On circumcision, other childhood medical procedures and EMDR

I was using eye movements with a 47-year- old client, Jay (pseudonym), focusing on an unnecessary tonsillectomy when he was about 9 years old. These operations were done on both his older brother and himself-just because this was what was done in those days. He described seeing his brother being wheeled, semi-conscious, out of the operating room with blood coming out of his mouth. He thought to himself, "Well, he's not dead . . . (is he?)." He was then dragged kicking and screaming to the operating room. His parents did not visit him for the 3 days he he had been promised some. As we was in the hospital. He got no ice cream, though were finishing the EMDR processing of this set of incidents, I asked him if he had been circumcised. (I had been meaning to ask about this since he was intensively processing a list of traumas in a short period of time before leaving the state for a new job. I chose this moment "out of the clear blue sky.") He said, "Well, it's funny you ask this because for the last ten minutes I have been feeling a sharp pain all around. . . there" (the head of his penis). As he moved his eyes, focusing on the sharp pain, it got increasingly dull until it went away. (Incidentally, processing this pain may have elicited, or made him feel safe enough to realize, another related fact-his attitude toward his body.)

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English

Sheryll Stuart Thomson

Thomson, S. S. (1995). On circumcision, other childhood medical procedures and EMDR. EMDR Network Newsletter, 5(2), 8