Something Went Wrong With Emdr

[rightkindofme]

Sometimes after EMDR I am suicidal for days. It is really intense and bad. I don't do EMDR on complicated, layered trauma any more. But I find it to be an excellent tool for helping me defuse things that are building. To each their own. Make sure you have ways of taking care of yourself.

 

[Deleted member 18510]

I agree with Muse and with everyone who's said it was the psychiatrist freaking out, maybe your therapist a bit, too. NOT YOU!!! Grounding exercises, the safe/calm place you learned in the preparation phase, all will be helpful to you now, in between sessions. If you go back to the EMDR therapist, talk about how she "over-reacted" and make a good plan for the future. Go back to the preparation phase.

 

[therapybankrupt]

I also had the reaction you had Eva. I found that I had multiple trauma and amnesia on abuse when I was three. The therapist doing the EMDR went back and gave me more preparations before continuing EMDR. She always tells me to call if I have problems and i get emergency appointment. Sometimes another EMDR treatment is necessary right away. EMDR got easier as I processed more. I have been in the process for 2 years going every week for an hour and half. I agree the Dr. was over reacting. This is also a fear of mine. I once had a miss communication and had cops and ambulance at my door. Be very clear when you call that you will not harm yourself or others you just need help grounding and there should be no discussion about hospitalization. Some times the benefit of going to the hospital when getting prescribed new medications you get close monitoring and someone is there 24 hours to help you through the adjustments. Not sure if that what the doctor was considering. Best of wishes on your journey to wellness.

 

[eav]

Thank you therapybankrupt, DMerish and all who replied. I began feeling much better yesterday after being around friends (even though I didn't really want to go out--I felt that if I went out everyone would look at me and know how out of my head I was feeling). I am going to the therapist this afternoon, even though I really would rather not. It would just be too hard to have to start over with a new therapist, and I think everyone except my husband agrees that I need help with this right now. His opinion is that I seem worse now than a few weeks ago when I started therapy. But I had already not slept more than an hour at a time in a couple of weeks before I started therapy--I don't agree that it is making it worse.

I am beginning to think that the EMDR helped with the issue I was working on, I do feel much less guilt about my dad's death. I wonder if the EMDR also stirred up other issues at the same time which were not fully explored? It seemed like while doing the EMDR, the images I was getting surrounding my dad were very nostalgic, sweet. But after I left the office, a few hours later, more images started coming that were very vague and kind of scary. I am pretty sure my dad wasn't physically abusive, but my mom was very submissive and I was expected to be, too. I'm not sure about the darker thoughts, or where they came from, why they upset me so much. Maybe they were just delayed grief.

I'm not sure what I'll tell the therapist when she wants me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. I am so tired of doctors right now.

I slept "a lot" last night, which helps. Even if it took me nine hours in bed to get about 6-7 hours of sleep! Nightmares suck. :sleep:

 

[therapybankrupt]

eav

I take prazosin for sleep it works for me like magic. No drowsy mornings! I also do sleep meditation found on You Tube for relaxation and deep sleep. Jody Whitely is my favorite. I hope this helps. Good luck with your appointment. Do not give up it does sometimes seem very tough to begin with.
Tb

 

[eav]

Thank you! Those seem to be great videos. I guess I am going to have to go to a psychiatrist and get meds, even though I have tried to avoid this.

 

[Kintsugi]

Hi Eav, I saw this and instantly recalled an old thread that stopped me from looking into EMDR myself. I was really thankful and glad that becvan posted this and the discussion that followed (Anthony was also pretty involved in this one).

https://www.myptsd.com/threads/emdr-lashback-when-emdr-goes-wrong.1388/

 

[Hashi]

EMDR helps a great number of people. It isn't for everyone, though. It isn't for me, for a number of reasons. One of them is that I feel that EMDR could raise all sorts of peripheral issues or touch things that I wasn't intending to touch on at that point.

Does the alternative have to be meds, if this is something you would rather avoid? Meds are another thing which I think can be very helpful, just not for me. Personally, I've tried to follow what feels most right for me, even if it's a bit different from the mainstream. In my case, that's things like art therapy, somatic therapy (craniosacral therapy - unlike EMDR you do not even have to think about the trauma), dreamwork and talk therapy which has a resonance for me. From discussions here on the forum, I came to the conclusion that the kind of talk therapy I do has the same sort of effect for me that EMDR has for other people.

