u/LichenTea

I’ve been having the worst few weeks of my life releasing toxic shame. It feels incredibly physically painful where my fascial tension is, like it‘s trying to rip itself apart, and I’m afraid of reaching out to people I know for help because I feel like I’m going to say or do something wrong, or that I’m going to get rejected and abandoned. Every awkward pause or look makes me wither with shame. The thoughts are very convincing, and even grounding and knowing that I am releasing old shame isn’t helping me not get sucked in to the narrative. If anyone has any advice with riding out the shame, please share. Thank you 🙏🏼

Here's a question I've been pondering for a while. There's really no good way of describing what's going on with the low/labile/extreme moods when working with trauma release to the average person unless if they're especially well-educated or understand trauma themselves.

Of course I'm not talking about trauma dumping to the cashier who asks how you're doing, but what about a closer friend or an acquaintance you're getting to know more and see regularly? Or your fitness instructor or other professional who would find it relevant to know? In other words, practicing unmasking a bit and being vulnerable, but with the right amount of disclosure and to the right people.

Usually my fallbacks are, if I'm currently doing some really hard processing, "I'm having a hard time right now" or "it's been rough" or some variation, and more detailed content if it makes sense (loneliness, sadness, fear/anxiety, exhaustion). I'm usually met with empathy or commiseration but sometimes I want to tell them it's just not the same! And usually the more activated/harder the processing is, the more I want to dig my heels into the sense that the pain I'm feeling is the worst in the world and nobody on earth has ever felt pain like this and nobody else could ever understand - but I know you guys do. And I know for a fact that when I have finally reregulated, I would have regretted acting out in that way. (So far I haven't.)

Anyway, a little vent there at the end - I might need to find a talk therapist again, haha. So, what's worked for you?

Does anyone else have the experience of feeling exactly where on your body your emotions release "from"? I've had some really intense pain in my fascial knot these past few days and I have not being doing any practices other than grounding and regulating. The sensation is similar to a deep cramp or tear. When the knot feels physically painful I also feel emotional pain - not really any one singular emotion, it's more similar to like, the pain of being alone, judged or excluded.

I have noticed that when I focus on the knot in a somatic meditation I can induce tremors, but this often leads to overdoing symptoms. I can't help but wonder though if I should be doing something to help it along, as it is far more painful than it's ever been and feels like it is having trouble unsticking. It is, however, more manageable than overdoing/overwhelm, so I don't want to add gas to the fire if I don't have to.

Thanks in advance!

Hello,

First time poster to this sub. Not at all a kundalini practitioner, but I had an experience last year that sounds similar to a premature awakening and wanted to ask here for guidance and help.

My background: Exactly one year ago I did a very safe, legal psychedelic retreat out of desperation because of my ongoing issues in life, feeling very fearful, helpless, anxious and stuck, even after years of therapy and vipassana practice. It was not a pleasant experience but I did not feel any lingering negative effects. Three months after I did a somatic experiencing session and it opened a firehose of what I now understand to be unrelenting trauma release. The SE practitioner did not place any guardrails on my session and was not very supportive afterwards. Neither my talk therapist nor I honestly had any idea I had CPTSD at the time of doing the session, as I didn't suffer outright abuse or capital T traumatic events. However, I had a childhood full of peer rejection and bullying, emotional neglect, high pressure to achieve, was not acceptable or lovable as I was, but I had repressed all of the pain and sadness around that and normalized it to protect myself from my own psyche.

This process has been very emotionally difficult and physically painful with some incremental improvement in intensity week by week, but recently it has been increasingly intense again and I am struggling a lot with feeling sane and practicing grounding and regulating. Right now I feel physically hot and buzzy with a lot of facial/jaw movements and emotionally I feel fearful of people and of being harmed. Are there any practices recommended for my situation? In the past I tried to be around others as much as possible, do physical grounding practice, daily walks, and a lot of rest. I tried to continue with meditation but am too dysregulated to stay with any form other than yoga nidra. I appreciate any help you can offer, thank you.

I recently learned about the concept of memory reconsolidation and have been wondering how it applies to TRE practice and if it's a necessary part of the healing process.

In brief, most, if not all therapist-assisted trauma processing modalities use a form of memory reconsolidation whether or not they consider it a formal part of the therapy; ex. in EMDR or schema visualizing therapy you go into a memory, which opens it up, and essentially rewrite it to how you wish it could have been, and the change in meaning confuses the brain and (if I understand correctly) the brain prefers the new meaning. It doesn't change how you remember the actual memory or even that you felt badly during it, but it doesn't have the same emotional charge anymore.

Of course, in TRE we don't choose the memories or emotions that come up but in my experience we do eventually hit an "insight" similar to doing hours of vipassana. Mine comes in the form of having a sudden brain flash while thinking of something and an emotional wave of sadness or grief. It feels like at the time this happens, I am able to access my inner child and tell her soothing and compassionate things. I don't know why but it's actually quite automatic - sometimes during insights I will imagine people who have supported me around me, or I will give my little one a hug and reassure her. It's possible that sometimes I do not say the right thing or don't say anything at all or I accidentally cut off the release because I am defending against it, and I wonder if that affects the "quality" of the release or if it releases anyway or if it waits to be released again more fully.

