Traumatised, am I really? Thoughts on EMDR Therapy after Suicide Loss

Between June and September this year (2019), I had 10 sessions of EMDR. I have written previously on why I opted to try EMDR specifically (to address the persisting vividness of my brother’s death by suicide) - what follows here is a little of what I learned from the actual experience of having this still-relatively-niche form of therapy.

Firstly, it’s quite something to have someone look directly into your eyes and say without a shred of exaggeration, “you’re traumatised”. Not gonna lie, it made me uncomfortable. My face, I believe, revealed no real reaction to the therapist’s comment, but in my mind I pictured another me, head tilted, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, sarcastically responding “Am I, though?” Middle class, white woman, good home, family, job etc. etc. “Am I really?” My first feeling was fraudulence, a lacking of justification to ‘own PTSD’ - I’m no veteran recovering from horrific conflict zone experiences or victim rebuilding after living through natural disaster, terrorist attack, child abuse etc.  

But as the therapist asked “How do you feel about having  PTSD?” after my ‘Dissociative Experiences Scales’ and ‘Impact of Event Scale’ questionnaires together revealed a score that put me in the bracket for a PTSD diagnosis, I felt a bit of the tension in my shoulders melt. “Honestly” I replied, “I feel like I’ve been screaming these things, symptoms and scenarios, at various people (particularly those in health services) for the last 7 years and no one has been listening, let alone recognising or acting to help with it. Now, seeing and hearing this here, it is a total relief to know I’m not an idiot.” I thought to myself as well, ‘this helps to show I’m not just clumsy; a person who so easily loses their shit because ASDA messed up a birthday cake; poor at concentrating with a rubbish, deteriorating memory; an overly jumpy human being for no apparent reason.’ “No, you’re not,” back came the therapist. “You’re reacting normally to an abnormal set of circumstances”. I cannot express fully how wonderful those particular words were to hear. 

As the first couple of sessions developed I learned more about PTSD and the way trauma can work with/in a person’s mind - I was given reading to go through outside of the therapeutic weekly appointments, which was both comforting and eye-opening. Elements like identifying the condition as a ‘just memory disorder’, or that flashbacks can be felt (not just seen) were especially helpful. They helped me to accept that, as weird as this may sound, the suicide of my brother was, in actual fact, a BIG DEAL and that it was ok that I was not yet ‘over it’. His death was an abnormally shocking death for me personally, to the extent that its impact on my life equated to trauma, something that was not acknowledged or cared for in adequate time, thus prompting in my case a mental and bodily grief experience in which PTSD developed. It took 7.5 years after my brother’s death to recognise this.

Secondly, I have never been more aware of the interlinking, meshing and general (total) intertwining of physical and mental health as I was during the EMDR process. Let me explain a bit. I have ‘told the story’ of the 'the worst month' (between 15th December 2011 - 15th January 2012) before - there is a narrative ‘what happened’ storyboard of it that remains easily (instantly) accessible to me - but it wasn’t until I was in this therapy room, hearing myself articulate the body sensations alongside/associated with the memory-images that I felt and really understood the magnitude of my experience in a physical sense. EMDR, as a therapy involves sequences (the following of a protocol), specific stages to work through, and involves much use of ‘I’ statements/declarations to articulate the feeling-associations within the experienced situations. For the purposes of openness/clarification, the following are all the self-statements I made in reference to just one ten-minute instance in the immediate-suicide-aftermath - seeing my brother in his coffin:

I am responsible

I am alone

I am helpless

I am out of control

I am insecure

I am shocked

I am useless

I am guilty 

I am scared

I am angry

I do not matter

I am hurt

I do not understand/I am confused

I am a failure

(Imagine an amalgamation of these plus more statements of this ilk in reference to other distressing image-memories (spanning a greater amount of time) from the experience, and you can perhaps begin to see/appreciate just how strong an impact suicide loss could have on a person). 

It is easy to read, even just say, these statements but the crucial point is that during the EMDR session that brought these up, I felt them. I understood what they truly meant for me because of how I accessed the feeling of them in the EMDR session. What I realised was that both images and feelings of the experience had been, since the moment I was in the funeral parlour room, alone with my brother’s corpse, encased in my physical body/being.

Acknowledging such physical feeling-memories, as equal to the image-based ones, is therefore, I think, an essential part of processing the trauma wrought by the experience of suicide loss - I had not realised that in order to work through my traumatic grief, I would need to be more in touch with my body than ever before (and that’s saying something after going through pregnancy and childbirth...). In processing sessions, whilst the hands held the paddles and the eyes flitted side-to-side, I worked through physical sensations (particularly in my arms, shoulders and gut, although sometimes full body) that I hadn’t realised I’d held on to, stored and embedded in my ensuing life, realising when processing had worked because the physical sensation vanished. My EMDR therapy thus provided the space to acknowledge the totality of my loss experience.  

