The Memory She Didn’t Think Mattered
Client details are composite and de-identified to protect privacy.
She came in for anxiety.
That’s what she told me in our first session. The racing thoughts at 2am, the tight chest before meetings, the way she rehearsed conversations in her head for days before they happened, and then replayed them for days after. She wanted tools. She wanted to feel calm. She wanted someone to give her a worksheet and a breathing exercise and send her on her way.
She did not think she had “real trauma,” and she was almost apologetic about taking up space in a therapist’s office. She actually said, in those first 45 minutes, “I know other people have been through so much worse. I feel silly even being here.”
I want to talk about her today, because I think there are a lot of women reading this who feel exactly the same way.
Let me say this clearly. Just because you weren’t physically abused or neglected does not mean your childhood didn’t change the way you think. And sometimes the way you think is not actually correct.
You might have been taught, completely unbeknownst to your parents who gave raising you their absolute best shot, mindsets that are not helping you feel at peace and whole. That you will never truly measure up. That you are stupid. That you are bad. That your feelings are too much. That love has to be earned, and re-earned, and earned again tomorrow.
A child’s mind is so flexible, so easily influenced. And when we hear and experience certain little-t traumas growing up, they don’t just stay in the past. They translate into a whole life of believing a lie.
What was actually going on underneath
When we started mapping out her life, on paper it looked beautiful. Two parents still married. Stable home. Church on Sundays. Family dinners. No yelling, no hitting, no nights where anyone went to bed afraid.
And yet.
She told me she had been a nervous kid. She remembered chewing the inside of her cheek raw in elementary school. She remembered her stomach hurting before piano recitals, before tests, before she had to read out loud in class. By high school she was a straight-A student who cried in her car before walking into school. By college she was the friend everyone called for advice, the one who never seemed to fall apart, while she was quietly throwing up before exams and counting calories until her cycle stopped.
Now in her early thirties, married, working a job she was good at, she still felt like she was holding her breath. All the time. Just waiting for someone to find out she was a fraud. Waiting for her husband to realize she wasn’t worth it. Waiting for her boss to pull her aside and say, “We made a mistake hiring you.”
This is what trauma looks like in a lot of women I work with. It does not always look like a story you would tell a stranger and watch their face fall. Sometimes it looks like a high-functioning, well-loved, faithful woman who simply cannot believe that she is okay.
The memory that came up
We started the work. We did a thorough history. We built resources, we built safety, we did the careful preparation that EMDR requires before we ever touch a target memory. And when it was time to identify what we were going to process first, I asked her to think about the belief that felt the loudest in her body. The thing she just knew about herself, even if her brain could argue with it.
She said, “I am not enough.”
I asked her when she first remembered feeling that way. She closed her eyes. She got quiet. And then she laughed a little, kind of embarrassed, and said, “Okay this is going to sound so dumb.”
It was a moment from second grade.
She had taken a math test and gotten a B+. She was proud of it. She remembered running home, backpack bouncing, and pulling it out of her folder at the kitchen table to show her mom. Her mom was unloading groceries. Her mom looked at the paper for maybe two seconds and said something like, “That’s nice honey, you’ll do better next time.”
That was it. That was the whole memory.
Her mom was not being cruel. Her mom was tired and distracted and probably already thinking about dinner. Her mom loves her deeply, then and now. If you asked her mom about that afternoon, she would not remember it at all.
But her little 7-year-old nervous system filed that moment away with a label. And the label said, “Even when you do well, it isn’t enough. You will always need to do better. The good thing you brought home does not deserve celebration, only correction.”
She had told herself for twenty-something years that this memory did not matter, that her mom did not mean anything by it, that she was being dramatic for even remembering it. She had minimized it so completely that it took us several sessions for it to even surface.
But her body remembered. Her nervous system had carried that little label everywhere. Every performance review. Every group project. Every time her husband did not immediately compliment dinner. Every Sunday she walked out of church wondering if she had prayed hard enough, served enough, been a good enough wife and friend and daughter and Christian. That same little voice, the one that started in second grade, would whisper the same old lie.
I am not enough.
What EMDR actually did
Here is what people misunderstand about EMDR. We were not trying to make her hate her mom. We were not trying to dig up dirt or assign blame or rewrite her childhood. Her mom is a wonderful woman. That was never the point.
The point was that her brain had stored that moment in a way that was still firing. Still active. Still shaping her thirty-something-year-old life. EMDR helps the brain take a memory like that out of the alarm system and file it where it actually belongs, which is the past.
We targeted that second-grade kitchen scene. We did the bilateral stimulation. We let her brain do what brains naturally do when they are given the right conditions, which is heal.
Things came up. Other moments connected to it. A junior high dance recital. A college boyfriend who used to grade her outfits. A boss in her first job who was never satisfied. Her brain started linking the memories like a chain, and one by one, the charge came down.
The shift did not happen all at once. EMDR is not magic and healing is not linear. There were sessions where she felt worse before she felt better. There were moments she wondered if it was even doing anything.
And then one day, a few months in, she came in and told me her husband had said something offhand about the laundry, something that would have wrecked her three months earlier, and she had just shrugged. She said, “I noticed I didn’t spiral. I just knew he wasn’t attacking me. I just knew I was okay.”
That is what reprocessing does. The memory is still there. She still remembers second grade. But the lie that was attached to it does not run her life anymore.
What we install instead
This is the part I love most about this work. EMDR is not just about getting rid of the bad. We are also actively installing what is true.
If that old memory has been telling you “I am stupid,” we work on it together until your whole body believes “I am capable.”
If it has been telling you “I am too much,” we heal it until you know in your bones, “I am exactly enough.”
If it has been telling you “Love is conditional,” we reprocess it until you can rest in the truth that you are deeply, fully loved, no performance required.
For my client, the belief we installed was simple. “I am enough as I am.” Five words. Five words she had not been able to say without crying for most of her adult life. Five words that, by the end of our work together, she could say with her shoulders down and her breath even and a little bit of a smile, because she finally believed it.
Where faith meets this work
I think this is one of the places where therapy and faith meet so beautifully.
For years, my client had prayed for peace. She had memorized verses about being fearfully and wonderfully made. She knew, in her spirit, that God did not love her based on her performance. She could have taught a Bible study on grace.
But her nervous system had not gotten the memo.
Her brain was still running on a script written when she was 7 years old, and no amount of repeating the truth out loud was enough to overwrite it. That was not a faith problem. That was a brain problem. And God, in His kindness, made our brains capable of healing when we give them the right tools.
I do not believe EMDR replaces faith. I believe it is one of the gifts that helps faith finally land in the body. I have watched women walk out of sessions saying things like, “I have always known God loves me, but today I think I finally felt it.” That is not a small thing. That is holy.
God cares about every part of your story, even the parts you have minimized. He is not asking you to white-knuckle your way past the lies you absorbed as a little girl. He sees the second-grade version of you holding that math test, and He is not in a hurry to move past her either.
If this is you
If you have been telling yourself your story does not count because nothing “really bad” happened, I want you to hear me. Your story counts. The way you have been thinking about yourself for the last twenty or thirty years counts. The fact that you are tired of carrying something invisible counts.
The memory she did not think mattered, mattered. And healing it changed her life.
If you have been carrying a lie for a long time, and you are ready to put it down, I would love to walk with you through that.
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