18. The 10 Impacts of EMDR on my Life, From the Legal Battle, to Unmasking my ASD & Becoming More Feminine - EMDR for PTSD 2/2 - Emotional Detachment as a Tactical Advantage for Family Court, Season 2

Here we cover 10+ practical impacts of EMDR on my life. It has been a game changer in how I've evolved as a woman, as a mother, as a coparent, as a worker, as a family member, as a child of God, and as a friend, after relational trauma and CPTSD. EMDR is an effective trauma therapy for survivors of domestic abuse and for survivors of narcissistic abuse who have developed PTSD. It is a terrific tool of nervous system recovery and it can be appropriate for people on the autism spectrum.

Welcome back to season two of Light in the Battle, emotional detachment as a tactical advantage for family court. Light in the Battle is a podcast for autistic women healing from narcissistic abuse, and it is a podcast where we get clearer, calmer, and spiritually and legally harder to mess with. What I learned in my journey is that the legal advice and strategy for family court against people who make us feel confused or scared just does not land when emotions are running high. I'm seeing survivors of narcissistic abuse keep losing in court over and over.

This is the transcript for Episode 18.

Then I figured it out.The safe parent has to show that they are the stable, child-focused parent, both in all the evidence that they generate, emails, texts, medical reports, and in their demeanor in court. As long as survivors show up in court frazzled with raging PTSD and resentment, and as long as they keep writing angry emails or share how mad they feel that contact has been allowed or refuse to cooperate on certain aspects, they are never going to be empowered to protect the kids from harm.

"As long as survivors show up

in court with raging PTSD,

they are never going to be able

to protect the kids from harm"

Although the concerns and feelings are mostly valid, and they won't change after we achieve emotional detachment, survivors need to stop creating content for the other side to use to make them appear unstable and unsafe for the children. So I'm taking you on the journey that I traveled to get to a point where I detached completely. I cared just as much about my child's well-being. However, I got my head out of my butt, is what happened, and I worked on myself so I could get to a new and improved version. A version of myself that could play by the court's rules to show the truth and the patterns of behavior in an indisputable manner.

So far in Season 2, we've covered how to understand and break the trauma bond, aka the addiction to chaos in episode 15 and episode 16. This is basically suggesting ways of staying gone once you've left. We've covered PTSD, CPTSD, and how EMDR works, though it doesn't work for everyone, in episode 17.

Here you'll hear about the 10 impacts that EMDR has had on my life.

Next, we will talk about

• forgiveness, and how it does not mean reconciliation in episode 19,

• codependency in autistic women,

• gratitude,

• fellowship & mentorship with the STAR Network and their TAR Anon meetings

• surrender & grief

  
  

So make sure to follow the show / come back to this blog if you want to be able to catch all the episodes about emotional detachment as they drop.

Okay, so in this episode today, we go over 10 of the many, many things that EMDR has positively impacted in my life, how it's allowed me to change my mindset and made me perform a lot better in family court after trauma, at work, as a parent, etc. I tried to sum it up in 10 impacts because it makes for a better episode title, but if you listen closely, there's a lot more than 10 going on.

Please start with episode 17 if needed because that's where I describe what EMDR is. I talk about traumatic memories versus bad memories, and I really lay the foundation for this episode. If you don't know what EMDR is and how it works, maybe loop back to episode 17 and then come back here to episode 18.

If I were to rank the impacts in order of importance, I think the biggest impact was the fact that I was finally able to talk about what was done to me. I was able to use the exact words to describe the actions and events and to do so calmly and professionally. There was zero traumatic response anymore when I would talk about it. I wouldn't get agitated. I wouldn't freeze. I wouldn't try to be funny. I wouldn't be fawning. That's really, I think, the number one fruit of EMDR. It shuts off the trauma responses since it handles the trauma.

"The number one fruit of EMDR

was that it made the trauma responses

(fight, flight, freeze and fawn) disappear."

You will see throughout the 10 impacts of EMDR on my life how fruitful it has been that those trauma responses have gone. Please make sure to stay until the end of the episode for the most important impact that EMDR has had on the course of my life and most likely the reason you're here listening to this episode in your recovery from narcissistic abuse.

