It is great you do that, even though as it continues it seems not really able to complete, and a therapist should be able to help you with this.
With regard to an SE therapist, I would at first look into their background, and see if they are a complete trauma therapist, who includes SE as one of their tools. Like they are by training a psychologist/psychiatrist, and not massage therapist. There are so many SE 'therapists', who call themselves therapist after doing an SE training only, and those are the ones you have encountered yourself.
For me SE therapy is going into bodily sensations, which can be tensions, pains, shaking, tingling, and I believe this is what you have already learned to do. The point is to keep feeling into this -actively supported by therapist- and then different things can start to happen. Certain emotions can come up and release themselves, or certain emotions can be too overwhelming to release yet, and you freeze. Same cycle start again to feel into the freeze, and you will slowly move out of it, which could lead to a totally different set of emotions you started off with, and you can release those.
Another way of release that I specifically had with totally unremembered stuff, is that the body will completely re-enact the child abuse scenario, it will feel like you are the child fighting off the abuser, you will make all the movements without your cognitive brain involved. The 'fun' thing is that at the same time your cognitive brain is still online and still remains the observer, so you do know what is going on. Then I say to my therapist 'hey this is really feeling and looking like someone is trying to drown me here', and I felt everything I did as a child. For many fragmented parts or EPs it has worked fantastically and point is after the release and trauma processing of this part, it is automatically integrated into your personality or ANP. I have been repeating this work for fragment after fragment and there were so many, it has been exhausting at times.
Light appropriate touch is used in SE, and this does miracles for me. If you run into a deep frozen part and nothing is moving after minutes of trying, my therapist will come sit next to me and put a hand on my back or shoulder and within a minute what is frozen will start moving. It is just the little bit of support that can facilitate this. It also tells you every time: I am no longer alone in this. Especially in the beginning this I found the most important that feeling. Or if really in despair I can ask my therapist 'may I please just hold your hand' and to me this is the humane aspect of the method, as holding a hand is priceless instead of words sometimes, and again the touch is so important to becoming a total feeling human being again.
Two basic building blocks of theory are underlying the SE method, and those are the Polyvagal Theory by Porges and Hypnosis as done by Milton Erickson. SE is basically done in a trance state, which actually is a light state of hypnosis; and it is the hypnosis that makes it possible for your brain to make those changes, as I described above. My therapist is therefore also trained in Hypnosis, for some patients he uses it in a different way. I reacted badly to deep hypnosis and we never did it again. The trance state is actually a state you automatically go into, when your focus goes inside in your body, and the therapist will accommodate this by talking slightly in a hypnosis inducing way. As mentioned your cognition is always online too, and should be, and nothing to be afraid of, it just feels odd in the beginning. Coming out of it at the end of the session takes some time, varying from 0 to 120 minutes from my experience. Then I sit in the waiting room until it is safe to drive home. Safe in the sense of mental clarity. It may feel your complete brain is being re-arranged after a session, dizzy, confused, and often I go straight to bed after a session, to let the neuroplasticity of the brain do its work.
It is not necessarily a chair based therapy, if you want to lie down (fold-out mattress always available) or walk or do whatever that is fine. Of course, you do talk as building a bond of trust =safe attachment remains essential as in any trauma therapy.
Trauma is complicated and that is why I think it is best that therapists have many different tools at their disposal. It is so hard to know beforehand how a specific patient will respond and what will help them optimally.
My therapist no longer uses EMDR and Brainspotting for complex trauma, only simple or mono-trauma.
I hope this gives you a better insight in SE, and to everyone I have no stock options in SE, as I am always promoting it. It is a personal delight after 20 years of other therapy, and it has saved my life.