Can anyone who -doesn't- do this kind of inner talk speak to whether or not TRE has worked for them? Or have you discovered that it works better when you do?

I'm posting this in hopes that other people can share their similar experience when they complete one "unit" of TRE, keeping in mind that I do not have a formal practice or sessions, only involuntary tremors.

1. In the morning upon awakening, my "knot" or primary area of tension starts to develop a range of physical sensations that correlate to an emotion. It may be a pressure, tightness, pain, pulsing, sense of weakness, tickling, itchiness, pulling, or heaviness. There may be some tremoring at this stage directly related to the knot, but not much, such as squeezing, twisting, or twitching. This is also the time of day when both the knot and emotions feel heaviest and hardest to feel, and feel very real and hard to stay with.
2. A number of hours later, the tension/emotions reach a peak and start to subside, and I get a metallic or sour taste in my mouth unrelated to food and not as a result of acid reflux. I still feel emotionally dysregulated or vulnerable at this stage but am more able to ground and be present.
3. a. I may have a cathartic release once I'm alone in a safe place, like my car or at home. If there was this "fuller" release at some point during the day, the tension/emotions are not as strong the next day and the cycle begins again.
4. b. If this release doesn't happen, there will be other forms of release or expression that my body will do, such as clenching the fists, moving the jaw, dry heaving, or facial expressions. Tremors are also stronger at this time. Then the cycle repeats again the next day where the emotional intensity and tension builds in the morning.

> If I do some form of body-centered meditation or even just lie down, I can generate more tremors and give them space to come out, but it's not clear if these tremors take the edge off or if they add more stress to the system. Possibly what it does is it accelerates wherever the process currently is, so if I'm building up to the peak then it "gets worse" and if I'm integrating then it "gets better".

In the beginning months of my journey, these steps were not so discrete and/or could have been happening at the same time, resulting in an overwhelming experience where the body was releasing a lot and not having time to regulate or integrate. Nowadays it's much easier to see these distinct steps and how it peaks and wanes.

I didn't think this would ever happen for me but I finally started feeling horny all of a sudden a couple of days ago. Ever since I started releasing trauma I have had no real sexual interest other than for a brief time when I was dating someone at the beginning and was using sex to regulate my intense attachment anxiety. I was also having intrusive sexual thoughts, which have mostly subsided.

It started when I was driving home alone; I suddenly felt a surge of sexual urgency. It was directed at someone in a group I had been hanging out with just before the drive, whom for many reasons I don't think would be healthy for me to date. In fact the heightened sexual attraction is probably a symptom of the unhealthiness of a potential relationship (limerence, confusion and anxiety being mistaken for feelings of attraction or love, physical intimacy standing in for real connection).

My released emotions generally don't point to one person in particular but usually are triggered by types of people or situations, so I'm not sure if this is a result of "releasing sexual energy" or if my nervous system is just finally free enough to experience sexual attraction again? Do I deal with this the same way as any other emotion, watch it come and go and try not to feed into it or believe it? Will it gradually normalize eventually? And it would probably be a good idea to avoid this person until it all blows over?

This is kind of tangential to TRE, but I was journaling with the intent to figure out my past-self (and current self)'s problems and instead realized I was meeting myself with a lot of criticism and self-judgment. Because of my lack of social skills and mental health issues I acted very strangely (dare I say, cringe) for the better part of my adolescence, teen, and young adult years. I know part of that is just undeveloped prefrontal cortex, but I still can't help but feel immense amounts of shame for how I behaved back then - which I'm sure added to my trauma as I started repressing "shameful" feelings and behaviors like joy (to avoid acting stupid) and attraction (to avoid limerence) in my later adult years. I feel like these judgments still come up in present day too - not in the moment, but days or weeks after I may think about an interaction I felt good about and then just automatically feel a sense of ick for no good reason.

Anyway, with that context, does anyone know of any practices that would help with self-compassion or forgiveness for past self? For those who do IPF, do you think this is a good scenario to use, and would you age up or keep it more childlike? Thanks in advance!

I've been having a relatively new physical symptom lately that feels kind of like my ears are trying to clear after an elevation or pressure change. I also suffer from jaw clenching/teeth grinding and related pulsatile tinnitus in one ear, which has mostly gone away since I started tremoring.

Also, I've noticed that for me, I only ever have tension and related tremors on my left side. It's so pronounced that I even feel scratchiness on only the left side of my throat/neck. Occasionally a tremor will be evened out on my right side, such as hip shaking or frowning, but this is rare. Interestingly, my left side is the more stable of the two - I usually have more injuries in my right lower back/hip/knee.

Has anyone else had something similar? I'm not worried, just looking to share experiences.

