A client of mine, about four months into processing, had been doing some really heavy lifting. We were moving through the old stuff, and she had finally tapped into this really clean, mobilizing anger.

But then, right in the middle of a session, the forward momentum just stalled. She looked at me, looking genuinely terrified, and said:

"I feel like there's an ugly person inside that all my people-pleasing has been trying to hide. And I'm scared of what I'll find if I keep going."

I thought I'd address this today because this isn't just her fear. It's a universal crossroads in complex trauma recovery.

You do the work, you finally stop blaming yourself, you get angry at the people who hurt you... and then suddenly, the anger evaporates. You are left staring at a sheer drop of panic. You start thinking, "What if I'm not traumatized? What if I'm just fundamentally toxic? What if the 'nice' version of me was just a lid keeping a monster locked in?"

If you are a client reading this and you’ve hit this wall, I want you to take a deep breath. You are not regressing. You are not broken.

In my practice, I call this the "U-Turn." And if you'll let me gently pull back the clinical curtain for a minute, I’d like to explain exactly what your nervous system is doing right now.

Here is why healing suddenly feels so incredibly dangerous:

1. Anger is just a doorway (and you have just walked through it...)

For those who survived chaotic childhoods by becoming chameleons - fawning, people-pleasing, erasing your own needs, anger is a massive developmental milestone. When you first feel it in EMDR, it means your nervous system is no longer trapped in a shutdown/cower state. It finally has enough juice to protest.

But anger is a mobilizing emotion. It moves outward. And once that initial wave of "I didn't deserve that" burns off, the anger acts like an open door.

And what's standing right behind that door? Fear.

Because if you stop being the accommodating, shape-shifting person you've always been... who are you? Your brain suddenly realizes the survival armor is coming off, and it sounds the alarm.

2. The illusion of the "Ugly Self" (and the fear of losing your edge)

When you grew up in an environment where your authentic feelings got you punished or neglected, your brain learned a brilliant, brutal rule: Who I actually am is not acceptable.

So, it built a false self. The "good" kid. The one who reads the room and becomes whatever is safest.

But after decades of wearing this mask, you lose track of the core underneath. Your protective parts start to believe that the mask isn't just a strategy, but a containment vessel. You become convinced that whatever is under there must be vile, or else why would you have worked so exhaustingly hard to hide it?

For high-achievers, this shows up as a fear of losing their "edge." I'll have clients say, "If I don't have this external pressure and anxiety pushing me, I'll be revealed as lazy, worthless, and defective."

This fear isn't a prophecy. It’s just biological friction. It's evidence of how long you've had to hide.

3. The Pivot

There is a moment in this U-Turn where something shifts. It’s not dramatic. It’s quiet, but the quality of the distress changes. I always watch for it in sessions.

Before the shift, the fear is paralyzing: "What if I actually am a bad person? I can't look." After the shift, the fear is still there - but it is accompanied by a profound exhaustion. It sounds like: "I am so tired of being afraid of this. I am so tired of hating myself. I don't want to live like this anymore."

That isn't resignation. That is readiness. It’s the willingness to finally find out what's actually there, even if it's scary, because staying in the fear has become unbearable.

4. The Messy Calibration Phase

Here is the part of rebuilding that nobody talks about: it is messy.

You decide to stop running. You try to set a boundary with a family member or a partner. And it completely backfires. The other person escalates, the house goes cold, you get a massive stress headache, and your internal critic screams: "See?! You don't know how to do this. You're just a difficult, toxic person!"

From my side of the room, this is what I see: Your brain just tried a brand new behavior for the first time in your life. Of course it was clumsy.

Your nervous system doesn't learn through perfect textbook execution. It learns through experience. You tried it, it was terribly uncomfortable, but you didn't collapse. You didn't apologize just to restore peace. You survived the consequence. This isn't failure. This is calibration. You'll notice this happening multiple tlmes throughout the EMDR journey as the "new self" gets built.

What you'll actually find when the mask comes off...

This is the most profound part of my job. Across hundreds of hours of watching people navigate this terrifying U-Turn, I can promise you one thing with absolute clinical certainty.

Not one single person has ever found a monster underneath. Not one.

When the fear finally burns out and we look under the people-pleasing, here is what is actually sitting there:

• A child. One client, terrified she would find a "vile" person inside, instead accessed a memory of herself as an infant on the floor while her parents screamed at each other. That was the "ugly self." A baby. Alone. Adapting to chaos.
• Inherited voices. You'll find that the "ugly" feeling isn't even yours. It’s your father's criticism, or your mother's contempt, installed so deeply you mistook it for your own identity. When you trace it back, the brain spontaneously realizes: I didn't put this here. It was handed to me.
• Profound grief. Grief for the protection you never got.
• Legitimate anger. The clean, proportionate anger of someone who was hurt and is finally allowing themselves to know it.

