When the Autism Crisis Is Over, But Your Body Never Gets the Message
What happens when that autism crisis is over, but your body never gets the message? For many autism parents, the years of fighting for services and managing frightening situations like meltdowns and shutdowns. What about problems with sleep and carrying relentless responsibilities? They don’t simply disappear. They can become trauma stored in the nervous system of autism parents. And that’s what led me to try eMDR therapy.
Research showed last year that autism parents have an increased risk of about 20% of being diagnosed with PTSD, specifically from raising a child with autism. Now, we’re not putting blame on that child at all whatsoever. But as parents, we need to recognize when trauma just keeps adding up, and then our nervous system can’t take it. This is when we start to be edgy.
This is when we start to have explosive reactions to a situation that didn’t warrant it. This is when, you know, looking at the phone, we might get When’s that next call coming? Parents of children with autism experience trauma and stress that parents of children without autism don’t have and sometimes don’t even understand. This is why I went and did eMDR therapy, and I want to share it with you so we can really talk about the trauma and how we unwind from that as our child starts getting healthier and healthier.
My EMDR Journey: Ten Sessions Documented Along the Way
What you’re about to see here is the unfiltered progression. What surfaced, what surprised me, the sessions that changed something, and also the ones that left me wondering whether this was working at all. By session ten, I understood something about healing that I could not have understood at session one.
Session One: Discovering How Much Fear Was Still in My Body
This was doctor session one, and I didn’t expect this. After the session, I felt so calm, like I had just spent a few days at the spa. It honestly surprised me because I’ve never done eMDR before, and I only knew from research that it’s supposed to be efficient. But it was different, and I actually slept incredibly well for the next two nights.
We didn’t have a lot of time for the full process because of intake and history and all that stuff, but we worked on something that had just happened the week before. Something that really scared me. And during the eMDR, I had this thought come up: I’m going to die. And what surprised me wasn’t the thought. It was how much I could feel it.
Like that fear was still in my body, even though in the moment I tried to push through it, and it made me realize something. Just because I tell myself not to think about something doesn’t mean I didn’t experience. And it doesn’t mean it’s not still sitting in my body somewhere. And as a parent, that really hit me because the stress we carry doesn’t just disappear.
Our kids can feel it. So going into this week, I’m focusing on noticing what I’m holding instead of just pushing it away. Let’s see what session two brings.
Session Two: Feeling Calm and Rebalancing Something in My Brain
This was session number two, and the first session I felt great. After this session, I felt great, but that feeling left it. I felt like a completely different person. Usually after something like a massage that that good feeling fades quickly.
But this time it really was like I’m becoming a different person. And what really stood out was that I’ve started to feel great. For no particular reason. I just felt calm and relaxed and great. And actually, I forgot how nice it feels to just feel good. This session was completely different because we actually spent 40 minutes doing the eye movements.
I started with one memory, and it was like pulling on a string. All of these other memories started coming up, things I hadn’t thought about in a long time. At one point I was really overwhelmed, but my therapist kept bringing me back to the feelings, to the feelings, and not the story. And eventually that memory settled. Then we did something new.
Once the intensity of that memory dropped really low, we switched to focusing on a positive memory, and that was just amazing. It honestly felt like I was rebalancing something in my brain. And here’s why this matters to me as a parent. I’m doing this for myself. Yes, but I’m also doing it so that my daughter has a less stressed mom because I already feel more relaxed, more calm, more present.
And that’s how we build an even stronger connection. Let’s see what session three brings.
Session Three: When the Memories Became Heavy and Overwhelming
This was eMDR session number three, and honestly, this one sucked. We started with a more recent autism related memory, and it opened up so many negative memories. It wasn’t like session two. This felt heavy and overwhelming. Like everything just came up at once. We spent about 40 minutes doing the eye movements, and I could not get my distress level below an eight.
It just stayed high. And what really surprised me was this: I started seeing how much my own childhood is impacting how I react to autism meltdowns. But we ran out of time, and I didn’t fully process anything. My therapist had me take everything that came up and put it in a container to come back to later. And honestly, I hated that.
If this had been my first session, I probably would not have come back. And afterwards I was still so irritable. I knew I couldn’t interact with my daughter or parents or really do anything. So I paused. I went on the internet, looked up what to do, and did about 15 minutes of grounding and that worked. I got back to neutral, and it made me realize something.
