by Linda Zercoe
He also spent a lot of time talking about how threats and perceived threats influence our immune systems and thereby influence the health of the cells. Chronic stress creates a less than optimal condition in the environment of the cell when cortisol is released from the adrenals in the “fight or flight” response. This puts the body in survival rather than thriving mode. This response is automatic. The only thing we can change is our belief about the threat. These beliefs are usually recorded to our “hard drives” (our subconscious minds) before we are six years old. How do you change beliefs you don’t even know you have?
In early May of 2007 I telephoned Bill, a therapist and an expert in the use of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. I had learned that EMDR could help identify repressed traumatic memories and triggers that create the stress response throughout life. Put simply, the technique occupies your conscious mind to access memories—even ones that are preverbal. Then, through a series of steps, you can rewrite your subconscious mind. I scheduled an appointment. Bill was the seventeenth therapist that I was meeting on the path of recovery since 1994.
When I arrived for the first appointment, Bill opened the door, introduced himself, shook my hand and invited me in. His office was hot and stuffy.
“Is it all right if I video record our sessions?”
He said the tapes would be for me to review after our sessions. I said sure, thinking I would probably never watch them. Then he asked me why I came to see him.
“I am specifically interested in the EMDR, the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.”
I told him about reading the Lipton book. He said he hadn’t heard of it.
“I want to get to the bottom of why I keep getting sick.”
He responded with a skeptical eyebrow and in between asking questions soon began to furiously take notes in a red spiral notebook.
For the next hour, I downloaded the highlights of my life thus far. It was like a tsunami. I think the guy took a solid six to eight pages of notes while occasionally wiping his brow with a pressed white handkerchief. He said something about there being “a lot of low-hanging fruit.”
He gave me a homework assignment to journal events that bothered me or got me upset, “triggers,” and how I felt about these things. At the end of the hour his telephone rang, he put the caller on hold, and we set up our next meeting. I felt exhausted.
In the next couple of meetings, I learned that EMDR would bypass a great deal of talk therapy and that it could “cure” things that always bothered me. If it was successful, I would cease to notice my triggers. It sounded great to me.
Bill asked me questions about my children, my husband, my illnesses and surgeries. He wanted to know more about my family, my parents, my sisters and brother. In the third session, he asked me for the first time if I was sure that I wasn’t molested by my father when I was growing up. I was taken aback by that.
“My father,” I mused “wouldn’t have harmed a fly.” He asked me to make a list of the “ten worst things that ever happened.” Whoa, that would be a challenge. How could I limit the list to ten? It seemed impossible. We would discuss this at the next visit.
During the week, after much consideration, I began my list. It came to the point that I had to think in terms of yes, this was bad … but not as bad as…. Eventually, I came up with my “worst things” list. And honestly, even though each one of these was bad, I had survived, hadn’t I?
Linda’s 10 Worst Things:
Dave’s death
Waking up during surgery
Waking up in the recovery room without medication for pain after the Whipple and no one listening
The Whipple
Losing both my breasts
Diagnosis of cancer each and every time
Wanting to die
Almost dying
Not feeling loved
Not being heard
At our next appointment, Bill looked over the list, did some professional prefrontal cortex machinations and asked, “So what is your earliest memory?”
I thought to myself, What are you talking about? Look at the list! Why did I bother to even make the list? Perplexed, I closed my eyes and thought back—Linda in the playpen, Mom on the phone, silver and turquoise kitchen, Mom ironing, talking to someone else, she’s laughing on the phone. Next memory—Linda in the playpen, Mom on the phone. In fact, I felt like I was always in the playpen, trapped, jailed.
I remembered something! I told Bill that when my children didn’t walk until they were 15 months old, my mother had told me, “You were toilet trained, walking, and singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at your first birthday.”
“Wow!” Bill said, “that means that by one year you were already trying hard to win your mother’s love and approval.” That sent me reeling. I felt so much rage toward my mother.
“How does that make you feel?”
“Angry,” I replied.
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate that?”
“Eight to ten.”
Using a metallic wand that looked like an old TV antenna with a ball at the end, he instructed me to follow the ball with my eyes as it moved back and forth. As he distracted my conscious mind, he asked me a series of questions. Slowly guiding me through these earliest memories with questions, he instructed me to focus on my feelings. We paused after each set to check in with what I was thinking and feeling and assign a number on the feeling scale. The more I dug, the more anger I felt.
The next week, Bill had me beating the sofa with a tennis racket, then stepping on a rope attached to a bar trying to dislodge the bar from the rope until I almost broke a blood vessel in my eye. I felt like a jerk, but it felt good. I wanted to kill her (my mother), and that feeling wasn’t coming off the top of the rating scale. It was hovering at around a nine. My hate was so intense that sometimes we would have to digress onto something else. He told me that I probably had these feelings when I was little but that I had to suppress them to survive. He postulated that maybe I felt as a child that I was a monster and compensated by having to be a superhero just to live.
“Mmm,” I said. I’d have to give that some thought.