The monster is a mirage. It's a protective guard dog generated by the exact same system that suppressed you in the first place.

Healing doesn't mean you turn into someone else. When the self-blame lifts, your real self just quietly emerges. It's catching yourself dropping a two-year argument over a door lock because you suddenly realize you just don't care to spend the energy. It's your chronic morning anxiety simply... vanishing.

You are not the chameleon act. You are not your people-pleasing. You are not the exhausting, hollow performance. Those were just brilliant adaptations that kept you alive.

What's underneath isn't ugly. It's just you. And you are incredibly worth finding.

(PS: Just a quick note as always, I write these posts out for my clients to help them understand their own processing, and I usually put the core content here on Reddit. All client material is highly composited and anonymized. Because this "U-Turn" phase is so massive and terrifying for clients, I've written a much deeper dive into this - including exactly how therapists should hold this space for their clients, and why boundaries aren't "one size fits all." You can read the complete article here: https://drantoniodcosta.com/blog/the-u-turn-when-healing-gets-scary.html

Open to learning how other therapists and clients have navigated this specific fear of the "ugly self," and happy to answer questions in the comments!)

Have you ever sat in an EMDR session, watching the fingers or holding the tappers, looking at that ball on your screen movign back and forth, waiting for the massive flood of emotion and... nothing happens?

Instead of the dramatic catharsis you expected - the tears, the vivid flashbacks, the big breakthrough, you get... nothing. A blank mind. Maybe a vague tightness in your chest. A strange sense of watching the memory from a distance.

And immediately, the intellectual, over-thinking part of your brain kicks in: "I'm doing this wrong." "My trauma wasn't bad enough." "I'm just fundamentally broken and cut off from my emotions."

I want to address this today, because I hear some version of this in my practice almost every single week. Culture has glamorized the "abreaction." We've been sold a script that trauma healing is supposed to look like a dramatic breakdown in the chair.

But the nervous system doesn't work that way.

When a client with CPTSD tells me they "feel nothing" during processing, my answer, grounded in both neuroscience and clinical experience, is always the same: It is working. More than you realize.

What you are experiencing isn't a failure or resistance. It is a highly sophisticated survival mechanism I call auto-titration.

The body paces what the mind cannot handle.

In therapy, we talk a lot about pacing and staying within the "Window of Tolerance." But what I've observed across hundreds of sessions is that the nervous system doesn't always need us to pace it. It paces itself.

When you target a genuinely traumatic memory and your mind goes completely blank, your prefrontal cortex has effectively thrown a circuit breaker. In cases of chronic trauma (especially the overmodulated/dissociative subtype of PTSD), the brain actively suppresses emotional intensity to prevent you from being flooded and retraumatized.

It's giving you the memory in a 10% dose, because 100% would be a sledgehammer.

I see this show up constantly as Somatic-Only Processing.

A client of mine was processing a memory of childhood abuse. When I asked what she was noticing, she looked at me apologetically and said, "Nothing, really. I don't feel any emotion. My mind is totally blank." She rated her distress at a 0/10.

But as she was saying this, her left leg was cramping violently, her neck tension had spiked, and her breathing was rapid and shallow.

Her body was processing the trauma at full intensity. Her conscious mind was simply being protected from it.

In trauma, conscious experience gets split. You can access the full physical sensation of the trauma - the churning stomach, the trembling, with zero access to the emotion or the narrative. The body is remembering what the mind cannot narrate.

"But I don't see any images. I don't have a story."

If you're targeting memories from when you were very young, or if you survived an environment where you had to constantly disconnect from your reality to survive, your explicit memory (the hippocampus, which builds the "story") was likely offline when the trauma happened.

The trauma was encoded entirely as raw sensory data in the amygdala.

So when you process it now, you might never get a clear visual or a neat narrative. The processing runs entirely through the body because that is how the memory was stored. The goal isn't to force yourself to "see" an image; the goal is to discharge the somatic survival energy.

Across my entire case series, a clear pattern always emerges: The body comes online first. The emotions follow (sometimes weeks later). The narrative and explicit memory are almost always the last to arrive. The nervous system builds the bridge from the bottom up.

The true measure of healing -

This is the most heartbreaking thing I hear: clients dismissing their own healing because they aren't sobbing in the chair.

If intensity isn't the measure of healing, what is?

