Just because you lost a feather doesn’t mean you can’t fly.
Month: August 2017
Triumph Over Hate
Hate has not risen from the depths of hell. It lay latent in man’s soul waiting to rise again with opportunity. Bullets fire in rapid succession targeting those historically oppressed and marginalized. No gun, no bomb, no worries; simply get behind the wheel to enact your fury. Find a bat or a brick and beat somebody or desecrate someone else’s holy site.
What gives you the right? Is it simply that you’re white?
More anti’s than I can count, phobias against anyone with a different religion, skin color or chosen love. The perpetrators of hate think they reign supreme, but hate does not rule. We the People will rise to take back our rights, our sacred sites and our very lives.
What gives you the right? Your history of dominance? Your ability to oppress?
You with your shield, your semi automatic, your slogan hat, your flag of hate that harkens back, you will not prevail. By history you will be listed as a footnote on the wrong side, a dark stain on your country and all of humanity.
Your bygone chants echo the past but with a sour note of desperation, as if you know this may be your final stand.
What gives you the right? Is it because you can stand hoodless in daylight?
Love and tolerance will claim their victory, even if it’s by the blood of the injured and through the tears we shed for the dead. Weary and beleaguered we will still find cause to celebrate, perhaps not today or tomorrow, but now that we have risen together we will see that love conquers hate.
NEVER AGAIN IS NOW
EMDR
As I mentioned in a previous post I have been participating in EMDR therapy. I intended to report on my experiences and progress sooner but it’s taken me a bit of time to, shall we say, settle into the therapy. It is not an easy therapy, emotionally or physically. I thought in this first post on the subject I would give a description of he therapy from the web so that you may have an understanding of what it’s about. You will find some information below with two links to more detailed information.
I am receiving this therapy from my therapist. The same therapist I have been seeing for 1.5 years for talk and CBT therapies. Her recommendation and the fact that I trust her led to my agreement to try EMDR.
As it says in the definition of EMDR therapy, our first session was historical and informational in nature. Following that session we began with relatively benign subject matter to enable me to become accustomed to the way the treatments work. I had some difficulty visualizing while following her fingers side to side so we agreed after the second session to switch to a different tactile stimulation method. We use a left – right tapping that I felt more comfortable with.
There is a lot of information on EMDR on the internet, some of it quite subjective. I tried to link to two sites that presented the treatment in a more factual manner and in the way that is closest to my experience. In my next piece on EMDR I will go into more detail of my own personal experiences and opinions with the therapy. Until then, If you are interested in it I encourage you to read a little about it.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes.
More than 30 positive controlled outcome studies have been done on EMDR therapy. Some of the studies show that 84%-90% of single-trauma victims no longer have post-traumatic stress disorder after only three 90-minute sessions. Another study, funded by the HMO Kaiser Permanente, found that 100% of the single-trauma victims and 77% of multiple trauma victims no longer were diagnosed with PTSD after only six 50-minute sessions. In another study, 77% of combat veterans were free of PTSD in 12 sessions. There has been so much research on EMDR therapy that it is now recognized as an effective form of treatment for trauma and other disturbing experiences by organizations such as the American Psychiatric Association, the World Health Organization and the Department of Defense. Given the worldwide recognition as an effective treatment of trauma, you can easily see how EMDR therapy would be effective in treating the “everyday” memories that are the reason people have low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, and all the myriad problems that bring them in for therapy. Over 100,000 clinicians throughout the world use the therapy. Millions of people have been treated successfully over the past 25 years.
EMDR therapy is an eight-phase treatment. Eye movements (or other bilateral stimulation) are used during one part of the session. After the clinician has determined which memory to target first, he asks the client to hold different aspects of that event or thought in mind and to use his eyes to track the therapist’s hand as it moves back and forth across the client’s field of vision. As this happens, for reasons believed by a Harvard researcher to be connected with the biological mechanisms involved in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, internal associations arise and the clients begin to process the memory and disturbing feelings. In successful EMDR therapy, the meaning of painful events is transformed on an emotional level. For instance, a rape victim shifts from feeling horror and self-disgust to holding the firm belief that, “I survived it and I am strong.” Unlike talk therapy, the insights clients gain in EMDR therapy result not so much from clinician interpretation, but from the client’s own accelerated intellectual and emotional processes. The net effect is that clients conclude EMDR therapy feeling empowered by the very experiences that once debased them. Their wounds have not just closed, they have transformed. As a natural outcome of the EMDR therapeutic process, the clients’ thoughts, feelings and behavior are all robust indicators of emotional health and resolution—all without speaking in detail or doing homework used in other therapies.
demons by my side 