If you feel it's best to consider meds then I would support you in that. I'm only posting because, helpful as EMDR can be for so many, and same for meds, I do want to speak out for an alternative for people who feel these may not be right for them. If you think they are right, I would support you in that. If you think you might need something different, I'd encourage you to explore that first.

 

[eav]

Went to the therapist, and she was very, very helpful. She said that she wanted me to have meds on Friday because I felt depressed and numb, that I was shutting down. She would like me to have a psychiatrist eval at some point, for a large part to put my mind at ease, but the psychiatrist she would like me to go to is not available for a few weeks. I feel like I am losing my mind a lot, the flashbacks are so often and sometimes make so little sense that I'm worried they are hallucinations. The therapist thinks they are just flashbacks, so I have to trust her on this. In the meantime, she thinks that the reaction I had may not repeat itself. Also, she would like to talk to me a lot earlier if it happens again. I did not call to check in on the second day as she had asked me to.

The funny thing is that I do think EMDR helped on the issue I was working on, it just also unleashed so much crap about other issues. I guess that is why it is so hard to use on complex cases. My therapist actually is trained in somatic therapy and hypnotism, but she thinks EMDR is best for me right now if I can handle it. We are going to try it again later this week and see if I can manage better. She reminded me to take a walk outside every day, meditate every day, etc. No one said this was going to be easy, right? I guess I was just unprepared for how hard it would actually be.

 

[Powder]

Hi, eav,

I'm so glad things are going better with your therapist this time. It sounds like EMDR worked on the target but also showed you that you have some more unprocessed grief or trauma related to the target somehow. I hope those connections become clearer for you and you feel better about them as you work through the memories.

From a book chapter I have been reading on trauma work, the doctor may have been schooled in the trauma work protocol that if a patient has an "abreaction" (that is, she is so upset by the terror that returns with the memories that surface in trauma work that she can's stop crying or can't function normally) they need to complete the truama work in an in-patient setting. The author of the work I read yesterday claims that this was considered standard protocol. But he said he can make the trauma work more manageable for the patient by setting up parameters in Phase 2. The doctor's freak out reaction may actually just be "old school" and it may be that he feels if you had an abreaction that your T didn't do enough preparation work first.

The author of the book I read used an example of the prep work: he claims that if your T. suggests that you remember the memories as if they are appearing on an imaginary screen and that you have an imaginary "stop" button to push if they get too intense, then the traumatic material won't upset you as much, and will prevent an abreaction (read, re-traumatization) providing you a safe distance or relative objectivity from which to recall and comment on the memory.

As DrPatty said above, and I agree, this type of set up can be augmented back to earlier phases of EMDR. I am going to have to study the phases more, myself.

I am also staring EMDR and am going to try to keep reading up on the phases of EMDR to self-educate as I go through it; I want to be ready to ask questions such as if I feel like I need to go back and work more on a certain phase before moving on.

(((HUGS!)))

I know that is hard, and that I will struggle with it also as I begin. I am going to do my best to self-advocate this time and not be passive about therapy. :)

Sources:
1. Dead Link Removed
-This excerpt is a reply to a person with a complaint that EMDR made them feel worse; usually, it appears the standard response is that Phase 2 needs to be revisited.
2. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/1467/Diss_4_4_7_OCR_rev.pdf
-This source is about DID, but has relevance to trauma processing techniques used in EMDR phase 2

Hope this is not too much info and is actually sort of helpful,
Muse

 

[eav]

I went back for EMDR yesterday, the therapist changed the technique, she said, and eased off and ended more positively with an affirmation and made sure I was completely grounded, also slowed down the EMDR stimulation for a while before the end. I know I made a lot of progress with the issue I was working on, and look forward to the next session. I seemed to have a problem with dissociating during the treatment.

I came home exhausted, slept for a short while, then continued with what I needed to do for the day. I slept soundly for most of the night, even had a dream instead of the usual nightmares. I woke up feeling great, but was exhausted by noon. I panicked a little and thought that I was spiraling down again, but didn't feel depressed, only tired. In other words, I think it went exactly as it was supposed to. I do need to schedule more rest time after my appointment next week.

 

[Powder]

Thanks for sharing this process!

I will keep this in mind.