In my clinical opinion, healing is measured by the quiet expansion of capacity between sessions.

It's not the dramatic release:

• It's the client who had argued with his wife about a door lock for two years, having a spontaneous moment of "why do I care?" and simply dropping the argument.
• It's catching yourself picking up your phone for a dopamine hit, pausing, and putting it back down - a "pause" between trigger and reaction that literally never existed before.
• It's your chronic, daily morning anxiety simply... vanishing.

These aren't dramatic breakthroughs. They are quiet, sturdy shifts. And they are the actual evidence that your nervous system is updating its threat response.

The session simply plants the seed. The days that follow are where the garden grows.

If you find yourself doubting whether your "quiet" EMDR processing is actually working, remember this: That doubt itself is often just a protector part trying to keep you safe. The doubter shows up right before the painful material surfaces - not to sabotage your healing, but to pace it.

Thank it for its concern. And then trust your nervous system. It kept you alive through things your conscious mind still can't fully grasp. It knows exactly how much you can handle right now.

You are not doing it wrong. The pace, however quiet it may feel, is the rhythm of real healing.

PS: This is a continuation of the last post I'd made. All client material is anonymized and composited. This is for education, not therapy advice. EMDR should always be provided by appropriately trained practitioners. I've covered the core of this phenomenon here, but I've written a much deeper dive into the specific clinical types of auto-titration, why pendulation happens spontaneously, and how the BASK model of dissociation plays into this. If you want to read the full 3400+ word data dump, you can find it here: https://drantoniodcosta.com/blog/wisdom-of-nervous-system-auto-titration.html (Discretion: It's an external link to my personal hosted website.)

As always, I'm open to taking questions and curious to hear how other tappers and therapists navigate these "blank" sessions...

I lurk around here, and this was one of the subs that made me jump into the split keyboard and ergo universe. I haven't seen many posts on this topic so I felt like sharing my experiences with this setup...

So basically I use Niri as my window manager/compositor... And I was contemplating between an index/middle finger trackball or a trackpad...

The cirque ones seemed too small, and the only thing available here that is decent rn (and utterly expensive) was the apple trackpad.

And I was pleasantly surprised... I don't have wrist pain anymore which I used to with the mouse. (The glove80 is for the RSI)..

Now the reason I mentioned Niri is because it works absolutely seamlessly with the navigation because niri/wayland supports multi-touch. Moving between monitors and windows and workspaces is a breeze. I feel I'd have opted for the trackball if it weren't for this one integration which the trackpad does way better without requiring to hold or press some keys...

Tap also means I'm not straining my wrist.... which I'm not sure how much it'd affect the RSI, but.. 🤷‍♂️ it exists...

I keep it tilted towards one side because most of the times - my left hand clicks the buttons for copy pasting, clicking, etc etc.. on the glove80, while the right just navigates. Sliding from the glove80 is smooth since they're almost at the same level and I just swivel my arm with the armrest as the pivot, so the shoulders stay offloaded.

I used to use a mouse layer before on the glove80, but I haven't used it since the few days I've got the trackpad. Which is surprising... I find it convenient to lift off the keyboard, which I didn't when I used to use the mouse. I'd rather be slow with a mouse layer than uncomfortable. Don't have to anymore 🙌

The trackpad was uncomfortable when flat on the table - gave me bad shoulder and wrist pain, hence I got that cheap tablet stand to raise it up so my wrist doesn't have to bend.

Wanted to just share if anyone else felt like experimenting with a split keyboard and a large trackpad. Attached some pics.

A client of mine, a few months into EMDR, looked at me at the end of a session and said it quietly, almost as an afterthought:

"I don't really know if I have a core."

That sentence has stayed with me because it unpacks something I see across almost every single complex trauma client I work with. Not the big, loud symptoms - the flashbacks, the panic, the rage. The quieter thing underneath. The feeling that there's no actual person in there, just a collection of responses and performances that get switched on depending on who else is in the room.

From the outside, these clients usually look fine. They hold jobs, they have relationships, they show up. But inside there's no felt sense of who they are. What they value. What they want - apart from making other people happy enough to keep them around.

This isn't indecisiveness. It's a wonky sense of self. The feeling that your personality is a suggestion rather than a fact. That if you stopped performing, there might be nothing underneath.

And there's a specific fear that keeps coming up, especially among people who have built a functional life on top of all this: "If I heal, will I lose my edge? Will I stop being creative? Did my trauma make me special?"

I want to talk about all of it. What this wonky self actually looks like, where it comes from, the terror of letting it go including that fear of losing whatever made you "you", and what I've watched happen as people rebuild from the inside.