All of this stress is still in my body, and it can come up anytime it’s triggered. That’s why I’m doing this, because I don’t want to escalate quickly when my daughter is struggling, and she needs me. I want to be at a calm, relaxed baseline so that I can stay grounded and parent from that place and also live from that place.
Let’s see what session for brings.
Session Four: Changing the Approach and Finally Getting Restful Sleep
This was Imber session number four for me, and we had to change the plan. After last session, I knew ending at a score of eight just doesn’t work for me. That was horrible. I talked to my therapist and said that I can’t end like that again. So we adjusted how we’re doing eMDR.
We’re staying really focused on one event at a time, because what was happening before was that I’d start with one memory, and then so many other things would come up. And during this session, that still tried to happen, even though I was focusing. So my therapist did have to prompt me a few times to stay with just that one memory.
And this time it worked. Go! Teamwork. We got that memory all the way down to one, and then we had a few minutes to do something I’m really starting to love. We did eMDR on a positive memory, and that felt so refreshing. I’m not just processing negative intensity, but with eMDR, I’m also building something calm in me. And here’s what really surprised me.
As result of session four. I’ve now had three nights of uninterrupted seven hours of sleep. That hasn’t happened in over a year. My body just feels calmer without me trying to make it calmer. And I feel more open, more compassionate, more understanding, more loving. And as a parent, that matters. Because when I feel this way, I can show up calmer, more patient, more connected for my daughter, and that is what matters to me.
Let’s see what session five brings.
Session Five: Catching My Stress in Real Time
This was given during session five, and I’m starting to catch my stress in real time. One thing I’m becoming much more aware of is when my brain goes into hyperdrive. When my reaction to something is way bigger than the actual situation. And that happened this week. And instead of just pushing through it, that became the focus of my eMDR session.
This is now the second time I’ve used eMDR on a really recent event. And honestly, it’s remarkable how quickly eMDR works on fresh stress. Like, I can actually feel my nervous system calming down faster. And part of me keeps thinking, I really wish I had started eMDR ten years ago. What’s a me? This session is that we processed the event so quickly that we were done in about 30 minutes, but I did want to start something new because after session three, I realized how stressful it is for me to leave feeling emotionally unfinished, unprocessed.
And I was just happy with the progress that we had made and understanding what my nervous system can actually handle. I think it’s important. We spent the rest of the session building a list of positive and negative memories to work on, and I noticed something really interesting. I’m having trouble accessing the negative memories, which my brain just does not want to go there.
I really don’t want to think about painful things that I’ve been through, and I think that made me realize just how much energy I’ve spent trying to push difficult experiences away instead of processing them. But maybe that’s why I needed in the first place. Let’s see what section six brings next time.
Session Six: Understanding Why I Negate My Intuition
This was eMDR session number six, and I finally understood something about myself.
In this session I processed a really old memory, something that happened about 33 years ago. It was something I never wanted to think about again. But during eMDR, I realized something that completely changed how I see myself. I understood why I negate my intuition. I could suddenly see how many times in my life I ignored what I felt deep down.
And I think that pattern may have started with this memory. And that hit me really hard, because when things started not going well with my daughter’s development, I negated my intuition constantly. Even when part of me knew something wasn’t right. And for a long time, I was angry at myself for that. I kept thinking, why wasn’t I stronger?
Why didn’t I listen to myself sooner? But after this eMDR session, I felt something different. I felt compassion for myself. I finally understood my. And that understanding brought me relief. It released some of the guilt I have been carrying around for years. And honestly, that feels really healing.
Let’s see what session seven brings.
Session Seven: Processing Loneliness and Finding Compassion
This was the real session number seven, and the comp was almost unbelievable.
After the session, I felt this huge sense of peace for like three days straight. I slept eight hours, and it just felt epic. And later in the week, when I started waking up around 4 a.m., it was actually easier to fall back asleep. My whole body just felt calmer. But then on day four, something shifted. I started feeling really sad and really alone.
And what surprised me is the feeling didn’t seem new. It felt familiar, but I’m pretty sure I’ve been running away from this feeling my entire life. During this eMDR session, we processed several memories where I had to fight for things completely alone. And I realized something. I think I turned that into part of my identity, like who I was.
And it became a badge of honor. I told myself I was fine, always going against the norm and always figuring things out myself. But now I’m actually feeling how lonely that has been. And strangely, it’s making me much more compassionate towards my daughter. She actually told me she feels me being more relaxed, and hearing that was just amazing, because that’s why I’m doing this.
