EDIT: I “knew” since some of my earliest memories (4 - 5 years old), when I was trying on my mom’s heels in her closet, and when stories of my birth were told and everyone in the family thought I was going to be born a girl, and I was pretty sure they were right and I was supposed to be born a girl, etc.
I also grew up wanting to be a girl, which especially got more intense after puberty started. I definitely played with barbies growing up (in the limited way I could under the watch of my father, who projected his fragile masculinity onto me by threatening violence for even minor mis-steps in my gender).
But I also ended up repressing hard and thought I could never be a woman or a girl, and I lost a lot of my memories of childhood and ended up very dissociated and unhappy. Therapy and meditation actually caused me to regain a lot of my childhood memories, which was very weird - I woke up one morning with access to them after months in EMDR + 1 hour vipassana meditation / day (which … I tend to think EMDR is quackery, but it sorta works because it’s like exposure therapy for traumatic memories? something like that).
I mean, if it helped you recall memories, then it isn’t quackery. Besides, I’ve never heard of a therapy that works on everyone; people are just too different.
I don't really like talking about this, so I'll put it in a spoiler
I was having rather profound … side effects and experiences from the meditation around that time, so it’s hard to say whether it’s due to EMDR (which on its own provided no therapeutic benefits before I started meditating 1 hour a day), or due to the neurological effects of meditation. I also started to experience changes in mood like increased energy (even to the point of what I think is called “hypo-mania”), and started to experience insomnia. Because I had had months of EMDR at that point, I don’t think it was due to the EMDR, but it might be the combination of EMDR and meditation that specifically helped me overcome that memory loss. However, meditation seems to me to be the main mechanism by which that happened, and the question in my mind was more about whether EMDR played any relevant role (which I do think it might have, by repeatedly re-engaging those memories during a time when I was meditating so much and so intently).
Also, the specific claims about eye movement being the way EMDR works is more narrowly what I meant about it being quackery - it’s probably just recalling traumatic memories in a safe environment that helps, and the last I read, the research showed it was no more effective than the exposure therapy aspect it relies on.
I understand any skepticism you might feel about these claims about my side effects from meditation, I was very skeptical myself (which is why I spent so much time reading up on it and then practicing meditation to explore these things for myself).
In the end, I wouldn’t reify any religious claims, but I will say that I understand that the predictable effects of skillful meditation will cause people to have experiences that might be described as “religious experiences” (like, relevant to neurotheology).
somehow I’m both?
EDIT: I “knew” since some of my earliest memories (4 - 5 years old), when I was trying on my mom’s heels in her closet, and when stories of my birth were told and everyone in the family thought I was going to be born a girl, and I was pretty sure they were right and I was supposed to be born a girl, etc.
I also grew up wanting to be a girl, which especially got more intense after puberty started. I definitely played with barbies growing up (in the limited way I could under the watch of my father, who projected his fragile masculinity onto me by threatening violence for even minor mis-steps in my gender).
But I also ended up repressing hard and thought I could never be a woman or a girl, and I lost a lot of my memories of childhood and ended up very dissociated and unhappy. Therapy and meditation actually caused me to regain a lot of my childhood memories, which was very weird - I woke up one morning with access to them after months in EMDR + 1 hour vipassana meditation / day (which … I tend to think EMDR is quackery, but it sorta works because it’s like exposure therapy for traumatic memories? something like that).
I mean, if it helped you recall memories, then it isn’t quackery. Besides, I’ve never heard of a therapy that works on everyone; people are just too different.
I don't really like talking about this, so I'll put it in a spoiler
I was having rather profound … side effects and experiences from the meditation around that time, so it’s hard to say whether it’s due to EMDR (which on its own provided no therapeutic benefits before I started meditating 1 hour a day), or due to the neurological effects of meditation. I also started to experience changes in mood like increased energy (even to the point of what I think is called “hypo-mania”), and started to experience insomnia. Because I had had months of EMDR at that point, I don’t think it was due to the EMDR, but it might be the combination of EMDR and meditation that specifically helped me overcome that memory loss. However, meditation seems to me to be the main mechanism by which that happened, and the question in my mind was more about whether EMDR played any relevant role (which I do think it might have, by repeatedly re-engaging those memories during a time when I was meditating so much and so intently).
Also, the specific claims about eye movement being the way EMDR works is more narrowly what I meant about it being quackery - it’s probably just recalling traumatic memories in a safe environment that helps, and the last I read, the research showed it was no more effective than the exposure therapy aspect it relies on.
I understand any skepticism you might feel about these claims about my side effects from meditation, I was very skeptical myself (which is why I spent so much time reading up on it and then practicing meditation to explore these things for myself).
In the end, I wouldn’t reify any religious claims, but I will say that I understand that the predictable effects of skillful meditation will cause people to have experiences that might be described as “religious experiences” (like, relevant to neurotheology).
I mean, fair enough. Mediation is powerful and transformative, so I won’t continue doubt your own read on your experiences.