The False Self as Survival

When you're a child in an environment where expressing authentic needs gets you criticised, ignored, or worse, you learn to hide. You read the room and become whatever seems safest.

One client told me: "From childhood right I have this issue of a shell outside and I'm just performative. I'm not really living, I'm just performing my role." By first grade he already had multiple lives running - one for parents, one for teachers, one for friends. None felt real.

Another could light up any room socially but admitted: "Even when I'm feeling very shit, I still smile. When I see a professional, I'm able to project feeling better than I am." Underneath all of it, she felt invisible. As a kid she'd learned to curl up into a ball and become as small as possible around her volatile father. That skill just got more sophisticated over time.

This is the chameleon thing. It gets called social intelligence or adaptability. But in complex trauma it's a disappearance. You get so good at being what others want that you lose track of what you actually are. The cost is a hollow, empty feeling underneath all those performances - like there's no "there" there.

Decision Paralysis and Perfectionism

When you don't have an internal compass, even small decisions feel impossible. One client told me: "I struggle with understanding what is the appropriate reaction. Should I be angry? I either think it's completely my fault one day and the next day I feel it's not, or I don't trust myself to make good decisions."

She had no baseline because no one had ever mirrored back a consistent, healthy reality. So she oscillated between extremes, never sure.

And perfectionism, in this context? Not about high standards. It's survival. If your entire sense of worth depends on external evaluation, any mistake risks rejection. I've had clients who couldn't speak during processing until they'd rehearsed the "right" answer in their head - terrified they'd mess up the process itself.

That's control, not excellence. And it never fills the hole, because no amount of external achievement creates an internal sense of okayness.

The Missing Core: Validation from Outside, Goals That Aren't Yours

If you don't know who you are, you look to others to tell you. One client admitted: "I am too much dependent on external validation because like my own values are missing." She'd fight with her mother for hours, not just out of anger, but because she desperately needed to hear You're my daughter. She was waiting, at thirty, for a stamp she never got.

Another described his entire motivational system in one devastating sentence: "Without external control or expectations, I am fundamentally worthless." He couldn't do things unless someone else required it. No internal fuel. He'd been running on external gas his whole life, and without it, he stalled.

And then there are the outwardly ambitious people who feel hollow inside - chasing shiny carrots they absorbed from somewhere else without ever asking what they actually wanted. Some build their whole identity in opposition to something else, defining themselves by what they're not, which sounds like independence but is still just holding someone else's framework and flipping the sign.

The Terror of Healing and the Fear of Losing Your Edge

This is the part that sounds backwards but is true: GETTING BETTER CAN FEEL TERRIFYING.

The person you've been - the chameleon, the perfectionist, the validation-seeker, survived. That identity, however painful, kept you afloat. Letting it go feels like free-falling into nothing. One client could intellectually see that the "vile" label she'd carried her whole life wasn't hers. But when I gently invited her to set it aside she panicked: "If I separate it from myself… what's left? Is there anything else?"

Vile was familiar. Vile was home. The possibility of being okay felt like an identity death.

And then there's the fear I hear from high-functioning survivors specifically: "If I heal, will I lose my edge? Will I stop being creative? Will my ambition evaporate? Did my trauma make me special?"

That fear is completely valid. Because trauma hijacks your natural gifts. If you're naturally perceptive, trauma weaponises it into hyper-vigilance and scanning every microexpression for threat. If you're naturally creative, trauma channels it into elaborate internal escape worlds. If you're naturally capable, trauma molds it into perfectionism that bleeds you dry. So it genuinely feels like the trauma gave you something - because your capacities got tangled up with survival programming.

But here's what I tell my clients: the trauma didn't gift you those things. It just forced you to use them on an emergency setting. You've been running at 100% capacity, all the time, on fear.

When you heal, you don't lose your creativity, your empathy, or your drive. You actually get them back. But now you get to choose when to use them, instead of them being ripped out of you automatically by a triggered nervous system. You don't lose your edge - you just stop bleeding on it.

What Actually Heals This

These patterns aren't permanent personality defects. They're adaptations. And in EMDR, I watch several things actively rebuild the self:

Creating internal resources that were never given. If no one ever gave you consistent warmth, your nervous system doesn't know what safety feels like. So before we go near trauma, we build synthetic internal experiences - protector figures, nurturers, a future Older Self who's already survived this and can offer steady guidance. The brain encodes these felt experiences of worth until you can access that feeling directly, without needing someone else to provide it.