Thirdly, through my experience of EMDR I have come to see how my reaction to the suicide of my brother has interacted with a pre-his-death me - my own quirks and tendencies and issues. I’ve come to think that how a person reacts to loss (pretty much any kind, not just suicide) depends in large swathes on other parts of their history - so for me whilst having EMDR targeted specifically the images and bodily sensations connected to the ‘main event’ of Martin’s suicide, what the sessions also taught me was that my response(s) to his death was(were) sometimes pre-exisiting, only exacerbated by the particularities of his death. 

My brother’s death did not plant mental ill health in me - I already had vulnerabilities. What his death (and manner of death) did was shock these vulnerabilities back into life. For example, this is what I quickly typed into my phone after my 4th session, trying simultaneously to avoid walking into lamp-posts as well as work through my thoughts on what we’d just talked about worked on, en route to my car:

‘Really I have always been worried and afraid of failure, but I think I’ve always usually come through the other side, passing, achieving. But Martin’s death was me failing. Seeing him dead was monumental confirmation that I had failed as a sister and that actually I really should be worried about failing, because when I fail people die.’ 

For this reason, I found EMDR as a process can be triggering, exhausting and hard work. It was important to take time to put in place mechanisms should anything ‘get a bit much’. My therapist talked about ‘The Goldilocks Analogy’ - for EMDR to work your state can’t be too hot, or too cold; it needs to be juuuuust right - and there was specific time in-built in the process to practice a ‘Calm Safe Place’ to aid in the moments of upset/great emotion. (It is the strangest experience to witness one (calm) image in your mind usurp another (more volatile), which is exactly what my ‘calm safe place’ did - this is a technique I will always recall as helpful from my EMDR experience). There were a number of headaches and zonkings-out after sessions, and it was surprising the amount of ‘oh yeah, that happened’ and ‘oh and that’ memories that re-surfaced each morning after a therapy session the evening before, (some of which were rather unpleasant but now sort of making more sense when related to how I reacted to my brother’s death). EMDR ‘targeted’ my non-processed memories of the immediate aftermath of Martin’s suicide, but the discussions and ‘processing moments’ also asked/required me to delve deeper, to explore my very-core self beliefs, the beliefs existing perhaps decades before suicide was even a fleeting notion in my brother’s mind. Ultimately, as a process, EMDR forced me to face my relationship with my own mind. It dragged me back into confronting my own mental (ill) health ideas and facing and addressing my own fight. 

And fourthly, I shall state, in my case at least, that EMDR does not remove grief and loss. During the 8th of my sessions I said “I am not bothered by my brother’s death. That sounds really so bad, doesn’t it?” In the 9th session, I was able to accept, say, and believe myself saying, “I was not responsible for my brother’s death”, a statement I had not anticipated I would ever say. And what became apparent next was that my issue now was about not wanting to/a fear of letting go and saying goodbye. Through EMDR I have, it really does seem, conquered the suicide-associated nightmares and flashbacks, the self-berating and beating, and guilt and responsibility regarding a perceived role in Martin’s death. The entirely negative 'I' statements became a single confident utterance of 'I did my best'. And the physical sensations too are no longer fierce/immediately recalled. But having removed these trauma-related elements, what is still left is sadness and loss at his leaving - there is in me a remaining resistance to letting go of him entirely. I do not want him to be totally gone. I clearly now have grieving to do, something which has up until this point been prevented by the emphasis on, the overrule of, the trauma that a suicide brings. I had hoped to feel happy if not elated after EMDR, that it would be THE thing needed. And I did experience lifts, (like when a particularly painful image of my brother in his coffin morphed into him sitting up, to face me and say “shut up you idiot, it’s not your fault, get on with your life”). But what I would say now after my therapy has concluded, is that EMDR is but one tool to engage in the journey after suicide loss - a valuable aid, a relatively swift acting one, but not something to address all the elements of being a suicide survivor. Bereavement by suicide is thus so complex that a mirroring-ly complex care/support process encompassing a number of tools and methods is required to really, really help those of us who’ve had to go through and live with the experience. 

How do I sum up? I don’t believe my reaction to suicide loss was/is entirely unusual. There is no diagnosis for ‘traumatic bereavement’ but perhaps there should be? My symptomatology before EMDR was the same as for PTSD from another traumatic situation (albeit in my case the scenario was not a life threatening one). I cannot therefore not be of the view that PTSD is (potentially) a ‘real thing’ for many others after losing someone to suicide - hence there is need for those who come into contact with suicide survivors to be aware. And hence also why there is need for those who find themselves in this worst-club-ever to feel confident and valid in seeking or asking for trauma-related treatment, if they feel it holds even the slightest possibility of relief for them. After all, every little helps when you have experienced loss through suicide.