Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

This is more of a post for me than you, dear reader, but you can read along.

Today, I had a teletherapy session and we did some EMDR targeting a difficult closing to my work with the Catholic Church in the 1990’s. It was difficult because they were just awful and terrible and immoral to me during a serious health crisis. But who is surprised by that?

We did a few rounds of EMDR and my therapist said something magical – “You have clinically resolved this incident.”

Wow. It was so good to feel accomplished and to have that validated by my therapist. It is just one small piece of my work, but it is something I did during a pandemic over the computer.

I have been working with EMDR for several years. Pandemic quarantine created a barrier until my therapist found a successful way to implement it over tele-therapy. We started a few times, but kept hitting walls due to real life circumstances and the sheer awfulness of all of the stuff to resolve. In those incidents, I made progress but it ain’t over yet.

So this specific incident is not forgotten or forgiven or magically wiped from my memories. I simply no longer feel the awfulness so intently. It happened, it sucked, it is over. I might feel sad when I think about it, but I don’t feel devastated. I can see nuance because the memory is no longer overwhelming me.

I also learned that our health insurance company has extended the waiver of co-pays for teletherapy through June 30, 2021. That’s great news. I really like teletherapy. I have only cancelled one session in a year. I even had a therapy session in the driveway of my mother-in-law using my phone while she visited with Laura. I sit on my bed, usually with some cats who make an occasional on-screen appearance, and I can control the lighting, my position, the sounds around me. And when I’m done, I can simply lie down if I’m exhausted or I can slide the computer under the bed and get up to do stuff. No driving home, no need to socially engage people on my way out of the door. No angst about running errands v just going home.

So I feel pretty accomplished today.