Tracing the "why" back to its source. I ask repeatedly: Where did that belief come from? Did you decide that, or did someone teach you? A client who felt he had to explain himself to exhaustion traced it to his mother, who always questioned everyone's motives. When he saw the pattern wasn't his, he felt an immediate physical lightness. The brain frequently discovers: I didn't put this here. It was placed inside me. That realisation creates space for something new.

Bypassing intellect to access body wisdom. Complex trauma clients are brilliant explainers - they can talk about their trauma in sophisticated terms without feeling any of it. But trauma lives in the body. So I redirect: What are you feeling in your chest right now? Your legs? One client's uncontrollable leg shaking turned out to be somatic discharge - her body purging trauma while her mind kept trying to manage it. Letting the body lead is one of the fastest routes back to the authentic self.

Unblending from protector parts. That harsh inner critic, the "maybe it was my fault" voice, the part that keeps you small and invisible - they're not enemies. They're exhausted bodyguards who've been on shift since you were a kid. When we acknowledge them, thank them, and ask them to step aside for a moment, the young, wounded part underneath can finally be seen and comforted.

Learning to differentiate. Before, every single threat felt identical - cower, self-blame, shut down. As the raw activation burns off during processing, the brain spontaneously begins making distinctions. A critical boss and an abusive parent stop feeling like the exact same threat level. Gray areas appear. The client realises they're not powerless everywhere anymore.

The Sequence I Watch Happen

It's not linear, but it's directional. Self-blame cracks: "It was all my fault" starts shifting to "I was just a kid, trying to survive." Grief arrives for what you never got. Then righteous anger - clear and grounded, the beginning of boundaries. After the anger burns through, there's a quiet clearing. Small authentic preferences surface. The music you actually like. The life rhythm that actually suits you.

One client who started therapy feeling worthless without external expectations eventually told me: "Anything not good for me can leave." Another, after years chasing love from someone who treated her as disposable, simply said: "I didn't want to be with him anyway." She'd known all along - she'd just been too disconnected from herself to trust it.

These aren't dramatic transformations. They're quiet, sturdy shifts. And honestly, they matter more than almost anything else.

You have a self. You always did. When the self-blame lifts and the body releases what it's been holding, the self doesn't need to be invented from scratch. It just emerges, like something that was always there, waiting for the noise to quiet down enough to be heard.

You are not the chameleon act. You are not the perfectionism or the hollow performance. You're not even the "specialness" you're afraid of losing.

You're the one underneath all of that. And you are worth finding.

PS: All client material is anonymised and composited. This is education, not therapy advice. EMDR should only be provided by appropriately trained practitioners. I've covered almost everything here in this post, but if someone wants to read the whole 3000+ word data dump from multiple patient records, you're free to do so here: https://drantoniodcosta.com/blog/the-self-that-wasnt-allowed-to-be.html (Discretion: It's an external link to a personal hosted website.)

As always, I'm open to take questions and curious to learn how other tappers and therapists navigate through this...

“How can I heal this very deeply rooted self-hatred and shame? I don't feel like something is wrong with me but that I am the thing that is wrong.”

After going through my clinical notes looking for patterns, I realized something: the way trauma heals isn't random or chaotic. When I first started tracking this, I assumed healing followed a logical, clinical textbook path. It doesn't. After hundreds of hours watching trauma actually resolve in real-time, I've seen that the nervous system has its own exact, specific map. And it almost always starts in the exact same, painful place.

If you are someone who carries that heavy, suffocating weight of self-loathing, if you feel like you are the pathology - I want to gently pull back the clinical curtain. I want to share my observations from the inside of EMDR processing, to show you exactly what is happening in your mind, and why that deep-rooted shame is actually a brilliant survival mechanism.

Here is the map of what actually happens when trauma heals.

1. The Universal Starting Point: Self-Blame

If I had to name the single most consistent thing I've observed across all my clients doing deep trauma processing, it would be this: Everyone - without exception - begins by blaming themselves.

>“It was all my fault.”

>“Maybe I really am too difficult.”

>“I was just a difficult kid. They did their best.”

When I first started noticing this, I thought it was just a function of low self-esteem. But the more I sat with it, the more I came to understand something genuinely important: Self-blame is not a mistake. It's a survival strategy.

When you are a child (or in any dynamic where you are dependent on someone for survival) and that person fails you, neglects you, or hurts you, you face an impossible problem. You cannot leave. You cannot make them change.

But there is one thing you can do that gives you a semblance of control over a terrifying universe: You can decide it's your fault.

