How to rescue yourself

Hello, friend ♡

The other day my dad said something that got me thinking. He said “You’re so open now. Before, it was like you were closed off, retreated into yourself”. And that’s true, I was. Living in chronic survival mode will do that. Your body, by trying to protect itself, is also keeping connection at bay. Without connection, we wither. Our need for connection is part of our human nature - no one is exempt from it. But we can’t authentically connect if our hearts are closed.

How I feel these days is the complete opposite: like my heart is open to the world. It’s a shift that can be physically felt. And it is a very interesting sensation - this openness, lightness (as in being of light) that can be felt with every breath.

It’s like this was the missing piece of the puzzle, the piece that had been missing for so long that I had forgotten it was supposed to be there in the first place. Does that make sense?

For a long time I wondered what was required to live in the world. I mean to really live, to feel like an actual human participating in the world, rather than being a passive bystander or an outsider. Someone can be an outsider in certain ways, and still be tuned into the flow of humanity. Being in the world is not the same as fitting in, as conforming.

(Sidenote: I wish there was a way to create images that illustrate the concepts I’m talking about, but I refuse to use AI, so there sadly is no easy way to do that. The mental images I’m seeing are way beyond my own art skills too, so for now, I am limited to words. And while I believe that in principle, you could describe anything with words alone, it remains a fact that we are limited by language)

The best answer I have at the time of writing this, is that this openness is the key. I’m not sure what else to call it, so I’m choosing to call it what it feels like physically.

It’s the sensation that you are one with other people and the Universe. (are they two different things?) The belief that you belong here, just as everyone and everything else belongs here. You are not above or below anything else, you are next to, you are beside, just as everything and everyone is beside you.

When you carry this feeling/knowledge inside you, you automatically begin to live from a place of openness, love, equality, fairness and respect. You begin to treat yourself and others in a way that is truly authentic to you. You feel in tune with yourself and with something deeper. You are harmonizing with everything and everyone else.

Some might call this alignment, and I think that is an equally good descriptor of the concept I am trying to express.

No matter what you’d like to call it, EMDR is what unlocked this feeling for me. Would I have gotten there anyway? I think so. (I’ve known it before, but it was taken from me, both by others and by myself.) But without EMDR doing what it did to my brain, I think it would have taken much, much longer to get myself all the way there. The things I was shown, or perhaps showed myself, through those internal visions and the re-structuring in the weeks that followed each session - all of it helped me to remember what I’m part of. Remember what this is all for.

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These days, I live more in the present than in the past. I’m building a strong sense of self not so easily shaken by external factors. I’m existing in the world, feeling more and more like a participant than a bystander. (Some days it comes easily, this comfortable assuredness. Other days, the fear of uncertainty and self-doubt is loud. But as I often talk about, being a person takes practice. It’s okay if it doesn’t come easily, that doesn’t mean you can’t get yourself to where you want to be. Maybe try looking at it like this: your victories will be even more satisfying as a result, your mastery more complete.)

It took serious work to get here. But the thing I really want people to know though, is that ‘the work’ isn’t necessarily what they are picturing. It doesn’t have to be hard, grueling, forceful - in fact I would argue that it shouldn’t be.

This work is different. It’s an act of self-love, of self-respect. This work can be soft, gentle, nurturing.

And here’s another truth: you can give yourself that, without believing you deserve it. Without believing it’s going to “do anything”. And it’ll still work, because it does work.

When we are just starting out in our journey, we don’t always believe in ourselves or what we’re doing yet, because we lack proof of success. We might want to believe, but if you feel like “everything” has failed up until now, why should this time be any different? Maybe you don’t feel deserving of good things either, because so many experiences have shown you that you are undeserving. (Of course, that’s just one way to interpret a negative experience. If you’ve internalized it in this way, it isn’t your fault. But you’re also not correct in doing that - you are deserving, you have always been deserving, and it’s time to let this illusion of unworthiness unravel).

For me, EMDR therapy was the main force of change. However, I was the catalyst, because I am the one who decided I couldn’t live like that anymore, looked up practitioners in my area, chose one to email, meet with, and continue seeing regularly for several years. I was the one who did the work.

Just as you have to, when you are ready.

