I notice that I was mentally exhausted after the first day, as if I had just taken an especially grueling examination. This sensation increased during the second day and I found that my eyes, despite the fact that they were closed for many protocols, felt dry and exhausted, as if I had used them past the point of eyestrain.
On the third day, although I did not have the same sense of exhaustion, I seemed to be "out of it" in the morning and experiencing a sense of being squeezed by a vise from my diaphragm to my pelvis and by a too-tight collar at the throat in the afternoon. That evening, these sensations seemed to represent decades of suppressing and not expressing my feelings.
During the second afternoon and periodically over the next two days, I smelled ether. My father was a veterinarian and his animal operations were performed in the basement of our home, where he had an office. Additionally, ether was a smell my nervous system learned about within hours of my birth. I would have died within a few days after birth unless I was operated on within 48 hours. The operation was extensive and long with some doubt I would survive.
I noted as the week after the intensive progressed that I felt less global anxiety, felt somehow more settled, and filled with more self-confidence and the belief that I could cope with whatever comes along. In addition, the sensation of exhaustion dissipated.
I can't recall when, but during the intensive session, I experienced tingling and an ache to my eyes and facial bones commensurate with injuries from a mugging. Aches in my lower back, shoulders and neck corresponded to those suffered when I walked into a moving car during a huge fog when I was six years old. During that incident, my clothing got ensnarled in the bumper of a passing car and I was dragged a few blocks. This may have repeated itself when I felt pins and needles in my shoulders and down my left arm. During one set of protocols, there was an ache that grew in intensity in my dominant hand; the sensation was between the first and second fingers and in the webbing between my thumb and index finger. The sensation varied during several protocols and sometimes was faintly echoed in my opposite hand. I know of no previous injuries to my hands.
Periodic headaches occurred during the intensive week. These seemed to lessen and/or disappear whenever I thought of the mugging. The mugging is an issue that I have long carried with me as it affected my life so severely that things were never quite the same at work and in my personal sense of wellbeing after it happened.
Listening to the audio CD after the intensive was completed, I began to recall things from my past. For example, I recalled the operation I had at one-day old through sensations, pains, etc. in my pelvic region. Twice I re-experienced the back, shoulder and neck pains of the car dragging. Early in the week after the intensive, I relieved the eye, face and head trauma of the mugging.
Most prevalent during listening to the CD was a sense of being unable to draw enough air, with the focus being a severe constriction in my throat. The sensation eased and disappeared when I thought of being s"MOTHER"ed into suppressing emotions. At times, after the intensive, when I was listening to my CD for the ten minutes twice daily, my mind wandered or I was distracted by loud traffic sounds nearby my home.
Five days after the intensive, I notice that I am not so depressed by the silence from family members, which has long disturbed me. In fact, the week after my sessions I had no contact with important persons in my life and it seemed to bother me less than I would have thought.
I have also found myself doing a recall of traumatic events and it seemed to me that the frequent smell of ether growing up could be attributed to having a tonsillectomy, the animal operations going on in the basement of my family home, the car dragging me and the subsequent medical care, and operation at one day oldthat I needed to live; all of these remembrances felt quite "tender".
After a flashback to a "smothering" event, I went to a very hurtful event where my grandmother openly said to my mother when I was quite young that maybe I shouldn't have lived as I was so much work because of frequent doctor's visits, daily routines that had to happen for me to maintain health, and the general worry of whether I would be OK as I continued to grow to adulthood. My mother did not respond nor defend that of course she would have taken me problems and all and what an awful thing to say; my mother didn't reply to my grandmother's statement. As this memory again came up, this time I saw the child's throat probably around the age of three being closed by a transparent hand.
All in all, I am relieved that my mind is less like the energizer bunny spinning round and round with thoughts. The frenetic energy I usually carry internally has mellowed out. I just feel that I can deal with whatever comes my way instead of living in some form of vague dread. Now I have a sense of, "Well, I can do that."
Optimized by: Barbara Davis-Thompson
Barbara Davis-Thompson, LCSW - New York, New York