Because if it's your fault, theoretically, you can fix it. If you're the problem, you can change. You can be quieter, brighter, less needy. Self-blame preserves the possibility of hope. It keeps the caregiver "good" and safe by making you the problem. The mind makes a trade: it takes the unbearable pain of "I was failed" and converts it into the manageable pain of "I failed."

That deep-rooted feeling that you are the thing that is wrong? It’s not the truth. It is a brilliant, elegant piece of psychological engineering that kept you alive.

2. The Layers of Defense (Doubt & Intellectualization)

Before we can undo that trade, the mind puts up defenses. It learned very early that certain truths were too dangerous to know, and it creates "static" to protect you.

• The Doubt: Almost universally, clients start doubting the memory or the therapy. "Am I making this up? Maybe it wasn't that bad." This doubt is not evidence that nothing is there. It is the mind creating noise so you don't have to feel the underlying pain.
• The Intellectualizer: If doubt doesn't work, the mind shifts to analysis. It starts contextualizing. Explaining their parents' childhoods. Using buzzwords like "cognitive dissonance" or "attachment theory." It sounds like insight, but it's a defense. Thinking is safer than feeling.

When these parts show up, we don't fight them. We thank them. They kept you functioning. We just ask them to step back a little so we can look underneath.

3. The Emotional Sequence: Passing through Shame to reach Grief

Once we get past the defenses, the somatic (body) and emotional processing begins. It usually follows a distinct gravitational pull:

• Numbness/Fear: First comes the flatness, followed by a diffuse, bodily dread. The fear of the child waiting for the storm.
• Hurt & Sadness: A heavy, crushing sensation. The realization of genuine helplessness.
• Deep Shame (This is where your self-loathing lives): Woven throughout the process is shame. Not guilt (what I did), but shame (what I am). "I am defective. Something is fundamentally wrong with me." Shame is what protects you from the absolute devastation of realizing you were unprotected. It desperately wants to stay hidden. But when it is finally witnessed in a safe therapeutic environment, it loses its power.
• Grief: After shame, the grief arrives. This isn't grief for what happened; it’s grief for what should have happened and didn't. Grief for the protection that never came. The realization shifts from "I am bad" to "I was just a kid." Arriving at "I was just a kid" is not a small thing. It is the whole journey.
• Righteous Anger: Anger is almost always delayed. It requires the self-blame to lift first. It’s rarely rage - it’s clarity. It’s the clear, grounded anger of someone who finally accepts the truth. As one of my clients powerfully stated during a session, addressing the void of her past: "Let anybody say anything - where were you?"

4. What Resolution Actually Looks Like

Resolution does not look like forgetting. It does not look like deciding the trauma didn't matter.

It looks like an "ecological zero." The memory exists, but the physiological charge - the way it hijacks your nervous system in the present is gone. It looks like grief that doesn't swallow you anymore. It looks like a settled sadness that you can hold, and then finally set down.

Most importantly, resolution looks like the spontaneous emergence of self-compassion. The person who has spent their entire life believing they are a toxic, broken entity suddenly has access to a different perspective. They can look at the younger version of themselves with the care they would offer a stranger.

A final note to the person who feels like they "are the thing that is wrong":

The heaviness you are carrying might not even originally be yours. Sometimes, through EMDR, we trace this profound sense of inadequacy back to a pre-verbal state, and realize it is inherited. Absorbed from the emotional environment of your earliest childhood, before you had the cognitive framework to refuse it.

You aren't broken. You are carrying a load that was handed to you, and your nervous system has done a beautiful, agonizing job of adapting to carry it.

Healing is not a straight line. But it does move. From self-blame to self-compassion. From carrying what was never yours, to the strange, spacious lightness of finally putting it down.

(PS: As always, I write these posts originally for my clients to help them understand their own nervous systems, and I post the core content here. This is not research, but personal views, and I'm totally open to taking questions and listen to tappers and therapists' views. That being said, this topic is massive, and condensing it for Reddit meant leaving out two major pieces: Somatic Processing (exactly what your physical body is doing while this happens) and the deepest layer of all - Inherited Trauma (what happens when the wound you are carrying isn't even originally yours). I've put the full, comprehensive ~3,000-word version on my blog here for those who want the complete map: What Actually Happens When Trauma Heals: Inside EMDR Processing

Dunno why I feel like sharing this, but it was playing as I typed this... maybe it's relevant to your system, maybe not - https://open.spotify.com/track/3X7uFMzJrEE0sxn62qd8Ch?si=9d6bf769531a4444

I've wanted to write about this since a long time, but found the topic to be way too deep, and couldn't figure out how to approach it in a way that conveys the actual (difficult) felt experiences of the client. I hope I've done justice to the same through this write-up. Again, as always, these are my personal experiences - a cumulative log of the multiple clients who've allowed me to be with them through this journey...

