Michelle Clinton had no intention of going into therapy when she called the counseling office of the Jewish Family and Children’s Services of the East Bay a year and a half ago.
“I just wanted a note from a therapist saying that I wasn’t depressed so that I could show it to my doctor,” says Clinton, 47.
With a trauma-riddled childhood, Clinton’s doctor had suggested that depression may be a factor in the chronic fatigue syndrome from which she had been suffering for seven years. He gave her a list of clinics and she chose JFCS.
“I am a religious person and an African-American, and I thought that because of the history and cultural strength of Judaism, I could find a therapist there I could relate to.”
Like many non-Jews, Clinton found the doors of JFCS open to her. With years of experience providing services for everyone from preschoolers to seniors, and refugees to native-born Americans, JFCS has extended its services to embrace anyone in the East Bay who is in need. On Saturday, Nov. 9, it will celebrate its 125th anniversary with “An Evening of Cultural Harmony,” a concert featuring music of Iran, Latin American and Eastern European Jews at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley.
The coincidence that Amy Weiss, a therapist and director of clinical services for JFCS, happened to be on phone duty the day Clinton called was beshert.
“We clicked. There was a natural rapport,” says Clinton, and when Weiss urged Clinton to come in for just one appointment, she reluctantly agreed.
Before chronic fatigue derailed her career, Clinton was a driven, nationally recognized, award-winning poet and martial arts instructor, traveling extensively and lecturing around the country. She often existed on only a few hours of sleep a night.
But once the syndrome hit, Clinton’s life changed drastically. At times it kept her almost bedridden with barely enough energy to take a bath. She fell into a destructive pattern in which every time she began to get better, she relapsed.
Before seeing Weiss, Clinton was discouraged and resigned to a life without a career, without friends and without activity.
“What I wanted [Weiss] to say to me was, ‘The best thing for you to do is to accept this illness and that the most you will have in your life is two to three hours of activity a day,'” Clinton remembers.
But instead Weiss told Clinton it was important for her to believe that she could get well and, in addition to traditional talk therapy, she began treating Clinton with eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR), a technique in which Weiss was specially trained, to help people who have suffered from severe traumas.
Clinton was a perfect candidate.
When she was 7 years old, her parents separated and she was left in the care of her mother, whom Clinton describes as mentally ill. Clinton and her siblings were neglected and often went hungry. She was raped, stalked, had her teeth pulled out, witnessed her sister being raped, her mother pushed down the stairs by her father and, later, beaten by her boyfriend.
Weiss says normal, everyday stresses are processed during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which turns them into memories. But in cases of severe trauma, sometimes REM sleep isn’t enough and those experiences get lodged in the nervous system. By simulating REM sleep through tactile and auditory stimulation, EMDR enables a patient to reprocess traumas and desensitize herself to them. But it’s a painful and emotional process because it requires a patient to repeatedly relive traumas in great detail.
Clinton stockpiled her childhood traumas and ignored them, and she compensated for them by becoming successful, says Weiss. But eventually denial, self-neglect and workaholic behavior caught up with Clinton in the form of chronic fatigue syndrome.
Clinton now understands the behavioral patterns that were so destructive to her.
“My way of coping was by being a good student and working as hard as I could,” she says. “I would never be still because when I was, I could feel the anxiety.”
Through her work with Weiss and their EMDR sessions, Clinton is starting to move ahead in her life.
These days, Clinton gardens, shops, does household chores, socializes and is starting to think about writing again. It’s a different life from the one she used to lead — less frenetic, less driven but psychologically and physically healthier.
Although Clinton has had some relapses of her chronic fatigue, they are not as severe or as long as in the past and, because of her work with Weiss, she knows how to take care of herself.
“Amy is a voice inside of me, like a wise woman, beloved grandmother or aunt, a gifted mother,” says Clinton, acknowledging that she and Weiss are about the same age. “When I get really hard on myself, frantically working, I can speak to myself in a calm, rational, patient way. Amy is re-parenting me.”
For someone who went into therapy kicking and screaming, Clinton has become a true believer. She knows she’s not home yet and expects to continue seeing Weiss for a long time to come. But she is optimistic about her future.
“I’m going to get well,” says Clinton. “I feel deeply grateful to [Jewish Family and Children’s Services] and to Amy. I have the potential for a life now.”