EMDR side effects?

[lisa67]

I'm on my 6th session of EMDR for CPTSD. I wish I'd never started tbh. I feel so much worse. I couldn't find anything much on Google about side effects so I thought I'd be ok. I have become so much more emotionally disregulated, I feel physically cold and very sleepy during and after a session and I feel so depressed about everything which is not how I was before I started. I wake up in the night now with terrible night sweats and I spend my waking hours thinking about worse case scenarios of situations that could happen in my life and the horrible thing is my body experiences it as if it's happening. I feel like I've lost myself and I can't get back to how I was before therapy. I'm lost.

 

[Freddyt]

I will have to talk to my t about knowing when the reprocessing is done and how to manage it more effectively.

I will say it is the single hardest thing to figure out in some ways. One of the signs is when the fog lifts......brain fog, that is. The other is that the "window of tolerance" opens and you can do more or tolerate more stress in a day.

I find it nice to take a couple weeks break and do stuff before diving back in.