications. 😜 I am never the one who likes to take medications. The taste is just..blergh! 😫 He asked how I’m going to be dispensing medications to patients as a doctor when I hate taking them. Excuse me. Um, but dispensing and taking medications are two different things okay. 🙄

 

Then the doctor briefed me on how the EMDR therapy is going to be. We established a “safe place” and a safe word for me to use if the therapy gets too much for me to handle. The “safe place” identified is the image of memory that elicits comfortable feelings and positive sense of self. It may be used later to bring closure to an incomplete session or to help a patient tolerate a particularly upsetting session.

 

There’s one thing that my doctor stressed about before we started the therapy – “Don’t read into the session at all. Only see the imagery as it is and describe it as it is.” This is particularly important for me since I am a medical student, so naturally I would try to analyse if I’m giving out the right responses. Mindfulness (I use Headspace) helps me a lot in practicing for this therapy.

 

Heh, who would’ve thought. Writing this down and reliving the memory again helps me reprocess the whole therapy again. 😅  This writing out stuff that has to do with the generalised anxiety disorder I’m having and its therapy are really helping me reprocess my situation more than I thought it would be. Heck, I didn’t expect it to help me reprocess myself. I’m writing out stuff to declutter my super messy brain. Hehe. See you in my next entry!

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