I saw my talk therapist, Deborah, biweekly, for four years. She had two adorable dachshunds; when I first started seeing her, many years before, it was those little dogs that often made sure I made it to therapy. “This is too hard. I don’t want to go. But I want to see those little dogs!”
I returned to her in 2024 as things came to a head, and my head became too much to bear. We talked about my dreams, sometimes doing a little EMDR, too. We had done a lot of work around the trauma of my dad’s death, but not as much with the tumultuous time afterwards.
One night, after a therapy session earlier in the day, I tried to get to sleep. My mind flitted, as it normally did and does, from all the reasons why I’m a bad person to all the reasons why I should kill myself. I thought about my mother. My father died about six weeks before I graduated from high school. Just a few months later, I left for college a thousand miles away. How my heart now hurt for my mother, returning to the empty apartment, just her and the cats, few friends, no family nearby. My mother was 46 when my dad died and I am 42 as I write this, so I can empathize with her in a way I could not before.
I had thought about going to college closer to home. I’d been accepted to one, and in retrospect, going would have left me with a lot less debt. But my mother said, in what I think of as her last lucid moment, her last gift to me, “Go, don’t live your life for me.”
But that night in bed, 41 years old then, I thought about that moment. I should have stayed! I should have. It would have been easier for everyone. Mom could visit often. Or I could have gone to community college. Got a job. We could have moved to a smaller apartment, split the rent. I could have made sure she took her medication. Maybe we could have gone to therapy together.
And as I cried, I continued to pull through the layers, as I’d learned in EMDR. I could not have made a difference. The school I’d been accepted to close to home was still a few hours by car. Mom would still have been without much of a support network. And had she chosen to move states away, as she actually did, I would be even farther away from her. After I moved out, she returned to her hometown, her parents and sisters. Her new home was closer to my college. We visited several times a year and spoke often on the phone.
If I had stayed and gone to that other school, and she had moved, I’d be left with even less than the broken despair I’ve carried with me all these years. There are ways I wish I’d behaved differently, times I wish I had been more thoughtful, tactful, proactive, assertive. But ultimately, her life did not hinge on that choice I made.
I stopped having nightmares after that. I did have a nightmare a few months later, and still have them now, but the frequency was much less.
Though that breakthrough was important, it was only possible because of all of the other treatments: talk therapy, psychotherapy, CBT-I, medication, my CPAP.
Bad Sleeper 
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