‘Take him through to the kitchen,’ she suggested. ‘The bowl is in the cupboard under the sink if you want to give him some water.’
Several of her clients had emotional support dogs.
‘Come on then, buddy. Ooh, what has Dad got here?’ A grubby plastic object appeared from the bag at his feet. ‘It’s Piggy! It’s Piggy, Milo!’
Milo trotted off happily with his ‘dad’， who told him he wouldn’t be long and that Milo had to be a good boy and not chew anything but Piggy.
And then he was back, and there was no putting it off any longer.
Lulu took a deep breath. ‘Let yourself think about that day. The sights and smells, the sounds, what you’re doing, what’s around you. Let the memories come. Narrate what you’re experiencing, if you can. And as you’re doing that, I’m going to slowly move my finger in front of your right eye. I want you to focus on my finger as you’re remembering. Just go with the flow, and let’s see where it takes us.’
It took them, as she had known it would, to a dark place.
A place Lulu really, really didn’t want to go to. But she did. She went there with him, she grounded him in the present, and, as he relived the horror of that day, as his face contorted unrecognisably and the anger threatened to rise up and overwhelm him, Lulu calmly told him to notice this or that image, to notice the anger; to let it in, to make space for it, to give it its due. And all the while, she slowly moved her finger in front of his eye and concentrated on making the movement smooth, on not letting her hand shake, and watched him watching it, staying in the present with her while he processed and filed away the terrible thing that had happened all those years ago.
EMDR, it was called – eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. It involved moving your finger in front of the client’s eye like a cartoon hypnotist, which seemed silly, but it worked. It was all about examining the traumatic memories from a place of safety in the present and filing them in the past where they belonged, in the vault of memory, so they weren’t constantly accessible on a replay loop in the person’s head. So they weren’t constantly interfering with day-to-day life, reactivating negative emotions. It was about turning a constantly relived experience into something that had been terrible, yes, so terrible, but was over and done.
He was breathing fast.
Sweat was pouring from his hairline into his eyes.
You poor, poor man.
Lulu felt dizzy with the horror of it.
How could he possibly ever get over this?
She handed him the box of tissues, but she knew better than to try to pour him a glass of water. It was as if, now that she had stopped the finger movement, her hands felt they had permission to start shaking.
Stop thinking about it.
Her mentor at uni, Professor Karla Szubanski, had once told her, ‘I have to teach a lot of my students how to empathise. But you’re at the other extreme – you’re going to have to learn to take a step back. Gain some objectivity.’
Easier said than done.
‘Let’s take a break,’ Lulu said, managing to keep her voice level. ‘I’ll just – I’ll just go and check on Milo.’
And she fled from the room. In the kitchen, Milo greeted her like a long-lost friend, and she sank to her knees and buried her face in his wiry coat.
‘Oh, Milo.’
She granted herself a few seconds of comfort from the little animal as Milo licked the tears from her cheeks, before giving him a final pat, splashing water on her face and towelling it dry. She threw Piggy for Milo to chase, and then she returned to the room.
Her client was sitting back in the chair, looking dazed. ‘That was – intense.’
She nodded.
‘But when I think about it now, what happened . . .’ His face suddenly cleared. ‘It’s not like I’m actually back there, you know? It’s like I’m thinking about what happened in a film I once watched.’ Tentatively, he smiled at her.
She felt a huge smile lifting her lips in response. ‘That’s great! It means you’re starting to consign it to the past. The memories will still be there, but that’s all they’ll be – memories.’ Oh, this was so great! And now tears were threatening again, but just at that moment there was another ping, giving her an excuse to turn away from him and go to her desk, pick up her phone and study the screen.
Damn. It was already past five o’clock.
She had six new texts from her husband.
They texted each other throughout the day, and when one of his messages pinged in after a harrowing session, often she felt like a drowning person grabbing a lifeline snaking through cyberspace. Even if it was just a silly description of his lunch or a colleague’s bad hair day, each text was a tiny, just-for-her reminder that Life is good, life is good, life is good.