A Doozie

Years ago I read a novel by Max Frisch called I’m Not Stiller. The themes all circle around identity, and there is one scene that sticks out in my mind. The protagonist, Anatol, wanders down into a dark cave, where he encounters a man—a man who is himself. The two men wrestle until only one is left. Anatol emerges from the cave, having wrestled and defeated himself. He emerges the victor. 

One of the major issues I battled during my EMDR sessions had to do with a belief I held about myself—that I am not good enough to be loved. There are a lot of things from my past that play into this belief, and for the most part, I knew what those things were. In fact, I had spent many years of my life trying to sort them out and let them go. I didn’t want them as baggage in my life, and so I chose to release them. It wasn’t until January when I started to discover that this same narrative of “Not Good Enough” wasn’t nearly as resolved as I thought. On more than one occasion during counseling, I felt really down on myself. I left there feeling not good enough, specifically, not good enough for someone to choose over and over again to love me. This is the point when I decided to see Saranne and begin my work in EMDR. 

At the beginning and end of every session, Saranne asked me the following question: “How true is this statement for you: I feel good enough.” I would then rate the truth of that statement on a scale of one to ten, one being not true at all, ten being totally true. With each session, I found the rating was growing higher and higher. But the number wasn’t magically growing. It was growing because I was down in that cave, wrestling myself. I had to go down into the muck, uncover some of the old beliefs, rewire them, and then emerge victorious, free from those untrue, unproductive beliefs. 

I blogged my way through the EMDR sessions, but there is one thing I haven’t yet shared. The thing that made me reactive in my romantic relationship linked back to an incorrect belief that I continually invested in. It was the way I interpreted (or misinterpreted) a statement, which was something to the tune of this: I better be on good behavior or else he will leave me. But this interpretation was deeply flawed for many reasons. And this is why EMDR makes sense. The narrative I had on repeat in my head about not being good enough became embedded in my mind, in my subconscious, becoming a truth onto which I fervently held. So I was terrified of my bad behaviors because I believed I would be abandoned if I didn't check those misdeeds, also translated as this: I must be perfect all the time in order to be loved. Given the main issue I decided to see Saranne (my reactive behavior), I saw myself behaving badly all the time, thus, I was all-the-time afraid of abandonment and I believed I was not good enough to be loved. It sounded so silly when I actually said it aloud, but I had permitted myself to operate from this belief for at least six months. 

Now for some yoga to pull it all together. I came to Mosaic (my yoga studio) around the same time that I started seeing Saranne (January 2011), at a time when I felt broken, disheartened, and completely lacking faith in myself. One night, while I was waiting for class to begin, the girl in front of me positioned herself, and I mean deeply positioned herself, into a pose that is incredibly challenging for me (half pigeon). At first, my mind thought, “Gosh, she’s so much better than me. I totally suck at that pose. I need to practice more.” And then, I stopped myself. That very moment, I promised to not let my yoga practice be another place where I am hard on myself. And I’ve done a pretty good job at keeping that promise, I think. In yoga, I practice loving myself, which served as a great supplement to my work with Saranne. In EMDR, I was breaking myself down; in yoga, I was building myself back up. So at Mosaic, I took the broken pieces and began to reform them, turning what was broken into something new and beautiful. 

My journey led me to a path of learning to heal myself, forgive myself, and love myself. And choosing love sometimes means doing something difficult. Sometimes choosing love means being willing to go down into that dark cave, deal with the parts of yourself that are harmful or unhealthy or destructive, and emerge anew.