Not just to heal myself, but to create more peace and connection between us as a family. Let’s see what session eight brings.
Session Eight: Identifying the Beliefs Underneath the Negative Voice
This was session number eight, and we didn’t do any eMDR. Instead of processing a memory, I wanted to stop and talk. After seven sessions, I realized I wanted to understand the root experiences that are still shaping how I see myself and the world.
I’ve learned a lot about trauma. Trauma isn’t just something bad that happened. It’s an overwhelming experience that takes away your sense of safety. It can create helplessness and can continue affecting how you see reality long after the event is over. One thing I’ve struggled with for years is identifying my specific negative beliefs. If someone asked me what they were, I honestly wouldn’t know what to say.
What’s interesting is that I could always hear a negative voice pushing me, so I knew it was there. But that voice said things like do more, be better, keep working, don’t stop. That voice was loud, and it was mean. What was much harder to identify was the belief underneath it, because those messages didn’t feel negative. They actually felt productive.
They felt responsible. They felt like part of the reason why I’ve been so successful. It drives me. But during my daughter’s journey, I can now see what may have been underneath them all along. Thoughts like: I’m alone. I’m not enough. I can’t trust myself. Something is wrong with me. The strange thing is that I don’t consciously hear myself thinking those thoughts.
That’s not the negative voice. They’re so familiar that I just don’t even recognize them. They don’t feel like beliefs. They feel like reality. So instead of doing EMDR in this appointment, my therapist and I spent some time identifying more past experiences to work on in the future, and something unexpected happened. I began to see these experiences as a mental cage that really shaped how I saw the world and what I thought about myself, all without really understanding how it happened.
So this was beyond self-reflection. For the first time, I feel like I’m becoming the creator of my life instead of just reacting to it. Now, I’ve meditated for years, for decades. I’ve spent years trying to understand myself, but I still struggled to hear these negative beliefs clearly. Now they’re becoming visible, and as they become visible, I feel more creative, more intentional, and more hopeful and peaceful than I have in a very long time without effort.
It feels like I’m finally seeing patterns that have been influencing me for decades without me even realizing it. Well, let’s see what happens in session nine.
Session Nine: When 20 Years of My Life Suddenly Made Sense
This was EMDR session number nine, and within seconds, 20 years of my life just suddenly made sense. After spending the last session identifying deeper experiences to work on, we started processing some of those older memories.
And the very first set of eye movements was like anything I’ve ever experienced so far. I started with a memory from when I was about five years old, and then something strange happened as my eyes followed the movements. It was like I was watching a movie, and in just a few seconds, it felt like 20 years of my life went by.
I couldn’t see. Decision after decision after decision. And suddenly I understood so much more about why I made the choices I did in life, not intellectually. I could actually feel the understanding. And with that came this incredible sense of peace. It was honestly wild how quickly it all happened. And for a moment I almost felt like telling my therapist, okay, I’m done for the day.
We did a lot, and the biggest thing that changed wasn’t the memory. It was how I saw myself. That strong inner voice that’s always pushing do more, be better. Don’t stop for the first time. It got quiet not because it disappeared, but because I could finally see where that voice came from. And when I understood where it came from, I understood myself.
A few days later, I was out with friends, and I noticed something interesting. There were quite a few things I normally would have said, a few things I normally would have felt compelled to do, and I just let them go. Not because they didn’t care, but because I no longer felt the need to act on every thought. And it felt so freeing.
In that moment, I felt lighter, I felt happier, and I started realizing that maybe healing isn’t always about becoming someone new. Maybe sometimes it’s about finally being free to be who you are already.
What Happened During My Two-Week Break From EMDR?
What happened during my two-week break from eMDR? I was actually quite surprised by what happened. For the past nine sessions, I’ve been sharing my EMDR journey.
Then life happened, and I had to take a two-week break. I honestly wondered if things would go back to the way it used to be. What? I started to get more grouchy, stressed, and irritable. What’s going to happen in these two weeks? But something unexpected happened. It felt like my brain just kept reorganizing. I had two incredible dreams.
In the first, I was back at my old office at the pharma company where I used to work. I was packing up, opening filing cabinets and boxing things up, and driving away. Then I realized, oh no, I’ve forgotten a few things. The friend I was with looked at me and said, ” It’s been decades. Do you really need it?