1. The first impact I noticed of EMDR on my life was in how I advocate for my autistic child. When I'm in school with the goal of obtaining accommodations for him and advocating for him in a way that nobody's ever modeled for me back in the 80s and 90s, I need to remain professional and be able to speak clearly. If I start to want to run away when I sense opposition, or if I start to try and be funny and fawn to get my message across to the school principal, I'm going to get zero respect and there's going to be zero impact and zero accommodations provided for my child. Same when I need to firmly tell someone who's close to me to kindly go fly a kite when it comes to my son's special needs. I can express myself in a more productive manner than I would have in the past. So he gets better advocacy, I get more respect, people get educated, everybody wins.

2. The second impact of EMDR therapy, a concrete application of what I said earlier, being able to talk calmly about what was done to me and to use the exact words to describe the exact events, is for example when dealing with police. I've acted as the "emotional support animal" for survivors of narcissistic abuse that went to the police to report the abuse they had endured. I've observed that when victims of narcissistic abuse are reporting the events to document them, they may be dealing with professionals that are - depending on the country, because some countries are training policemen and policewomen extremely well on domestic violence and so they'll be equipped to read between the lines even if you freeze or if you start to get agitated - in a lot of countries unfortunately that's not the case. And so if they're still carrying PTSD, survivors will tend to go on tangents, freeze when a precise, disturbing question is asked, or start cracking jokes. Instead, you have to be able to do your police report calmly, stay in your body while you recount the events, stay on topic, not ramble, basically not display the freeze, fight, flight or fawn. After EMDR treatment, you're sitting up straight in your chair and you can answer the questions factually.

   
   
   
   

3. The third impact of EMDR on my life was that I discovered my softness, my femininity, and a deep sense of safety. Once I was able to feel safe because I wasn't constantly on high alert and hyper vigilant and ruminating over the things that happened and how that could happen again, I became genuinely softer. I felt safer and I was able to become more feminine. There's a lot of peace in that and it was a discovery for me of a whole side of my personality that I did not know was there - because I'd had no other option for all these years, than to be tough, which is really not the same thing as being strong. I now feel a genuine strength, that's a quiet strength, rooted in that sense of safety, which I didn't have when I had CPTSD. So I'm better able to set boundaries calmly and make sure that I remain safe now that I've got this underlying quiet strength and we'll see later on how that has impacted my relationships.

   
   
   
   

4. The fourth impact of EMDR was the amount of energy that I saved in my day to day. Oh my God. When I'm no longer carrying CPTSD and spending all of my mental resources on being hypervigilant, ruminating, strategically avoiding certain conversations or places, reacting too strongly to certain things or freezing and then having to come back to earth or spending all that energy trying to be funny because I'm fawning and I can't really deal with the situation... All of that energy I'm now saving and I can redirect it to being the best mom I can be, the best worker I can be, the softest woman I can be. It's a much better allocation of my energy.

   
   

   With ASD, I've got a very limited bandwidth. Life's exhausting to begin with. And so I need to be saving as much energy as possible to allocate it to the areas of my life that really matter. So I became a more regulated mom and I had more calm to give to my child. I was better able to attune to what was going on with him, to his emotional needs, to invest in his secure attachment. And these are things we talk about a lot in the first 10 episodes of this podcast. We talk about from different angles every time, but the common thread is how we give our children as much calm as possible, despite the trauma, despite the ASD, despite the sensory overwhelm and all that, so they grow up mentally healthy and emotionally healthy. And so with a more regulated mom, it's just a lot easier. There's more calm to give to our children.

Before we move on to the fifth impact of EMDR on my life after CPTSD, I'd like to ask you to please leave this piece a five-star rating (at the top). I'm very happy to be providing all this content that I would have needed so bad a few years ago, and to share with you the shortcuts and the tips that have worked for me. But I do need you to leave ratings and comments because that's what actually pushes the content upwards in the algorithm. Thank you so much.

5. The fifth impact that I noticed after EMDR was the levels of sensory overwhelm as an autistic woman. I'm a sensory avoidant, raising a sensory seeker. So the combo between the two is interesting. And so if I'm less startled, if I'm less triggered by sounds and noises and the rocking and the pacing and all the things that happen around me, that makes that combo easier to navigate. Noise has not stopped causing pain for me. It's not suddenly become enjoyable all of a sudden, but it no longer makes me dissociate or leave. And so I'm able to stay connected with my child. Something we talked about in episode 13, how we stay connected with our children as an ASD parent was easily getting overwhelmed on the sensory level.That starts to shift after EMDR. It did for me anyway.

