I Felt No Empathy, Love, Or Connection For Decades — Until I Tried One Specific Therapy
I tried everything to fix my severe dissociation. EMDR was the only thing that worked.
golubovy | Canva The first time someone described EMDR to me, it sounded like new-age quackery. Then again, I wasn’t exactly opposed.
In an attempt to understand and overcome my severe dissociation and lack of empathy, love, and connection, I tried just about every therapy — EMDR was the only one to work.
I’d been to multiple talk therapists, all of whom called me “rational” and “level-headed” before assigning me self-help titles like this was an expensive, exclusive book club. Medical doctors suggested MRIs and thyroid medication.
On the less-scientific end of things, I’d tried Reiki. Hypnotherapy. Yoga. Acupuncture. One Manhattan-based Shaman laid me down on a buffalo skin and fanned me with feathers while she extracted my inner demons.
Nothing worked. For almost two decades, I lived disconnected from my body. The world around me looked dull and dream-like. I felt virtually no pain, physical or emotional. I also felt no empathy, connection, or love.
Finally, as I neared my 30th birthday, one psychologist presented a diagnosis alongside a supposed solution: Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder, she said, and I could fix it with EMDR. “But first you should consider whether or not you want to fix it,” my therapist warned. “Dissociation is the brain’s way of protecting you from trauma. Without it, you may not be as calm, or motivated, or logical.”
Logic be darned I decided I wanted to feel again.
What is EMDR?
cottonbro studio | Pexels
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. The scientific definition: a proven psychotherapy technique that uses bilateral stimulation (an activity that stimulates both sides of the body in a rhythmic left-right pattern) to help the brain process traumatic memories frozen in the amygdala, the fight-or-flight center of the brain.
In layman’s terms: You focus on your most messed-up memories and watch a finger (or, in my case, a glowing square) bounce back and forth.
My therapist and I scheduled a few virtual intake sessions. I compiled a list of memories that qualified as traumatic — or so I’d been told — and then I read them off to her as if I were reciting a grocery list:
- My older brother has been trying to end his life since he developed bipolar disorder at 11. More often than not, I was the person who talked him out of it.
- My dad cheated on my mom shortly before her kidneys failed and then they got divorced.
- My best friend developed acute schizophrenia overnight when he was drugged at a music festival and then he committed suicide.
- I endured abuse between the ages of five and eight (I couldn’t remember exactly when or how many times it happened) at the hands of someone I trusted.
Finally, after recording my earliest memory and teaching me some grounding techniques, my therapist gave me the green light.
It was time to start EMDR.
Liza Summer | Pexels
It was time to start EMDR.
She clicked her mouse and her face disappeared from my laptop. The screen turned black and I saw a glowing blue square in the middle. She clicked again. The square started moving, back and forth. I followed it with my eyes.
Left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left. It stopped.
“What do you feel?” my therapist asked.
“Nothing.” Per usual.
“Okay, let’s go again.”
We went again. And again. After the third time, I was ready to mentally toss EMDR into the ever-growing pile of techniques that couldn’t fix me. And then it happened.
A stirring in my chest. An emotion that grew from a raindrop into a puddle into a wave into a tsunami. It swept over me — drowned me in its weight and complexity — and for the first time since I was a child, I felt. My dissociation had cracked open.
EMDR made me human again.
Antoni Shkraba | Pexels
Over the next week, all the emotions I’d refused to feel for the past two decades shoved their way to the surface and poured out of me. I was catatonic for two days straight. I sobbed. I dry-heaved. I felt like I was in a deep, dark hole, and nothing I did or said could ever get me out of it.
I scheduled an emergency session with my therapist. I moved my eyes back and forth. Inch by inch, memory by memory, I clawed my way out of that deep, dark hole. And then the real healing began.
I am a walking billboard for the odd psychotherapy technique that healed my deepest wounds.
I’ve been in EMDR for almost three years now. My therapist has helped me process all of the memories on my traumatic grocery list and then some. Using patience, presence, and back-and-forth eye movements, we work through whatever comes up.
I’m back in my body. The world around me looks vivid and solidified. I feel everything. I’m not as calm or motivated or logical as I used to be — but it’s worth it.
I’m deeply in love with a man who makes space for my messiest truths. I honor the fiery, sensitive child inside of me who has finally woken up again.
I surround myself with people who accept and support this version of me, and I do the same for others. I look other human beings in the eye and sit with them in their joy or pain, knowing that one cannot exist without the other.
Maria Cassano is a writer, editor, and journalist whose work has appeared on NBC, Bustle, CNN, The Daily Beast, Food & Wine, and Allure, among others.