So, I want to talk about one of the most confusing and exhausting parts of trauma recovery...

Often, a client will do some really deep processing, use their grounding tools, stay within their window throughtout the process, and leave the session feeling wonderfully calm and light (parasympathetic system activated - this is a good thing - yawning, good sleepy, relaxed, etc.).

But two or three days later, the exhaustion sets in. I'll get a message from them, and they are just completely overwhelmed. They can't sleep, their chest feels tight, and the anxiety is rushing back. They tell me, "I feel like I'm spiraling. Therapy feels like it's making things worse. It's just too much to bear right now."

If you are a client reading this and you’ve felt that post-session crash, I want you to take a deep breath. I want to validate how incredibly tiring this is. You feel safe in the session, but the moment you are alone, the healing process feels like a storm.

Please hear this: You are not failing at therapy. You are not broken.

If you'll let me, I'd like to gently pull back the clinical curtain and explain exactly what is happening in your nervous system. I want to show you why this "crash" is actually a sign of your brain’s beautiful, protective programming, rather than a sign that therapy is harming you.

Here is why things feel so heavy the moment you leave the therapy room:

1. How your brain "shares the load" (Structural Dissociation)

If you survived a chaotic or painful childhood, your brain did something incredibly creative to protect you - it divided the labor.

In therapy, we call this Structural Dissociation. You have a part of you that functions in daily life - the part that goes to work, uses logic, and gets things done. But you also have younger, emotional parts that hold the raw memories, the fear, and the physical tension.

When you are in the therapists office, your daily, adult self is present. You feel safe because we are tackling the heavy stuff together - something called "co-regulation" also helps. But between sessions, that sense of safety can waver. A younger, emotional part of you gets triggered at home, and it suddenly feels overwhelming because that younger part doesn't yet have the coping tools your adult self has. You feel flooded because that little part of you feels like it's sitting in the dark without the therapist there to hold its hand.

2. The 3-to-7 day ripple effect

During EMDR, we help your brain access a memory while signaling that you are finally safe. But your brain doesn't stop healing the second you walk out of the door. Over the next 3 to 7 days, especially while you sleep, your mind is actively digesting and reorganizing that old pain.

Because those old memories are moving around, the protective parts of your brain - whose entire job for decades was to keep that trauma locked safely away, start to get understandably nervous. They see that the vault is open, and they sound the alarm. The distress you feel isn't a step backward; it’s just the biological friction of old, locked-away things finally moving. Your protectors are just trying to keep you safe.

3. Time collapse (Why it feels like it's happening right now)

When you feel that intense anxiety between sessions, you might think, "This feels exactly like the past." You are entirely correct.

Emotional memories don't experience linear time. When an old feeling is activated, it brings the original body sensation with it, but without the logical understanding that years have passed. It doesn't feel like a memory; it feels like it is happening right this second.

And this always happens in the body first. Your chest gets tight. Your mind feels the panic, looks around your safe room, and tries to figure out why you feel scared. It reaches for the nearest explanation: "Therapy is causing this. I am in danger." This is why you can't just "logic" your way out of it. The alarm is ringing in your body, not your thoughts.

"But isn't this hurting me? Isn't this what's called retraumatisation?"

When you are in the thick of this exhaustion, a part of you might passionately feel like therapy is actively harming you.

I like to think of it this way: Imagine you have a deep splinter that your skin healed over long ago. You can function, but it always aches. When we finally open that spot to gently remove the splinter, the area becomes raw, exposed, and very tender. It's entirely natural to feel that soreness and think, "Opening this up was a mistake."

But that tenderness means the wound can finally breathe. It's the old ache surfacing, so you can feel and process it in the present safe environment you're in; It's the same old, familiar wound. True retraumatization means therapy is creating a new wound. But processing discomfort comes in gentle waves. It peaks and subsides. It feels familiar. And eventually, it passes.

The urge to push therapy away

Because this is so tiring, you might feel a sudden, strong urge to quit therapy, or you might feel angry at your therapist.

If your past taught you that getting close to people eventually leads to getting hurt, it makes perfect sense that a protective part of you wants to push the therapist away before they can let you down. It’s an attachment test. You are waiting to see if we will abandon you when things get messy. (A good therapist won't).

How we can make it gentler...

Therapy shouldn't constantly feel like you are drowning.

If you are spiraling between sessions, we simply slow down. We hit the brakes on the deep trauma processing. In my practice, we shift to a 70/30 ratio: 70% of our time is spent just building comfort, stability, and coping skills, and only 30% on the heavy processing.