6. The sixth impact I've observed after EMDR is that I wasn't fawning anymore.And I'm talking about this, I'm making a whole sixth point about fawning because to me, it is the same thing as masking in autistic women. So the sixth point should really be, "I'm now able to start unmasking as an adult-diagnosed autistic woman". So we spend our lives, especially as women, fawning, masking, trying to please everybody, trying to perform in a way that's not representative of who we are, that doesn't match our needs, does not serve us and doesn't genuinely connect us to people because that's just not our authentic self. And once you've done your EMDR, you don't feel that need to fawn anymore.

   
   

   It's become a lot easier for me to start my unmasking journey after EMDR because fawning doesn't come so easily anymore. I've got that quiet strength that I mentioned earlier. I don't feel the need to please everybody anymore and I can unmask safely. To me, fawning, the trauma response of fawning in autistic women is what makes you keep your mask on. And so you see how the fruits of EMDR have really compounded together because if you get rid of the fawning trauma response, which I am convinced in autistic women is the same thing as masking, then you can start showing up as your authentic self because you've got that sense of safety I talked about earlier. So that's pretty exciting.

7. The seventh impact of EMDR was that physical, mental, and emotional sensation that Shrek had loosened his grip over me. Shrek has left the building. Shrek's an image I used in episode 17. He's the guy who gets in the driver's seat when I'm triggered and starts making all the decisions for me, makes me act a fool, and I just don't control it - the very definition of a trauma response. So that sensation that the CPTSD has loosened its grip, I can now uncover entire areas of who I am that were covered by the fog in past decades. I catch myself responding to situations in new ways. And that's how I was able to get all the way to a point of total forgiveness. Stay with me. Forgiveness, not reconciliation. That's something we will be talking about in episode 19 next week. It has freed me from the anger, the resentment, the impact of that tension on my body. I didn't need to hold on to it anymore as a potential fight response, you know, ready to ready to go, ready to defend myself. And so this in turn means that I can help others without my own anger getting triggered. I'm a more helpful member of society without CPTSD, without Shrek calling the shots for me. I was able to achieve forgiveness and I can help others now without getting triggered by what I see, read, and hear.

8. The eighth impact is my ability to surrender. Once you're able to talk about what was done to you and to think about it with a lot more distance, because you're not reliving it right now - your brain doesn't think that because you're talking about it, it's happening again right now, no, no, no. It's a bad memory. There's a lot more distance. And so you can get all the way to a point of total surrender to your situation. To me, it sounds like this, "This is shit. And that's okay". Okay, I'm keeping it real over here. Whereas before it was more like, "maybe if I hold my breath and hide in a corner, it will go away". Or, "maybe if I fight this situation hard enough, I can control the outcome". Or, "let's see if I can make this person laugh with my uber developed sense of sarcasm because my situation sucks so bad, I need human connection and I don't know how to achieve it, so I'm going to try and be funny." No. Now it's more peaceful. It's "all of this sucks. It does. I will have to give my opponent time and multiple opportunities to misbehave some more so I can prove a pattern. It's not fun for me. It is impacting the kids. And that's okay. It's necessary for a better future." Stay with me. This level of surrender is something we're going to be talking about later on this in this season.

   
   

   It has been a game changer for me in how I handled my whole legal battle, which by the way, will never end, as you probably know if you're reading this. And that's another thing I've surrender to by the way, is there will there will always be another hearing, there will always be another strange accusation, strange grief. Surrendering to that has reminded me, by the way, that God holds everything in the palms of his hands. There's so much freedom in that. And I could not see this with raging CPTSD. I couldn't see it. Huge impact of EMDR for me, that ability to surrender.

   
   
   
   

9. The ninth impact that I observed in my life was the quality of my relationships. So first of all, like I said, because I became softer, there wasn't that toughness in the way I would behave to people, especially more masculine people in my life. If I'm not coming across as a woman who's trying to be tough and always ready to raise my voice and argue or debate with them about everything, and I can just be softer - I'm still going to have an opinion, but I'm going to communicate it in a more firm, feminine manner with that quiet strength. And so the quality of those relationships has skyrocketed. Masculine men respond a lot better to a soft, feminine, inspiring, yet firm energy. And they'll want to protect that and provide for that. That's a whole nother conversation. We'll maybe make a whole season about that later.