After a few months of seeing Bill, I had to switch my appointment time. My slot was following a woman who came out of her therapy appointment looking like she had been reliving a weeklong gang rape and Bill was glazed over for the first quarter of our session.
I now had the first appointment of the day. Soon, I began noticing that Bill was developing a trend of showing up five to ten minutes late for our appointments. Interestingly, while I was waiting I would get nervous and fidgety, obsessing about how he wasn’t going to show up. I had to tell myself that it wasn’t personal; it didn’t mean See, you really don’t matter, the way I automatically thought. Starting to feel like I was “owning” my power, I brought up his lateness, telling him in a nice way that I thought it was disrespectful and unprofessional. He apologized and showed up on time for the next appointment.
He asked me where my father was and what he did during my childhood.
“Either he was working two jobs, starting a business, losing a business, or just plain checked out. He wasn’t around.”
“How does that make you feel?” And for the first time, I realized how angry I was at him too. Why didn’t he protect us from her? Why wasn’t he around more if he knew how she was? Didn’t he care? Maybe he was trying to stay away from her. What a coward, I thought. Maybe he didn’t know everything. In my thoughts I was defending him, excusing him, but also wondering why he wasn’t the parent. My feelings vacillated between compassion and anger. I thought it was all crazy.
Bill asked me if I had any other medical history other than what I had already described.
“Yes, when I was four years old I had surgery to remove two moles, one on my shoulder and one on my back.”
Up to this point, this was just some benign statement I had transcrib
ed onto innumerable patient history forms.
“Let’s talk about what happened.”
He handed me a double buzzer apparatus that alternated a zzzzz in each fist, again with the purpose of distracting the conscious mind, allowing better access to the subconscious and repressed memories.
“On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel right now?”
Whoa, I thought, I was a joke. When the stitches were about to be removed my mother did nothing to comfort me. She not only didn’t care, but she was also making fun of me. I was less than a nothing. I hated her. Oh! How I hated her. Why did I have to have this surgery—to remove the remote chance of getting cancer someday? For God’s sake, I was 4 years old. What was she thinking?
As usual at the end of the hour, the telephone rang.
“Hold on, please.”
I gave him my check, agreed to meet the same time next week, and stumbled out of there like I’d been binge drinking. I made it to my car and just sat there, so sad, tears streaming down my face along with my makeup.
Eventually, I made it home. And then it hit me. I thought, wasn’t it ironic that the mole removal was ostensibly done to prevent me from getting cancer, but each time I really did get cancer the aftermath was always the same—not getting the love I needed, not feeling special, feeling pathetic, really. On top of that, each time the likelihood of surviving the disease was decreasing but the outcome was exactly the same. This was the pattern. Whoa! This getting sick has got to stop now! I thought.
It scared me a bit to think of the possibility that I had created all of this on some level, a subconscious level, looking to resolve some old shit. I felt like I had struck gold. At least now I might be able to understand how to fix the pattern. If I could fix the pattern, getting the love I needed from myself, feeling special just because I am, then—abracadabra—I’d stop getting tumors! My god, I was mighty and powerful in a very self-destructive way.
At the next visit with Bill, who was late again, I shared this revelation. He seemed dismissive of my theory. He wanted to get back to the memory of the car ride to the doctor and being ignored.
This time he wanted me to imagine being the mother to myself. I couldn’t do it. He then asked me to imagine that it was one of my children. Would I have been able to comfort my child?
“Of, course,” I said.
Then, using EMDR, we went back to the car, where I had Uncle Joey drive and I sat in the back with my child, holding her the whole way, offering words of comfort. I didn’t know why I couldn’t do this for “little Linda.” I was blocked.
For the next several weeks, we revisited the appointment with the doctor who removed the stitches. I don’t know if it was stubbornness on my part, but I just could not get off eight to ten on the scale of rage with my mother. Bill postulated that I turned this rage inward and somehow embodied that I was bad. He referred to my feelings as a “toxic cesspool.”
Soon I began to have physical manifestations with the memory of rage at my mother during the EMDR—a sudden intense headache, eyeball pain, neck pain, loss of power directly affecting my solar plexus with a sensation of a ball in the gut. In my mind’s eye, my rage focused my power—I imagined sending out a ball of death to my mother but it was never released. As instructed, I went through the exercise of biting her, chewing her up, and spitting her out. Then I felt sad, especially that I had disappointed my father. Bill told me I had internalized a pattern of being angry rather than hurt. I learned that rage didn’t help. Killing my mother didn’t make me feel better. But I sure did have passion.
In between visits with Bill, I decided to give my mother a call and ask her in an as matter-of-fact a way as possible to tell me what she remembered about this surgery. As I expected, she immediately got defensive. She said she did it “because the doctor said I should have it done.”
“Why did you decide to do this when I was 4 years old?”
“I think it was because we were living with Grandma but were about to move. I thought this would be a good time, since Grandma could watch your sisters.”
