Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [76]
She was right: I would see Stevey Joy, for example, go into a really deep place of sadness, crying in her room and holding a picture of Maria. I would sit and hold her. Then about ten minutes later, she’d be outside skipping and playing. She would fully enter into her sorrow and then move fully into her play.
Dr. Lois began seeing the little girls regularly. I learned a lot through her work. With Shaoey, she used a therapy called EMDR. In simple – believe me, very simple – terms, I would describe it like this: when you see a tragic loss, your brain can’t handle it. This is just how the brain is designed.
So for a child who witnesses her sister’s death in the driveway, or a soldier who sees a friend step on a bomb in Afghanistan, the brain takes in the catastrophic event and then the experience explodes into thousands of pieces, like shrapnel, in the mind. It’s an instinctive survival response.
The problem is, of course, that these pieces of traumatic memories are all over the place in one’s mind, almost like land mines. You can be doing fine, and then a chance association will detonate one of those memories, triggering a panic attack, a flashback, or worse.
The idea of the EMDR – in my layman’s terms – is to bring all the pieces of traumatic shrapnel together in one place. Then you can put them in a mental file cabinet and access them when you want to . . . rather than the flashbacks coming when you least expect them.
Because of the way the brain is designed, repetitive motor movements crossing the midline of the brain, combined with mental imaging, can pull together one’s mental shrapnel. Dr. Lois would have Shaoey sit with her, tapping her open hands first on Shaoey’s right leg, then the left, back and forth, in a pattern.
While she would tap – left, right, left, right, tap, tap, tap – Dr. Lois would ask Shaoey to remember Maria as she saw her right after the accident. Then she would redirect by saying something like, “Okay, Shaoey, now instead of seeing Maria all bloody and lying on the ground, I want you to see her in your mind all clean and laughing in Jesus’ arms.”
Shaoey would replace the awful memory with a beautiful picture in her mind, which also had the distinct advantage of being true. This wasn’t just wishful thinking; it was replacing what was visible to human eyes with the reality of what was actually occurring in spiritual reality. For Shaoey, and for the rest of us, it meant choosing to SEE how Maria really was.
This kind of therapy was – and is – immensely helpful, particularly because Dr. Lois is a believer and uses it in a Christ-centered way. These techniques don’t erase what happened. But hopefully they can give the girls – and the rest of us – psychological and spiritual tools we can use for the rest of our lives in this broken world.
Another, deeper issue we have all had to deal with in varying degrees is guilt. Will feels it: he was driving the car. I feel it: I should have been outside with my children. Steven feels it: ditto. The rest of our family – and even friends who weren’t connected at all with the events of May 21 – feel guilt in one way or another.
I didn’t realize how deeply it was affecting Shaoey, though, until we visited the cemetery a few months after Maria’s death. She was mad and just didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to pray with us and wasn’t acting like herself.
Finally I asked Shaoey what she was feeling inside.
“I don’t want to be here,” said my broken, insightful Shaoey, at that time eight going on about thirty-five, “because this is where guilt finds me.”
Shaoey felt like she was responsible for the accident . . . because she had told Maria to go get Will, that Will would lift her up on the monkey bars.
I said to her, “Shaoey, is it a true statement that Maria was too heavy for you to lift to the monkey bars?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Is it a true