Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday I went to see Ruth again. She had asked me to think about an image that would capture these subteranean ‘whooshes’ of tangled up feelings and biochemical processes that remind me of the crash. Two images came to mind as I drove to her office: gnomes (kabouters in Dutch) and trolls. The gnomes are lovely creatures that populated the stories of my childhood (and even young adulthood with Rien Poortvliet’s magificent book about them). They are harmless and do good things. Trolls I only know from Scandinavian stories. I don’t think they live in Holland; maybe too much sun. I think that I choose those two sets of mythical creatures because they belong in the subterranean world of the unconscious. The gnomes were responsible for all the good things that happened as a result of the crash; the trolls were still messing around with sharp things like the glass and metal shards that flashed through my mind from time to time. They represented the bad consequences of the crash. They were gnawing at the roots of my confidence.

Ruth walked me once again through the protocol that EMDR requires: a clear articulation of the negative self cognition associated with the images that is generalized and untrue and then the positive self congnition; each are rated for their strength on a scale from one to ten. After that she gave me the left and right hand clickers (buzzers) and set the right intensity and speed, and off I went. This is like a discovery journey into the subterranean layers of the mind. I wanted to see those creatures in their own surrounding.

What I found, after some settling in, was the dark image of water surrounded by trees. While I am in this netherworld, Ruth intently watches my face and body for clues about my journey inside. When she sees something she stops the buzzer and I tell her what I saw. Water and trees were prominently present during the crash. “Go there,” she commands and turns the buzzer back on. This time I saw a landscape of young bright green trees but they were tilted at a 90 degree angle to the left. Of course, that is how I came back to my senses, lying on my left side, as the plane had landed on its left wing.

Ruth asks me to pay attention to my body while I am following the frantic imagery inside my mind. I notice the tight left knee and leg, as if I am bracing myself. The muscles in my right side are also tightening and suddenly my neck feels painful, as if a heavy load is dropped onto my shoulders.

Later in the hour my visual imagery takes me up into an attic. I am let in through a mirror that opens like a door. Someone holds the door open for me. It is a woman but I can’t see her face. The attic is a wonderful place of discovery and I enter with excitement and a sense of anticipation of the treasures I will find there. It is dimly lit. There are cobwebs and piles of dust everywhere. I see the outlines of old toys, pieces of furniture, trunks, an old leather elephant that must have been a stool once. And then some little creature that looks much like Tinkerbell zaps through the air and disappears. I try to find her again but my eyes are drawn to a trunk that is open with sewage seeping out of it. Another, trunk, next to it, has scorpions crawling over the edge. The sense of excitement and loveliness makes way for for another set of feelings. The attic is dark and dreadful now.

Ruth notices my frown. We talk about what I saw. This is about flying: both the excitement and the dread. The excitement is well represented by the magical trip Axel and I took with Alison on July 3 to the Cape and the islands. It was like going into the attic with all this anticipation and then discovering so many treasures. The trunks spilling over with sewage and scorpions represent the dread of a failed landing. I am holding both of these side by side in my head. It is probably no coincidence that my return to flying has brought these images back.

More images follow, now tilted to the right. It’s true that before landing on its left side, the plane tilted to the right and then lost its right wing in the trees, which turned it left. I see swallows flitting by. My brain kicks into action and is busily interpreting what the mind’s eye is seeing: in my dictionnary swallows are about bad weather coming. But Ruth says it could be much simpler than that; swallow is also a verb; and when I later see the image of an artichoke, she repeats the word with the emphasis on the last syllable; swallowing and choking. My body remembers something and the mind is holding the clues.

I feel a tremendous urge to yawn. It feels impolite to do that in company but Ruth enourages me to go with the flow. “Yawning,” she explains, “is about release.” I yawn, and yawn, and yawn. This is not about being tired.

The rest of the day was overshadowed by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and listening for hours to the BBC’s coverage of this momentous event. This is the work of big trolls that have come up from their subterranean hide-out. There is a theme today, both in the world and in my mind of good versus evil, kabouters versus trolls, God versus Satan.

I listen to the stories because they are about a strong woman, which is a big theme in my life. I hear the same stories over and over again but it never occurs to me to turn the radio off. I must have listened for 6 hours non stop. And while I am listening I am doing stuff that is rather mundane and domestic: baking and sewing, I also think like a mother. I wonder whether this event will set Bhutto’s children on their life’s path as it did for their mother.