Working with EMDR and the photographs people bring, enables access to feelings which can then be reprocessed, allowing integration in remarkable ways, creating a new ‘Innerscape’

I dig into the cupboard under the stairs where'd I'd put that box of old photographs. Lee uses them in her therapy work, and I'd agreed to bring some to the session. I'm reaching in up to my shoulder, my hand flailing around in the dark. Ah! my hand finds those tarnished old silver candlesticks - I suddenly remember the box is under them. It takes an age to move everything to get the box out, and I'm running late, so I grab the two lightest albums and fly out the door.

On the subway I flip through them ... lots of landscapes ... images captured on my adventures with David; The Appalachian trail with its hidden waterfall; a blazing autumn on Walden Pond, Thoreau's sanctuary; that cabin at Mendocino, perched over the Pacific coast. Lots of self-timer shots of the two of us. That are no longer a two-of-us.

In Lee's office we sit on the couch and turn the pages together. She asks me to stop when an image speaks to me. She tells me I have an eye for composition but I say I'm hopeless with lighting. Suddenly I fall silent - here's a photo of David standing beside me, his arm around me, smiling. As I look at his face I can actually smell that soap he used - he was the cleanest man I ever knew. Below us I hear the surf at low tide, just a shush and a ripple, and a light wind lifts my hair. David's smile is impish, warm; he's indulging me. He thinks people who take photographs of themselves are missing the moment; he says they're exchanging a moment of living for a piece of paper with their faces on it.

In a split second I'm clobbered by grief, sobbing, stunned at myself for losing control like that, with no warning.

We turn the pages and I'm with a love I lost in my twenties, and then I'm ten, with my my beloved grandmother who would die the next year, leaving me without hope of ever being loved or understood or cared about ever again. I am awash in sorrow, I am gasping for air, I think I will never stop crying.

Without knowing it I've been carrying this huge old hope chest of grief for decades, and it's so heavy it's stopped me from opening my heart up wide again, from living a life - a real and reckless, sparkling, impulsive, risk-taking, full-hearted life. I weep inconsolably - it seems to go on forever, this weeping. I blow my nose and wipe my face and cry some more, and then I begin to notice I feel lighter... with every tear I shed I am letting go of what I thought I'd have to carry for the rest of my days.

Not that I knew it was there - but I see that it was the thing that was knotting up my heart, making it more and more difficult to open up to love. To life. To my one precious life. I hollow myself out with crying until I feel transparent, washed clean, humbled, grounded. I feel real, devoid of that layer of hardness we grow to protect ourselves from getting hurt again.

Yet I don't feel unprotected. Just ... open. Kind of elastic, where I used to be rubber cement. Some blockage inside has dislodged and a river is running through the ice and snow. I can hear it. I can hear it, rushing now, white water rapids cascading toward an ocean. Spring is coming. There can be no mistake about it.

 Rachel. 2007