She was 26 at the time and the mother of 4-, 3-and 1-year-olds. She wasn’t thinking about any untoward outcomes. It was interesting to observe that for the rest of my childhood, she didn’t bring me or my siblings to the doctor for anything unless it was close to a life-threatening emergency—hence the rest of the trauma and corresponding anger. To this day she goes to the doctor only kicking and screaming, to the detriment of her own health.
At the next session with Bill, I told him about barricading the bedroom door as child.
“Are you sure you weren’t sexually molested?”
“I locked the door because you never knew when Mom would burst in yelling, screaming, hitting or pulling your hair.”
He told me my mother was mentally ill. From all that I had told him thus far, my childhood was far from normal. He thought that I was emotionally and physically abused. He told me my diagnosis was complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
One day I noticed a large budding amaryllis bulb in Bill’s office, replacing a dead sprig of something. That was the day he fell asleep while I was talking. I felt offended, hurt, betrayed. He didn’t seem too upset and was very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. I rationalized that the room was hot, as usual. I thought maybe he was sick, on some medication, didn’t sleep well the night before. I called him during the week. I thought he owed me an apology and some explanation for his lapse. Reluctantly, he finally apologized, but offered no explanation. It didn’t help me feel any better.
I overlooked all of this behavior though. I supposed my reaction was another by-product of my childhood. We continued working together, doing EMDR for other incidents of trauma, learning how much junk I was holding inside. We were still trying to work through the stitch removal incident, slowly making progress on mothering my inner child, when at the end of our session he told me to visualize putting my feelings toward my mother in a box on the shelf. Instead, I visualized throwing her into a putrid New York City dumpster and then frantically winding a cable around it multiple times. Then, heroically maneuvering the dumpster using a crane, I hurled it into the Hudson River. While this was going on, I was giggling, ecstatic in fact—never in my life had I had such an extreme feeling of joy. It was a bit frightening. I felt a little crazy. I felt such relief. I felt free for the first time. Maybe I finally tipped over.
We never really had an opportunity to find out what that was all about since Bill fell asleep again at the next meeting. I was stunned.
“We are done here.”
He wanted to continue our sessions, but I didn’t think I could trust him anymore. I asked myself, How is this therapeutic?
Someday I will know whether I am the one who creates the pattern by choosing to see only proof that nobody really cares. But I learned from seeing Bill that I care about me. Maybe I don’t need to self-destruct anymore. I’m learning to hurl the dumpster again and again until it’s gone forever. I want to feel the glee, giggling and free.
I definitely hurled the videos of our sessions in the dumpster.
Chapter 29
Searching for the Om
in -omas
May 2007–October 2008
May 16, 2007
I had an appointment with the head of genetic counseling at UCSF. It seemed to me she was curious about how I am dealing with all of this. The bottom line is I am still here. However, I feel like a POW, on a constant state of alert, overly vigilant, looking to make sense of insanity, trying to hold on to hope.
She seems to think I have a genetic syndrome (of course). She wants to do BRCA analysis rearrangement testing (BART, for short), an updated and expanded test for BRCA 1 and 2, for $995. My thoughts are that they should pay for this test for their possible research article if the results are positive. I would rather spend my money on a trip.
Having a genetic syndrome creates a feeling of doom for me. It doesn’t make sense. Why haven’t I had more tumors if I have an inherited m
utation in my DNA? Nothing seems to have changed much since my last visit in 2001.
Nixon launched the “war on cancer” when I was a child. This country can rally around terrorist bombings. What about the terrorism of cancer, the internal bombs, the WMD of the disease that affects millions of people? So many people are living with suicide bombers lurking around every corner. As this population of baby boomers ages, will anyone correlate this disease to an avian flu pandemic or anything else? We can spend billions of dollars to fund killing one another. Why isn’t there more funding when the war is inside the bodies of so many of us?
I get so enraged, I need to scream. When is this to be considered an epidemic, possibly a pandemic? It won’t be, due to apathy, indifference—too painful to think about, we all die from something. Someday the light will go on—it will be simple. No more mutilation, poison, frying. DO IT NOW! In 20 years it will be too late for the majority of this population.
June 7
The genetic counselor called. She said their genetic group met and now they think I might have a p53 germline mutation. She would like me to reconsider the BART. Come on. I don’t believe any of it.
I turned 50 in July. I was excited to still be alive and grateful for an incredible life. There were many birthday celebrations. Doug and I were planning a trip to Japan as my gift in November. I was finally getting over the last cancer diagnosis.
July 28
Wouldn’t it be funny after 50 years of living to finally begin to learn to live, to no longer be an extreme tide of reactions, rising up to a tsunami or being flat and splattered. Oh, to be an oak tree, strong, rooted, grounded to the earth, rustling with the winds but not toppled. I’d lose my leaves in the fall and rest in the winter, leaf out in the spring, be energized in the summer. I’d be a place of rest and refuge for the birds, home to the squirrels, nourishment for the planet, filtering the air, providing shade, warmth and beauty. My soul would be at peace knowing who I am.