Fear and the Pier
About twenty-five years ago I was on the back of a horse in the mountains of Costa Rica. It was just after the rainy season. The trails were narrow and a little washed out in places. There were no railings between the trails and the edge of the mountain. I was there with my husband, a friend and several guides. We came to an incline that turned right at the top. I watched my friend’s horse slip a little on the slick incline, recover, make the ascent and turn the bend. Then I watched my husband’s horse do the same thing. As my horse and I approached the incline, I was already scared. My horse never regained her footing. We slid and slid backwards. The guides began yelling at me to get off the horse. I was off in a flash but was unconsciously still gripping the reins. After being instructed to let go, I did and … just like that…just as I let go of the reins, my horse went over the side of the mountain.
My brain then did things I thought only happened in movies. I heard nothing at all and my vision literally tunneled into a sharp focus on the horse going over the mountain in slow, slow motion. It lasted seconds but seemed to go on forever. Then everything sped up like a film on fast forward. I returned to normal sensory processing and heard my husband calling my name. He had rounded the bend and couldn’t see what was happening but could hear it all. I called out, “I’m okay!”
The good news is that the horse was miraculously able to be rescued and was okay.
Fast forward to last month. My husband and I were in Florida staying in a cute little place with a pier on a bay. The pier was designed for docking boats so there were no rails. It was a little narrow; a tight squeeze but two people could fit across. We walked to the pier on our first night there. I was looking forward to exploring the pier and the bay, but once my feet were on the pier, I could feel the old, familiar fear seizing my body.
My husband strolled casually to the end of the pier where he sat and watched the bait fish. I, on the other hand, froze a few yards down the pier. Completely unable to follow, I sat on the edge closer to the shoreline. I knew this feeling. I knew where it originated, but that didn’t stop the past from distorting my experience in a way that overwhelmed my body.
Allowing myself grace to sit at the beginning of the pier that first night helped me to calm and stabilize because I felt no immediate threat sitting at the beginning of the pier. From a calmer space, I experienced my current reality with more clarity.
The next morning, I went alone to confront the pier. “It’s just walking. It’s just walking. You know how to walk. Just get to the end.” I coached myself to the end of the pier. I did it, but the walk to the end and back was not without anxiety. I tried to accurately assess the threat. I could have fallen into the water, but I know how to swim, and I could see the bottom of the bay from the pier: the actual threat was minimal. We walked on other piers where I experienced no fear at all, some were wider, some had railings, but they were all much higher from the water. It was just this one narrow little pier without railings that reminded my body of a mountain and a horse.
This is how trauma hijacked me. I’ve worked with this fear both with EMDR and in other ways. I can now, mostly, drive on mountain roads, something I couldn’t do before EMDR. Under just the right circumstances, however, my body can experience fear from the past even when my mind is in the present and understands what is happening. I depended on my steady mind to help guide my body home, moving it from a long ago, far away mountain edge and back to the present moment. I’m not going to pretend that all of the anxiety just magically disappeared; sometimes it was there, but in a much more manageable way. And once my body and mind were reunited, we could join my husband for the last days of summer on the pier at sunset.