After having considerable (& quick) success with CBt (Cognitive behavioural therapy, info can be found here), our youngest was finding life easier to cope with.  It was still stressful, it still caused anxieties and people, sights, smells and tastes are all still issues that he has to deal with on a daily basis, but he now has the coping skills to deal with said issues. However, I still felt that there was a piece missing in the jigsaw to make him feel, well, normal isn’t the right word here at all, but I’m not sure what is. There were still things going on in his subconscious that were causing problems, and although CBT had helped a lot, and we know that the sensory issues are something else altogether, my gut feeling was that there was stuff somewhere inside his head, and we had to unlock it and help him deal with it.

Actually, to be completely honest, I knew what it was/is. This was the first ‘issue’ I tried to sort out with him when he was 3.  The issues are all to do with his neonatal, postpartum experience. Although many people say that you can’t remember things from when you were brand new, there are now some people who believe that we have foetal memories. We talk to our babies when they are growing so that they know our voices. I bought a close friend a jingling necklace to wear when she was pregnant as the idea is that the baby will remember the sound when they arrive. We might play music to them, sing to them, even read to them. Our instincts says they hear and remember, and science is catching up with us. A study published 21 years ago says that there is definitely foetal memory (details here), and I am sure (I hope) that there are much more recent studies into this.

So, his birth story is quite straight forward – normal pregnancy, quick labour, and he arrived a day early. So far, so good. When he was just a couple of hours old, however, he went blue and floppy and had to be rushed into the SCBU where he was put on oxygen, he had a glucose drip, and within 24 hours he had an umbilical drip as they couldn’t get enough glucose in quickly enough, and he had to be fed fortified milk through a nose tube.  In total, he spent about 8 days in an incubator, and another 4 days in SCBU before he was discharged to come home, on hydrocortisone liquid every 8 hours, and a referral to an endocrinologist. Every 4 hours while he was in hospital he had to have blood sugar (this is important!). At 6.5 weeks, we then had to go to Sheffield Children’s Hospital for 2 days for controlled withdrawal of his meds. There was no other way to see if he could come off it, whether this was a lifelong condition or a neonatal blip. While he was there, it was 4 hourly blood sugar tests, and then he had to have between 2 & 5 mls of blood taken from a heel prick (there was a medical reason why this couldn’t be from a vein, but the actual amount needed & the reason why are long forgotten). He came off the meds, his blood sugar was stable, and at his 3 month check up, we were discharged completely, and we thought it was all forgotten.

Fast forward 3 years, when he started having dreadful nightmares, with green monsters appearing above his bed. He was adamant, and consistent, when telling us where they came from.  When we had to visit my Dad in hospital at the same sort of time, he announced that this was the hospital where he was born and where he had to stay in a plastic box. And then he told us one day while we were eating dinner, that when he was a baby, a giant used to come and stab his fingers with pencils……and then the penny dropped, and where the monsters were appearing was where hand would go into the incubator. At the time, cranio-sacral therapy was recommended, and we saw a lovely lady who we called the bad dream lady, and 8 sessions with her made the bad dreams go away.  When they came back a year or so later, we went to see her again, she worked her magic, and all was good.

Except, it wasn’t, really. He would occasionally tell me that he remembered that once he cried and I didn’t come. He doesn’t like hospitals at all. He couldn’t sleep through the night on his own until he was 5, and the only way we could get him to sleep through was for me to sleep on his floor, and when things get too much, I still sleep on his floor.

When I mentioned this to his amazing CBT therapist, she suggested that EMDR might help (info here). I read up on it, and it has been used mainly for PTSD so far, but is being increasingly used for non-verbal memories. So, today we had our pre-EMDR session, and it was strange. We both went with him as we are both off this week, and there are bits of the birth story that I couldn’t remember, Our son said ‘I was put on a tray thing, and then lowered into a box’, and apparently that’s exactly what happened, but I hadn’t remembered, and my husband hadn’t said anything.

So on Monday we start EMDR properly. We know that it might make the nightmares come back while the body processes the memories, but the fact that he had a tummy ache going today, knowing what we were going to talk about, and on the way home he was emotionally drained shows that it is still there, like the elephant in the room. I will blog about it, as there must be many skware pegs that have had emotional trauma that still sits in their brain causing minor problems from time to time, but I feel very positive and optimistic that this is the missing piece, the missing link for us.

And that’s a good place to conclude and pull everything together. What works for one person may not work for another, even if their problems seem very similar. Also, mental health help doesn’t come with a one size fits all, or one solution will ‘fix’ you. It might be that 10 sessions of CBT or NLP or whatever else works, or it might be that CBT followed by EMDR with regular top ups or Reiki and aromatherapy are what works for you.  It might be art therapy that keeps you feeling fully functional, or other talking therapies, or it might be being outside with nature (ecotherapy is definitely my personal favourite). The point I am trying to make, is that we are all amazing, unique individuals. How my brain works isn’t necessarily how your brain works, so what helped me isn’t necessarily what will help you (although it’s always good to share what did and didn’t work, as long as we don’t force the matter). What matters is that we do whatever we need to do, and we get whatever help we need to optimise our mental health and well being.