• 💖 [Donate To Keep MyPTSD Online] 💖 Every contribution, no matter how small, fuels our mission and helps us continue to provide peer-to-peer services. Your generosity keeps us independent and available freely to the world. MyPTSD closes if we can't reach our annual goal.

General EMDR and lurking darkness

Status
Not open for further replies.
C

ColinKevin

If you are able to, or have experience of this, would you be able to help me understand this please?

When you are having EMDR and I understand it can initially make feelings worse or more pronounced. Do you 'sense' that there is something seismic lurking and the fear of that can make you react without fully knowing what it is/might be? Or rather the fear of what it might be does.
Do you sometimes feel like a stranger in a foreign land?

Thanks in advance
 
Yep.

Think of it this way - you are using emdr to dig up all the crap you hid from yourself to keep going.
So feeling like the world is going to explode? Pretty much my first year of emdr. ☺️

EMDR can be brutal. Really brutal.
The good news is that when it works it is amazing! So it will be worth it in the end

Make sure you are honest with your T about what's happening. They can tweak the process to try to help rein in some of the painful stuff and can actually use the emdr as a way to build coping skills for how to get thru emdr!
 
that feeling of being in constant danger (hyper-vigilance) is a pronounced and highly illogical ptsd symptom. i haven't done emdr, but psychotherapy can, indeed, make it worse before it gets better. i like the broken bone analogy for the phenom. when a broken bone is left to heal badly on its own, it is necessary to rebreak the bone to reset it properly. ouchus maximus, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
 
Sometimes in EMDR I know I'm getting close to something difficult. With my therapist's help, we adjust what we work on, so it's not too overwhelming, but also deep enough that we make progress. Other times, we'll get started on something, and an unexpected wave of feelings comes crashing in. Other times, we'll do something that seems pretty straightforward, but a few hours later I'm utterly exhausted. So my EMDR responses seem to come in lots of varieties.

Initially, I had a lot of fear of EMDR. The EMDR process was a trigger that brought up the PTSD reaction for me where overwhelming terrors seemed to come up for no obvious reason. I can see that it's just two buzzers and a headphone, but the touch and sound wakens up something very frightening. What I was afraid of initially was that immediate sensation of terror, and not what was behind the terror. I suspect that there's an even deeper fear of what's behind the terror, but thinking about that in a conscious way gets suppressed and buried in the feeling of immediate terror.

Do I feel like a stranger in a strange land? No--it's very clearly a dangerous land, but one that is clearly my land. However, I'm often surprised by what comes up and by my responses.
 
that feeling of being in constant danger (hyper-vigilance) is a pronounced and highly illogical ptsd symptom. i haven't done emdr, but psychotherapy can, indeed, make it worse before it gets better. i like the broken bone analogy for the phenom. when a broken bone is left to heal badly on its own, it is necessary to rebreak the bone to reset it properly. ouchus maximus, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Great analogy of the broken bone, I wonder whether this explains the feeling they report of not being the same as they were.
 
every experience in life changes the entire equation of life. most changes are so subtle that we don't notice until the changes accumulate and we notice in one big, "aha" moment. we really are different than we were 10 years ago. how did THAT happen?

more so for the massive changes of sudden, cataclysmic events. it takes time to process all that changed in that single moment. confusion to be expected.
 
My experience with EMDR is that I absolutely KNOW there is something more, if for no other reason than I know the memories we haven't yet worked on.

Defining something as "seismic" is completely subjective, and will largely depend on the fear IN THAT MOMENT due to the c/ptsd. In a different moment, it may not be as big as it is currently felt.

Stranger in a strange land? Not really. Because they are all my storage boxes. I HAVE been surprised by my reactions and/or learning the root of a feeling is different than what I anticipated.

Is your partner/sufferer unable and/or unwilling to explain their experience with you?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top