Being “ready” is both a feeling and a decision. You either wait to feel it, or you decide to be it.

But we are not always ready to make a decision, either. And if that’s you, it’s okay. Maybe you are still in the information gathering phase, and if so, your action phase is still to come. Trust that you will find your way there in time!

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A session of EMDR therapy is like having a vivid hallucination of the past, yet being rooted in the present - all while talking through it with the conducting therapist.

It is typically done quite systematically. Before you begin the actual therapy, you decide which specific events (narrowed down even further to individual moments) in your past to work on, together with your therapist. For some, that might be the starting point - knowing the specific traumatic events from your past and then jumping into EMDR. But for others, the road might look different: first, they might need to identify that they are currently being held back by something, or that they have persistent issues in their daily lives which often stem from unhelpful (but protective) beliefs about themselves and other people, and that these beliefs in turn stem from trauma of some kind, before they are ready to begin actual work on it.

You either work from the outside in, or from the inside out. One is not better than the other; they are just different. They both work. You will get where you need to be regardless.

The most important part is that you do the work, no matter what that looks like for you.

But that’s all context, what I really wanted to tell you is that a pattern naturally developed throughout my sessions: when first beginning to work on a specific event, it was mostly like reliving it, but in addition to the reliving, it was like opening the floodgates that held the feelings associated with the memory under control. This was, as you might imagine, pretty intense.

But what came after that is what fascinates me the most.

Suddenly, I would start to see a different version of me, standing there beside myself in these memories. This would happen in therapy, during the session - and it happened for every single event we worked on.

The first time, I was surprised. And in the later rounds, even as I came to expect it as something that would probably happen, I never pushed it to happen. It wasn’t a conscious choice. It was like watching a movie where the next scene just unfolds, all without any action on your part. Well, I guess that isn’t the best comparison since I was taking action, I was sitting there working through my emotions - but the point is that she just came. She would come every time.

Sometimes it was a roughly present-day version of me, someone I would recognize if I looked in the mirror. Other times, it was a much older version. I can’t see her face as clearly, but I know her as my future self. Her essence is strong, the steadiness that comes with a lifetime of experience radiates from her.

It was so strange. After a lifetime of longing for someone to save me, to hold my hand, in the end it was me. I held my own hand. I rescued myself.

Again and again, I relived an experience in which I had previously been alone, and then suddenly I wasn’t. She was next to me, sometimes a silent support - an acknowledgement that I had been wronged in some way, and sometimes she spoke on my behalf. That was fun to “watch” - the present-day version of myself yelling at people I never managed to stand up to (and even if I did, they never heard me). But she gave them no choice but to listen.

Through that work, I was shown that that power was always within me, even when I didn’t know how to access it. I was shown that I was never alone, have never been alone.

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Look, none of us truly knows how this all works, right? Life, The Universe. It’s up to you to choose whether or not to believe that there is a reason for everything, a deeper meaning, order in the chaos, some objective to all of this.

Personally, I find it endlessly fascinating, no matter which side you’re coming at this from. What I will say though, is that the feeling of alignment in essence feels as though it’s originating elsewhere, even though we can feel it strongly within ourselves. It does really feel like a unifying something - something we can be tapped into, attuned to, rather than an emotion that originates individually - and that remains pretty interesting whether you’re looking at it from a scientific perspective or a spiritual one.

The older I get, the less I find that it matters exactly what it is and why. The scientific details, although incredibly interesting, become less important, and the focus naturally becomes on what it can be used for. The good it can do, the change it can drive.

The more people are attuned to this feeling, the more people are unified and attuned to each other, the more we can heal and grow through the problems we as a society are facing.

I will leave you with this:

In rescuing ourselves, we rescue others too. Someone is coming to save you, and it’s yourself first and foremost, but it’s also countless other people. Healing has ripple effects, like a stone dropped in a pond.

By coming to save yourself, you will save others in turn.

You save others by inspiring them to take similar action, or at minimum, to stop taking actively harmful action.

You save others by sparing them of painful interaction with the most unhealed version of yourself.

You save others by letting them know you, see you, because those things carry more power than you know.

You save others by giving them the gift of connection.

All of this will save you, too. There is love in both giving and receiving.