The Power of EMDR and Dreams

I have to share this story from a client/fellow EMDR enthusiast... The power of working transpersonally with dreams. Thanks Beverley, and shared with permission.

I thought I’d write about an amazing light bulb moment with some EMDR on a dream last night with Mark, to hopefully make you all smile on this rather dreary day!

This was the dream:

‘I have an apt with my spinal consultant to get the results of a recent MRI. We meet outside the operating theatres and he tells me to follow him. Instead of to his consulting room, he leads me to his on-call flat, where I feel very uncomfortable and wonder what he is doing.

He then tells me that he is going to be moving his practice to a new area because of a little girl with complex medical needs who he’s been helping. The little girl’s family are moving away and so he has agreed to also move to the same area so he can continue to support the little girl.

To confirm his commitment to the girl, the family have left him with one of her shoes and have told him that he has to eat the shoe.

My consultant then hands me the shoe and tells me to eat a piece of it as well. I am very resentful about this because I have just heard that I'm going to lose him as my consultant to this other girl who is more important than me.

I'm also feeling disgusted, and can't stomach the the thought of eating her shoe, especially when I don't even know her.

I break a piece of the shoe off and try to eat it.

Then my consultant’s family and friends arrive and I'm feeling very uncomfortable being in his flat, wondering what they’ll think, and have to find a way to discreetly leave.’

The target was the prospect of having to eat the shoe. The NC (EMDR's negative cognition) was something around not being good enough/less important, and the emotions were around disgust.

As we started to process I remembered that for many years from early childhood into early adulthood I had had some strange aversion to leather, and when I would see a type of leather (that I could never remember so as to prepare myself against the reaction), I would gag and have to turn away immediately, with no understanding of why leather made me feel so sick.

This has been something I have tried to process numerous times without any success, except that I'd realised that the leather represented skin. 

Mark asked me to do his ‘Transfer of Consciousness’ into the shoe, where he then asked me what the shoe wanted to communicate to me, the dreamer.

It was a shoe for a child around 3-ish, Nubuck leather, light blue, with pink leather flowers on it. 

It transpired that the shoe represented a time when my younger sister was born and was about the attachment trauma related to her birth and the ‘loss’ of my daddy.

My sister was born with a severe skin condition that also meant endless hospital visits and stays during her early childhood. Her arms and legs were always wrapped in bandages because her skin bled all the time.

Sadly, we never got on and I hated my sister. We’ve had long spells in adulthood without contact but over the last two weeks there has been a reconciliation between us. 

The shoe was asking me to swallow - or digest - this trauma, and process her arrival on the scene.

I could see it was a pretty shoe, that was made of soft nubuck leather, and then could see my sister playing and felt myself smiling as I watched her. 

All of these years I have assumed that the aversion to leather was about something much more sinister than this, but was in fact a reaction to sharing in the pain of her skin condition, all the hospital appointments she had, and the attachment trauma of her arrival (into a pretty dysfunctional family). 

It has felt like such a fun piece of work and a real lightbulb moment.

Once again, I am amazed at the power of EMDR and the idea that everything is stored within us, coming up in dreams from time to time, and waiting for us to work it out - with somebody clever like Mark who can lead us through it.

Not sure I would have got there without him having the light bulb moment himself as well just before me, and guiding me through it!

Hope it made you smile.

Consent given to share this with you today.