I first checked in with Dr Katie Heath-Tilford after a lifetime of trying to cope with what life had served me. Terrible parents, bullying at school, sexual abuse, drug abuse, and a failed marriage all lead me to her.

I’d tried multiple types of therapy, but I’d found as much as these methods helped me to learn and discover ways to ‘cope’ and ‘make do’ with life…. nothing could turn off the pain, the dead parts of me, and the inability to find happiness, joy, or look forward to the rest of my life.

 I’d ended up having a mental shutdown in 2018 (I don’t like the term breakdown, I wasn’t broken) and I’d read about EMDR therapy, and its successes for severe trauma conditions, so I rolled the dice again in search of something better for myself and the ones I loved.

The sexual abuse I’d suffered at one point was borderline torturous, and I admittedly flitted around facing this part of my therapy, because I feared what I’d have to drag to the surface, discuss and face.

EDMR therapy for me just made sense and really worked. It was something that I could relate to, and internally connect to where I felt my traumas sit within me, I could use it to access the feelings and hurt that my brain had hidden away from me as a younger person to protect me and help me survive, and deal with them in the present as a mature adult, with the help and guidance of Katie. 

However, the path that my therapy took, was one I’d never had guessed it would take.

We initially started working on issues other than the sexual abuse, mainly for me to get used to and understanding of how EDMR works, and because I’d had more regular talking therapy on the subject before, but also as I said, through the fear of what I would have to deal with.

When I was ready and comfortable to face it, we did… thoroughly.

I thought this would be the answer, the final step along the path of my therapy, that would give me back my natural happiness and joy that I’d been looking for and working on. 

Although the EMDR absolutely worked, something still wasn’t right. 

This is when Katie very deftly and subtly steered me back to how I was treated by my parents. My mentally and emotionally manipulative and abusive parents, my physically abusive parents, my parents who, like every child should expect and receive, did not keep me safe, and did not safeguard my feelings, did not hear me, validate me, did not see me, listen to me, didn’t hold me in my sadness, did not celebrate in my successes, who didn’t help me in the night when I was scared, who didn’t engage in a relationship, advise me, who were just not there.

I have purposely started that list from what seems to be the worse, through to what you may think are the lesser of parental sins. The thing is, they ALL count, they affect severe long term damage to a young mind, they prevent a sane or calm inner monologue to form, they take away the ability to cope, to self soothe, and it has to be noted the lesser sins affected me as much as the more serious ones. 

As a kid, you learn how to act and talk and think from your parents’ treatment of you, and their words and actions around you. As they would from theirs, and so on and so on, therefore making on a passing on a generational poor modelling and traumas from parent to child in an ongoing cycle. 

Katie helped me break, understand and heal from this recycling of traumas.

So for me, it turned out, that it wasn’t mainly the sexual abuse that had left me feeling so void and flat and joyless… in fact I could compartmentalise that more easily as it wasn’t my parents that did it to me, what the people that were supposed to love and care for me more than any others did to me, in fact, was far worse and had inflicted far more damage than I’d realised.

Katie I know realise had gently led me down this path, cared for me and worked with me to understand and achieve essential healing insights and realisations, used the EDMR therapy to help the adult self heal the younger self, and all the while making it feel like I was being treated like a friend, and not a therapist.

The real kicker was, that it wasn’t until after my therapy had finished that I realised I’d been treated with “Attachment-Informed EMDR” and that those attachment issues  were due to such horrendously mentally damaging treatment that I’d received at the hands and deeds of my parents.

To sum up, I feel honestly and sincerely healed, I feel daily joy, real happiness and a sense of wonder and excitement about my future. My relationship with myself, my loved ones and friends is not plagued by constant internal triggering, all of the relationships are vastly improved. 

Peacefulness and calmness are now mine…which I thought were lost forever.