   
   

   And another thing about the relationships is once you're able, finally, to tell your loved ones, your safe people, the people you trust, about what happened exactly - they can finally feel that empathy for you. For me, there was many years that went by without me being able to name what happened. And so I think the people that loved me, they took for granted that the PTSD wasn't just coming out of nowhere. There had to be a reason. But they hadn't measured the gravity of what had gone down until I was able to name it and talk about it and use the exact terms for it. And so those levels of empathy and connection, genuine connection with people, they're entirely different after you can talk about it (with your safe people, again). And so you're able to engage in what Renee Brown talks about when she talks about vulnerability for connection.

"You're a lot better able to do that after EMDR.

You can be vulnerable.

You've got that strength and that softness."

You feel safe while talking about it. And so you're connecting with people genuinely a lot better.

Please remember to follow the show before I give you the juiciest 10th impact. Following the show is how you'll be able to catch the entire season two. I'm taking you on a journey!

10. The 10th impact of EMDR on my life was in my legal battle. None of the advice my lawyer was giving me in how I should behave was landing, when I was angry and reactive and trying to control the outcomes. So before the surrender, before the forgiveness, before Shrek had left the building, none of his advice was landing. I started to get it after EMDR. So before you even walk into court, in the months leading up to that date, there are angry emails that you should not be sending.Text rants that you should not be sending. Triggered behavior that you should not let the other side document. Because it will make you look like you're just as high conflict as they are!

And when you're in family court, you're talking to a judge, and you're trying to talk about what happened and you have not worked on your trauma... You will most likely be unable to describe the events without freezing or without getting agitated. The problem with getting agitated in court is that courts are not trauma informed. They're not therapists and they're not trying to be your friends. So all they'll do is perceive you as emotional and unstable. Therefore, you will be perceived as the unsafe parent.

While people who display narcissistic patterns of behavior, because of their absence of empathy, are perfectly capable of showing up as calm and collected. You don't want that to happen. You're trying to protect your child. You want to show that you are the safe, stable parent. So don't be Shrek in court. Don't be Shrek in front of a judge. Don't be Shrek over email. Just don't. And you likely won't if you do EMDR.

So you'll stay calm over there all the way. You'll collect what you need to collect to prove what you need to prove, with the guidance of qualified legal counsel. Your opponent will smell that indifference. They can't handle it. And so you let them flip out and lose their shit either over email in front of the judge, and that can be a way that you show to the court on which side the high conflict behaviors truly reside.

If you've suffered narcissistic abuse, go get your butt in trauma therapy, whatever that looks like for you, whatever your licensed therapist, trained professional determines is the best approach for your PTSD or CPTSD. Please do that, yesterday!

I said in episode 17 that I would tell the world about the impact of EMDR in my life until the day I die. And maybe now that you've got the list of the 10+ impacts that I've observed that have radically changed my life, that makes more sense to you.

It just got that mud out of my system, one memory at a time. And over the course of a year, you can clean, you know, anywhere between two and four traumatic memories, but then it compounds. It's the strangest thing. You'll clean a memory, like a specific memory from your childhood, something that happened at school. And then you'll see. Once you've done the sessions for that memory, you'll start to notice that it's impacting how you react to completely different things. There's very strange ties between things in the brain.

So even if in a year, you can do maybe two to four memories, there is then a snowball effect, and there's actually a lot more getting more peaceful in your in your brain than just these four memories.

Another thing that I've observed over time was the cumulative effects. You've got the short term effects of EMDR, which is mainly that the trauma, the four trauma responses are no longer recurring and all the impacts that that can have on your life, short term. But then long term, I'm seeing that it's impacted my feelings about life, my softness, my femininity, my strength, my relationships. In the months and the years after I completed EMDR, I'm still picking up on behaviors here and there that are not the behavior I would have had for the first few decades of my life. I'm responding differently.

I'm responding. I'm not reacting.

Shrek has officially been evicted. I'm in control now. I can think about what I'm going to say, how I'm going to say it and come up with an intelligent response. A game changer.

Thank you for reading this piece today. If you suspect that you're dealing with PTSD or CPTSD after abuse and until you can find the right type of therapy that works for you, until you get to that point, you remember to take it one day at a time. Your only job today is to make it until this evening and then you'll do that again tomorrow and the day after. We will see you next week and we'll be talking about forgiveness.