SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I am 11 months out from DDay 1, 9 months from Dday2- no new affairs, or sexual acting out, just details he held back- so I consider it DDay 2.

I’ve been in IC for 9 months and it has helped me start taking care of me. The memories and triggers are still strong, my IC has suggested we start EMDR. I’ve been reading and watching videos, it seems to help people, but seems so different than the therapy I’ve been doing.

I’m just curious if anyone has tried EMDR and what your experiences were with it. Did it feel helpful to you?

I did do EMDR and found it very helpful. It's not going to make you forget your triggers, but I found that it did take the heat out of them. You still feel your feelings, but it's less visceral, less immediate.

It's an immersive therapy, so you might feel very flooded at first. Be prepared for that. I also found that I got better results when I didn't try to eat the bear whole, as it were. One bite at a time, one trigger at a time, worked best for me. I was surprised at how many other associations might pop up with a particular trigger. Allowing your mind to roam a bit and bring forward random things you didn't realize had connected to the trauma can be part of the process.

I'd also recommend reading a copy of The Journey from Abandonment to Healing by Susan Anderson if you haven't already read it. It's geared toward people who have made a permanent split, but honestly, this was probably the most valuable title I read during my own healing. Understanding how the brain processes trauma and how abandonment triggers our most primal fears can put soooo much in perspective, and at its core, infidelity is an abandonment.

There’s active research in how humans remember things, and how those memories are stored in the brain. One finding is that every time we remember something you re-form that memory in your brain. There is a brief moment when that memory is destabilized.. There are emerging techniques to take advantage of that destabilization to help reform the memory in a positive way.

Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories (RTM) is one of them. Worth a google. EMDR also is expected to work on a similar principle. Activate the memory, and tweak it while less stable. Seems like voodoo until you think of it from that perspective.

It's helping me. I've learned a lot about myself and the way that we process the trauma makes it less impactful on me. I still notice all the bad things, it just doesn't crush my soul anymore.

EMDR helped me so much, especially with learning to separate the emotions caused by infidelity from the emotional scars from my life. In addition to the LTA, I was also dealing with the death of my mother, who was unkind to me in her last days, and an angry, abusive alcoholic sibling. I fell into an abyss where I felt I didn't matter and no one cared for me and they never did and never would. It was crazy in hindsight, how I let all those separate things become one thing I thought was true about myself. I didn't realize how much weight I was dragging around and how easily I fell into a trap of poor coping techniques and sad, false thought patterns until EMDR helped me see and break the subconscious connections. My past rejections and these current situations had nothing to do with each other, and yet I was treating them like empirical evidence that I was not worthy or valued. I was drowning in sad and hopeless thoughts and purposely sought out an IC who had EMDR experience.

EMDR wasn't easy, and it took some time after the sessions for things to settle in, but I can definitely see improvements in how I react emotionally now to stressful A related situations. I am able to tell myself that this is not about that, and finally believe myself. I see my old patterns of thinking and reacting and I am able to rise above them because they do not help me to heal. I want to try some more sessions to see if they can help with the unwanted and intrusive thoughts that are triggered by every possible reminder of the A. Nine years is a lot of memories to be triggered by, so I am struggling to move past the remembering of the same painful details of my betrayal. I don't get as emotional as I used to, but I would like to see if I can just make those thoughts stop happening in the first place.

I hope you give it a try. It's a strange process, based on the way the brain stores memories and ingrained patterns set in motion in our childhoods. The eye tracking seems like a strange component, but it is part of the memory reset magic. For me, it was the reset I needed to move forward without crying all the time. I still have a lot of work to do, but now I can focus on healing from the infidelity and betrayal instead of dragging my childhood, or my FOO issues around as if they were the same thing, or evidence of my value as a person. I feel like the clutter has cleared, I have more focus for what is important and I just feel a lot lighter inside my head. I will be grateful to my IC forever for the help and support she has given me. I hope you are able to say the same in time. Good luck to you.