Handing Shame to God
“Okay,” She said, her blue eyes offsetting her light hair, “What I want to do is try some distancing. I want to take you back there in that room, where you are . . .” she paused delicately, “In that situation. And remember last time where you flew above and fast-forwarded away, farther and farther?”
“Yep.”
“I want you to do that. Float away. And this time, tell me how you feel.”
She flipped the EMDR machine on and I gripped the black plastic in my right hand and the gray plastic in my left hand. The blue dots flashed from the middle, to the left, and all the way to the right again and I let my eyes focus in on them. I sat very still and just waited.
“What are you seeing?”
I closed my eyes and chuckled. This was going to probably make her laugh, because we’d just talked about how I will focus on general themes and concepts because I’m scared of feeling primitive emotions.
I’m scared it will make me go crazy. She promised me it won’t, but I’m scared anyway, but that’s not it this time. I’m not afraid.
“Well, leave it to me to get all metaphysical, but here’s the thing. I feel like I’m with Archangel Michael, you know, like in my novel. And we’re going toward God, and I gotta go there, and he’s going to . . . I’m going to have to tell Him everything. He’s going to see all my sins and my . . . “ I inhaled and tried to keep talking. “He’s going to be ashamed of me.”
She didn’t say anything and so I kept watching the blue light skipping from right to left and back again. And then I heard Him, I saw Him, I felt Him. “But that’s the thing. He’s not ashamed of me. He just said to me that ‘He’s got this.’ He told me to hand it all over to him. He told me to hand Him my pain and my shame and . . .” I grinned. A lightness infused me as I kept talking. “He’s seen it already. He’s seen everything. And He wants to take it from me.”
I was silent then. I sat and felt Him taking my shame away and once He did, I felt lightness in my being.
“Now what are you feeling?”
I smiled. “Peace. Peace. I feel peaceful. He’s got this, so I don’t need to carry it anymore.”
“That’s amazing.”
I nodded. “Mmm.”
She waited for the blue lights to stop in the middle, and she clicked the black machine off. “No really, that was amazing. Did you notice that once you left that room, you went, you floated, towards God?”
I grinned. “Yep. Pretty awesome, eh?”
Her eyes lit up. “I just gotta tell you what I was thinking—what my thought process was. When I took you away, and you were floating and said you felt ashamed, I thought, ‘Oh shit, that’s not where I wanted to take you with this, and I was about to intervene, to bring us back.’ You just never know where someone is going to go with this EMDR. But anyway, that’s the beauty of it. You went full circle. You then turned it around, and . . . it’s amazing the way the EMDR worked with your synapses.”
I smiled again at her. “Yep. He took it all away. Maybe it sounded weird—“
—“No! It’s perfect.”
“That’s where I ended up.”
She looked at me and I could tell she was thinking about therapeutic methods and EMDR and synapses and all things clinical. I genuflected mentally in the direction of those thoughts, her thoughts, and then smiled. There were other things on my mind.
“So how are you feeling now?”
“Bemused. He’s got this. I’m at peace now.”
She looked at the clock and back at me. “That’s a good place to stop.”
I nodded.
“Unless you want to keep going? I just don’t like being wedded to the clock. If that’s all for today—“
I glanced at the clock. It was a little bit past the 90-minute mark and really, I had nothing else I needed to say. “Yep. It’s a good place to stop.”
She sorted through her papers, scribbled the code down on the bill, and then handed the rectangular white paper to me. “We’re good next week?”
I stood up and took the paper from her. “Yep.”
“And you’ll take good care of yourself.” She stated it more than she asked me.
“I will. Thank you.”