Almost at the end of 8 months of involuntary releases. I‘ve been feeling particularly grody these past few weeks. Since my nervous system has gotten exponentially more resilient and I have way more energy now, I’ve been trying to get out more and make new friends. The trouble is, I find myself being just completely socially “dumb”, shyer than ever, and I have been struggling to apply my mentalization skills. In some ways I know I am beating myself up for not being healed yet and having social mastery. I don’t even know what I’m feeling really except for sadness/depression for being so bad at making friends.

I’ve always had problems making friends and socializing, so I think it might be old stuff mixing with new stuff - has anyone else ever had this experience? It’s so complex compared to the releases I’ve had before - in the past I could label anger, fear, sadness and know I was going through integration and ground through it, but now it‘s so hard to tell if I’m releasing or reliving. Would it be better to just stick with safe people I already know and actually step back from socializing for now, to lessen the pressure until I’m more integrated? Any experience or advice would be appreciated.

Or, in other words, can you fail the AAI if you are more dysregulated, distracted, or tired than usual?

I'm joking about failing, of course - but could you get a "worse" score than if you took the AAI on a good day? Is there an advantage (or possibly even a disadvantage) in trying to optimize your chances of remembering and relating yourself well, or does the test/scoring automatically take that into consideration? I understand the test not only asks for what happened but also takes into account things like correcting yourself if you realized you said something wrong or forgot something, and I'm pretty sure the likelihood of me remembering what I said 15 minutes earlier can change from day to day, attachment-related or not.

I ask because I'm genuinely curious about getting one done and scored professionally, but I would want to make sure that it's as accurate as possible, especially with the cost of scoring, and avoid "oops, all disorganized!" if that's not actually the case.

Thanks!

I might already know the answer to this already, but I'm asking just in case:

I'm currently somatically processing my C-PTSD and it can cause me to have an excessive amount of thoughts, some of them being frightening and intrusive. When I started non-facilitated IPF around the same time, I hadn't unearthed as much relational material yet and had quite an easy time imagining at least one figure and had a couple of deeply impactful sessions that were very regulating. At present, however, I've noticed that some of the time I will start imagining (not on purpose) things like morphing faces or scary touch. This happens with metta practice as well. Usually when this happens I will "rewind" and reimagine something different, but I obviously worry that imagining bad things happening with the ideal parents one too many times is going to poison the well of the technique.

I understand that working with a facilitator would help me navigate these occurrences better, however, would it be better to let the somatic processing run its course before attempting even facilitated IPF, just so I don't have to deal with constantly fixing the visualizations? (And possibly, as a bonus, I wouldn't have to do as many sessions once the underlying trauma is addressed?)

Many thanks!

I’m having a specific fear that’s coming up again and again that I’m not sure how to deal with, which is the terror of not knowing who or what I am and the terror of becoming something I don’t want to be - for example, I have always identified as a certain gender and sexuality, and intrusive thoughts about not being those things are terrifying me.

Through a psychedelic retreat before trauma release I believe I finally developed a “self” and the sense that I have one and exist - this feels different.

Logically I can tell where this fear comes from - never being mirrored correctly or lovingly by my caregivers intertwined with a rejection of what I showed them, along with a rejection of what I (intrusively) think I might be.

Has anyone else had this fear come up, and how did it resolve? Did you realize a different identity than what you thought you were and accept it willingly, or did you have to process that more in a cognitive way? Or did you not change much at all?

Looking for a reality/sanity check here. I've started having an obvious new "symptom" of occasionally seeing flashes and spots in my vision, mostly on the right side of my visual field (that I can tell). I also seem to be "getting back" a kind of vision I had as a kid, which is seeing blue/red on the edges of certain objects like white overhead lights, or a sense that I could see more colors than "is actually there", sort of like the brain has trouble smoothing out a color. I do have pretty bad eyesight, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if that part is just my tired brain freaking out at an artifact from my glasses. Has anyone else had this experience and did it resolve, or stay the same?

I’ve been in therapy off and on for over 20 years and have yet to find a good therapist - with the exception of one who I left only after a few sessions that may have been promising in my 20s (yes, I know how that sounds).

My current therapist has been… okay. They have been helpful in times when I actually talk about deep, urgent stuff, but in the day to day I feel a huge disconnect and misattunement. For example, when they self-disclose or give advice, it doesn't feel like it’s geared towards me at all or that they really “see” me. I self-diagnosed with CPTSD and they don’t disagree, but this pattern of being missed by therapists (including this one) is an ironic repetition of the experience I had growing up. And like many of my relationships, I’ve given them a little too much time to make things work when there’s a fundamental mismatch but haven’t felt empowered to leave because I don’t think I can do better.

I’m already working somatically on the trauma so I don’t need an EMDR/SE type of therapist. I think mostly I am looking for someone who knows when to dig and when not to dig, and also who understands what is going on with emotional flashbacks and can give reality checks and support around that. I’ve heard that psychodynamic is a good modality for CPTSD - is there anything else I should look for or try? I don’t particularly relate to the IFS style but I could be convinced otherwise. And I understand that it’s really the relationship and not the modality that’s important, but I have to start somewhere.

Many thanks in advance!