I don't think it is a matter of sticking out the heightened symptoms, but more about finding ways to control the symptoms enough for you to 'stay in the room'. For me that meant doing EMDR far more slowly, and only addressing the memories for seconds at a time, until I had built up a tolerance.
You make a good point about dissociation during EMDR.... if I am not "there," what is the point? On the other hand, if I understand Anthony's comments correctly, it sounds like I will need to be willing to withstand a certain level of heightened symptoms if I am to process my trauma... but the question remains, to me anyway, what is the "level" that my therapist and I should tolerate?
I really just want to get on with it already - even if that means more freak outs in therapy - but I am honestly starting to think that my therapist has done a sh*tty job of making sure that I am stable enough and have grounding techniques that I can actually use (as mentioned previously, I am not very practiced/comfortable with the techniques shown to me). Anyway, hopefully my therapist will be willing to modify EMDR the way yours seemed to... that sounds very practical and as if it might work...
I'm curious - if you spent all summer working on stabilising your symptoms, why did you get a panic attack and dissociate doing EMDR? This is a neutral question, not a leading question. I'm not making any judgements, just trying to understand what happened. What was missing, between work on stabilising your symptoms and staying stable during EMDR? What is meant by "stabilising your symptoms"?
Totally a fair question... no worries. I started getting my PTSD symptoms over the summer, and started seeing my therapist around the same time as my symptoms continued to take a nosedive. Although we touched on some of the trauma so that she knew roughly what she was dealing with, we spent the vast majority of this time together just going over different grounding techniques and helping me survive/manage my symptoms and getting through the day-to-day. We finally started tackling the EMDR once my schedule was conducive for it and it appeared that my symptoms were a bit better or at least not getting worse. This is what I meant by stabilizing my symptoms.
I really don't think the EMDR was necessarily the reason for the panic attack or the dissociation. I've gotten panic attacks during regular talk therapy, and I really don't know what to make of the dissociation, but I suspect it has much more to do with the intense focus on certain memories. Also, just for additional background, the time that I dissociated was on a day that I felt pretty sh*tty going into the session - symptoms were not great and I had had specifically made the appointment because I was feeling sh*tty from the last time I met with her and had shared a very difficult trauma. I was unable to really vocalize how sh*tty I was feeling when we first started this session, but I was having a difficult time concentrating and her office felt like it had way too much stimuli (poor lady - I asked her to turn just about everything off!). But we went ahead and did the EMDR, and that's when I dissociated. When I went back the next time and she asked me about what had had happened, I explained how I didn't feel particularly "stable" that day and that I didn't think the dissociation had anything to do with the EMDR, but I didn't really get any of sort of acknowledgement from her, such as "I should have made sure you were in a better place before we started with the EMDR." So that was a long answer to your question and I'm not even really sure I answered it actually.
How stable does someone have to be for EMDR?
