Stuck in the Mud
How a video game about driving in mud helped me through EMDR therapy
After twenty minutes, moving foot by foot through the tire-deep mud, relying on my trusty winch and praying for the sturdiness of the trees near me, I reached the top of the hill. I stopped for a moment to appreciate the view, forgot to apply the parking break, and rolled down the side of a rock and tree studded cliff, destroying my brand new purple Jeep.
Fortunately for me, this all happened in a video game — SnowRunner, from Saber Interactive. In real life I’d be sitting there crying into my hands, convinced I was stranded forever and would never see my family again. I do not have the emotional fortitude for difficult driving.
SnowRunner is not my usual genre of choice. In fact, the last time I saw my partner playing, I asked him why he was playing what looked to be the most boring game ever developed. In it, you are a trucker of sorts. You drive all manner of heavy duty and off road trucks on hauling, delivery, and search missions, through all manner of insurmountable terrain. It’s a slog. It takes planning and preparation. It’s very easy to fail and have to start all over again. And to do it successfully, it requires all of your attention, lest you blink and topple down a mountain like I did.
Taking my Jeep on a quest turned into an hour long endeavor of inching along, shifting between gears, and winching my way up hills. And it was exactly what I needed.
I recently began EMDR therapy (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) to work through some past traumas I’d buried away and tried to forget about. While the name of the therapy refers to eye movement, any sort of bilateral stimulation will do. Moving both eyes following a light or hand movement, alternating taps on your thighs or chest with both hands, even walking is a form of bilateral stimulation. My therapist has me follow alternating flashes on the edges of my widescreen monitor. Because audible cues to change focus and return my attention to her are useless to me as a Deaf woman, she uses the “Tap” feature on her Apple Watch to tap my wrist via my Apple Watch. During my session, I focus on one memory and occasionally check in with my therapist on what I’m feeling or thinking. At the end of the session, I put my memory back in its “box” so I’m not left hanging there focused on the my worst memories as I get on with my day.
Despite the years I’ve spent in therapy, the main traumatic experiences of my past had never really been processed and worked through, only discussed ad nauseam. I’ve known that EMDR would likely be the ticket to finally and properly working through my past. But as a Black Deaf woman, finding a therapist is hard enough. I need my therapist to understand my experience and my identities and I need them to speak my language, so they have to be a unicorn: a Black, Deaf, ASL using therapist, preferrably a woman. Toss into the mix that I need in-person sessions, not telehealth, because I won’t sit through sessions with background blur or a photo background¹ and the therapist I’m looking for ceases to exist.
I began my search for this mythical therapist about six months after my partner began his own EMDR therapy and finally found one after a year of looking. She offered telehealth only but she said she was happy to leave the blur off as long as I wouldn’t judge the laundry behind her. My first two sessions were spent with her explaining to me how EMDR would work and with me sharing some details of what I was hoping to address.
For my first working session, I chose to focus on past spousal abuse— a specific memory of my ex-husband that was starting to impact my current relationship. We discussed a troubling recurring thought regarding the memory to cement it in my mind and the session began. After about 30 minutes of coming in and out of the bilateral stimulation sessions with breaks for me to check in with the therapist, we stopped to discuss how I was feeling now at the end. I was not feeling any better. She told me that was OK, that some things don’t make much progress after just one session, and we would pick it up next time. We wrapped up with a positive cognition and more bilateral stimulation, though I can’t say I was truly focused on that positive statement.
Coming out of my session, I felt the way I do after waking from a realistic and intense dream. Logically, I knew it wasn’t real, it wasn’t happening, I was safe in my home with my loving partner, but my brain was reeling from being so deep in the memory. This made sense because the eye movement of EMDR is very similar to that of REM sleep and the brain processes emotions and memories in a similar manner. As I continued to try to calm myself after revisiting that memory, my watch asked me if I wanted to record my workout.