And I said, no. And I woke up with this incredible feeling of peace. Then of unity. Later I had another dream. I was standing in a room, and it was covered with, like, strings and wires and old phone cords, and it was tangled across the walls and the ceiling. And somehow I just knew my brain was cleaning up the connections.
I actually woke up laughing. And so, like, my mind was doing exactly what it needed to do. So even though I didn’t have any EMDR sessions for two weeks, it felt like my brain was still integrating everything we’ve been working on. And that gave me a very nice feeling, because maybe healing doesn’t stop when the therapy session ends.
Maybe sometimes your brain just needs time to keep doing its work. Life doesn’t always have to be so hard. Let’s see what happens when I get back into therapy.
Session Ten: Can EMDR Help With a Lifelong Fear?
EMDR session number ten. Can eMDR help? A lifelong fear of mine? This was eMDR session ten, and I wanted to see if eMDR could help me overcome one of my biggest fears.
For the first time, I didn’t want to process a life event. I came in with a question for my therapist. Can eMDR help with a fear that’s been with me for decades? Two years ago, I started open water swimming. I’ve probably swum more than 41.5-mile swims in a lake. But here’s the crazy part. I’m terrified. I’m still terrified every time seaweed touches me anywhere.
My brain starts automatically going into panic mode. I’m in a lake. I know there are no sharks, but all of a sudden I start imagining that a shark is going to get me. It’s. It’s not. And once that fear kicks in. It’s hard to breathe, right? Which makes it almost impossible to swim freestyle. So what’s interesting is after 40 swims, exposure alone hasn’t changed that fear very much.
I thought it would, but it didn’t. So this session I decided to use eMDR. So we started with a memory of me getting scared at the beach as a little kid, and then one memory after another started surfacing, and suddenly I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in easily almost 40 years. My cousin tried to drown me when we were playing Marco Polo.
He thought it would be funny. I had actually completely forgotten or really, more suppressed, that experience. But the moment it came back, I thought, oh, maybe that has something to do with why I’m scared of something attacking me out of the blue. Because it wasn’t just that I was scared. It was that feeling of something unexpected coming out of nowhere and hurting me.
And that’s exactly what my brain still expects every time I’m swimming in open water. So I processed it, and now I have to go swimming. Let’s test it out and see how good or not eMDR works on the 40-year-old fear eMDR.
Testing the Results: Swimming in Open Water After EMDR
I tested it last week. I used eMDR on one of my biggest fears: swimming in open water.
A few days later, I decided to test it, see if it worked. I’ll be honest, I was nervous driving to the lake. Pardon me, was excited. The other part was thinking, what if it absolutely changed? Nothing. If you follow this series, you know I have a ridiculous fear of swimming in open water. Seaweed touches anywhere on me and my brain immediately decides the shark is about to eat me.
It’s not exactly my finest moment. I know it’s irrational, but after processing some old memories with eMDR related to this irrational fear, I was generally curious to see had anything had changed. So I got in the water, and almost immediately I noticed something different. The fear wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t like front and center anymore. The thoughts still popped into my head like, oh, there’s the sea!
But it didn’t take over. I didn’t get panicked. For the first time, I could notice those thoughts and actually keep swimming. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it was huge. I’ve done more than 41.5-mile swims in open water, and the exposure alone was going to fix this. It would have happened a long time ago.
This felt different. It wasn’t the lake that had changed. In fact, there was way more seaweed. It was that my nervous system was finally starting to believe I was safe. And honestly, that gave me so much hope. I was so happy. Not just for swimming, but for every part of my life where fear has been making the decisions for me.
Completing Ten EMDR Sessions: What I Learned About Healing
When I started this series, my goal was simple: complete ten eMDR sessions and honestly document what happened along the way. Well, I did it. We reached ten and was surprised. Most wasn’t just how much calmer I feel or how differently I respond to stress, or even how easy this was. It was realizing how many experiences I’ve carried with me for years without fully processing them, and without even really knowing that they’re there.
EMDR has helped me understand myself with more compassion. Definitely quiet some of the noise in my mind and feel more present in my life. And I think I can also be a better mom, which was my main goal for doing all of this. And because of that, I don’t see a reason to stop. I still have experiences that I want to process.
I still want to keep growing as a person. So while this chapter is complete, my eMDR journey is not. Thanks for coming along with me.
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