My partner had been in therapy doing occasional EMDR sessions for a year and a half and he had prepared me for how I might feel afterwards — the part often left out by EMDR practitioners. After his sessions, he’s always noted that he feels everything associated with the EMDR focus much more intensely, be it anger, sadness, or anxiety. He’s also learned to prepare himself for being more easily stressed or triggered by even subtle reminders of the focus memory. I came out expecting this, but I guess it’s one of those things you can’t really understand until you’re experiencing it. After an hour spent talking about and processing violent memories of my ex-husband, everything felt bad. I told my partner this and he joked, “It’s like Listerine. You know it’s working if it hurts.”
Though my therapist guided me through putting my memory back in its box at the end of my session, it certainly did not stay there. It was all I thought about for the next few days and was unlike anything I’d prepared myself for. I felt angry, frightened and on edge, sensitive to everything. I’ve been practicing mindfulness and meditation for over 40 years and even that was not serving me with some of my worst memories fresh in my mind. With my partner, even the stupidest of things became fodder for a full on fight. I did my best to simply avoid him until my EMDR hangover passed and I could again converse without it becoming an argument.
When I was ready to rejoin the land of the living and emotionally regulated, I sat beside my partner on the couch and shoved a box of apology Thin Mints at him. I told him I was sorry and he chuckled and said, “Welcome to the most horrible good decision you’ll make.”
I was dreading my next EMDR session. In addition to the after effects impacting my relationship, they were also affecting my ability to do my job. I do not have the time and space required to go through two to three days of everything making me cry and be angry when my own job is to work through traumas with people (though not via EMDR).
When my partner began EMDR, he was working a job that offered unlimited PTO, so he was able to take the rest of the day and some of the following day off to deal with the “hangover.” Now in a different job with minimal time off, I needed to know how he was managing his sessions and getting right back to life and responsibility afterwards.
“If I can find something to do that puts me in a state of mind opposite of my usual state of high energy and high anxiety, that helps. Usually something that doesn’t allow my mind to wander back to the EMDR focus,” he told me. “Playing SnowRunner has been doing the trick lately.”
When I play games, it’s usually with my grandkids or partner. They’re seldom an activity I do alone but I was ready to try anything to avoid my life being derailed for two days after therapy.
After my next EMDR session — just as unpleasant as the first — I scheduled a couple hours in my day to play this boring game that my partner was now inexplicably hooked on. When I do play games, they’re always fast paced or story based. Games like Dragon Age or Fable where I connect with the characters and the events of the world, or Forza Horizon where I can race at dangerously high speeds in exotic cars through stunning locations. Games that offer me experiences I’d never have otherwise. If I wanted to drive slowly in poor conditions, I’d just go get in my car and go somewhere during construction season.
During my first mission in SnowRunner — the tutorial mission — I came to a flooded road, closed off by traffic barriers and I believed I wouldn’t need to take the long way, I could go through the flood, my truck was big enough. Wrong. Not only did I flood my engine, I also damaged an axle while driving over the wooden traffic barrier. I tried to winch my way out of the crevice and instead tore every tree around me out of the ground. I tried AWD, low gear, both to no avail. I was stuck with no way out and had to begin again. Begin again — my constant mantra in meditation and mindfulness but never something I’ve connected with gaming.
This was naively how I felt about my first “mission” in EMDR therapy too. I’m a therapist. I know all the tricks and BS our brains are so good at. More than that, I knew exactly how EMDR worked and how the therapy process would facilitate me working through the trauma I’d come to therapy for. I allowed myself to believe that all this knowledge gave me an edge, it would make the process easier. I could power through the deep water.
After my second EMDR session, my brain was again in that jarring, just startled awake from a nightmare state. Flashes of having been hit, the lead up to being beaten, and the aftermath of it left me raw, panicked, and hypervigilant. My eyes were red and puffy from crying while repeating my end-of-session positive cognition of “I am safe now,” and I had two hours to get it together before seeing my last two clients of my workday.
Thanks to his therapist, my partner had a plan to alter his usual means of getting my attention — a gentle hand on my shoulder or back — after my sessions. They surmised that touching me without my awareness and consent immediately after my own EMDR processing would not go well and they were right. Instead, he flickered the lights of the room I was in. Except in this instance, the bulb burnt out with a flash, which my reeling brain decided to interpret as another reason to freeze and panic. I was in no state to counsel anyone on anything and when your mind is in that fight, flight, freeze, or fawn place, it’s difficult to pull yourself out of it just because you’ve got a schedule to keep.
For many, the appeal of video games is the power fantasy. You can be unstoppable. You can save your people, the world, the galaxy! It feels good to feel powerful when society and life often leave you feeling anything but. That’s certainly what I enjoy about them, the feeling of being unstoppable, an agent of great change despite your great responsibility. I’ve never sat down at the TV, turned on the Xbox and thought, let’s settle in for a boring time of moving slowly!
In the world of SnowRunner this is precisely what you’re tasked with. All the thoughts of “I can get this done fast,” or “Oh I know a shortcut!” will result in failure the majority of the time. Even on a stable surface like a paved road, pushing too hard on the gas pedal will cause you to lose control of your vehicle and go careening into a cement barrier. It took several do overs but eventually I learned that the trick to success in SnowRunner was slow, thoughtful movement. Patience, planning, and focus are paramount in this game.
After three attempts over an hour and a half, I finally succeeded at my mission of delivering metal beams followed by wooden planks to the collapsed bridge. That victory felt better than any win in my usual games. I really earned that bridge. While celebrating my hard fought success, I realized the game had done just what my partner said it might. My mind was calm, once again feeling safe and grounded, and I could get on with my day. My mind was thinking about my next delivery mission through the mud, not reliving my painful past.
Having to give my undivided attention to delivering virtual bridge building supplies to save the town of Black River, Michigan pulled me out of my panicked and agitated state when little else could have with such ease.
Traumas, especially those long buried and avoided, will never be something we can process or work through quickly, whether the traumatic event itself happened in an instant or over the course of months or years. Speed has served me throughout my life. It’s given me impressive finish times in many marathons, it allows me to bask in the feeling of accomplishment in video games, and it’s protected me from some spousal abuse. Going slowly, especially when my mind believes danger is iminent, does not come naturally. My mind longs for speed when I’m faced with revisiting parts of my past because to focus and dwell on them hurts.
The more time I spent in the game, the more I began to draw parallels to my experience with EMDR therapy — which I was nearly ready to call it quits on. Illogically, I wanted EMDR to be a silver bullet, the best fast solution to the parts of my past that had plagued me for so long. The fad diet of the mind was my hope. But just as in SnowRunner, EMDR has to be slow and methodical. You have to plan your routes carefully, so to speak, with your therapist to ensure that the therapy is helping and that you leave your session with the tools you need to ground and soothe yourself.
I got to the top of the mountain and went rolling right back down several times, both in the game and in my EMDR sessions. But I’ve learned that’s simply the process. It’s not a shortcut, it’s not a straight path, and the destination won’t be reached with ease.
This boring game taught me and equipped me with a patience for myself that doesn’t come naturally to me and it gets me out of my head, out of ruminating in such a unique way because of the focus and planning the game requires of you.
I still can’t say I enjoy EMDR. I don’t know that anyone would call it a fun time. But now that I no longer feel like I’m being tortured after each session, I can see that my triggers are, ever so slowly, lessening and becoming more manageable. All while I become a better big rig driver in the mud.
¹As a Deaf person, my entire world is visual. I need to be able to see detail to feel safe and secure in my environment because I cannot hear what’s around me. In telehealth sessions, though we’re not actually together, if my attention is solely on the instruction of my therapist, her environment becomes an extension of my environment. If I cannot see it, I cannot feel safe or grounded, a requirement of EMDR therapy. And so in video based sessions, all of my attention instinctively goes to what I can’t see while my brain reminds me that I am not safe because I cannot perceive my surroundings.