We stop expecting your terrified inner child to use adult logic. Instead, we build gentle "Bridge Objects" (like holding a smooth stone, or a soft blanket) and use EMDR to anchor feelings of warmth and safety to those objects, so you have something physical to hold onto at home. We thank your angry, tired protectors for working so hard, rather than fighting them.

If you are crashing between sessions, but you still bravely walk through your therapist's door the next week... your fear didn't win. Given everything you have survived, that is profound, beautiful progress.

You aren't breaking. You are just doing the bravest, hardest work a human heart and nervous system can possibly do. Please be incredibly gentle with yourself this week.

(PS: Just a quick note as I've mentioned before, I write these posts out for my clients and usually put the complete content here on reddit. But this time since this topic was wwaaayyy too big (and super IMPORTANT), I've decided to just touch on the main points. As much as I refrain from putting links to my own website (since some of ya'll think that's "promotion"), I'll have to for this post as I'd completed a much longer and comprehensive write up for this (4200 words, v/s 1200 words for this post): https://drantoniodcosta.com/blog/complex-trauma-therapy-feels-too-much.html

My next post would be on the Phobia of Positive Affect - Why some clients see more negatives than positives and feel like there's not much change (even where there's been a lot), or feel the emotions they feel are just being "guessed" by them and hence therapy hasn't actually helped. I'll try and complete it as a reddit post in itself. Should be small, but this was the base article for that next one.

I share this hoping it wraps a little bit of understanding around your shoulders if you're finding therapy really hard right now. Open to learning how other's have addressed this issue and open to questions in the comments as always!)

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An Advanced Tool for When the Storm Hits: "Don't Fight. Feel."

** Clinical Caution: This is for therapists to guide clients, NOT for clients to follow and perform: Please only try this approach when your client has enough "capacity" - meaning they are still grounded enough to text you or recognize where they are. If they are completely overwhelmed or severely dissociating, skip this and focus ONLY on physical grounding (like holding an ice cube or splashing cold water on their face). **

So, the script goes like this:

If you do have a foot in present reality when the panic or rage hits between sessions, try shifting your relationship with the pain:

1. Recognize your capacity: The very fact that you can notice the rage, or that you are able to text your therapist about it, shows massive capacity. It is proof that your brain is post-processing, not breaking.

2. Anchor to Present Safety: Gently encourage yourself to stop fighting the physical signals (like hand pain or chest tightness). Tell yourself: "Don't fight. Feel. But remember, this time I am in a safer space - my room, than back then when I had no choice."

3. Look underneath the Rage: That angry, protective part of you is acting like a siren trying to bring attention to deeper, unprotected feelings. I often give my clients an Emotions List. When the rage hits, look at a list of emotions and try to find the 10-12 feelings hiding underneath the anger (like betrayal, exhaustion, grief, or terror). When your protective rage is finally given the vocabulary to express what it is actually guarding, it often softens, opening the door for profound self-compassion.

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When the hands from the spool start to swoon, To locks that press the soul beneath. All they gain is control over the puppet, Playing games till it's time for supper.

Whoever knew playing could turn into preying? Where the prey is made to bend and comply. What started once tries to extend, Like a cat-and-mouse chase that never ends.

Strings pulled tighter, breath grows thin, A silent war beneath the skin. Each whispered move, each forced disguise, Reflected faint in hollow eyes.

The hunter grins behind the thread, While pieces dance as if not led. No spark breaks through, no voices rise, Just quiet loops and practiced lies.

And when a thread begins to fray, Another hand will take its place. The stage resets, the roles replay, No trace of struggle left to trace.

For even broken things can bend, And call their binding something kind. Till prey and player start to blend, And no one’s sure who holds the mind.

I thought I’d write today about a specific subset of clients I’ve noticed who tend to “dissociate” from emotions by intellectualising them. This post isn’t about the entire spectrum of emotional numbness or blunting (which can stem from depression or other conditions), but just this one pattern.

I’ll share a few examples that fall across a spectrum, but where I use a similar underlying approach.

1. The “Zoned Out/Numb” Functional

I asked a client how they’d been. They said they were “mostly very zoned out during the day.” I asked what that felt like. They said: “I remember everything that I need to do. I just keep reminding myself of whatever work I have, whatever is next. Just that. Nothing else.”

So I asked: “How should you be feeling instead?” They answered: “I want to be able to look forward to meeting friends or doing anything fun. But I just don’t feel up to anything at all.”

They added: when they’re with friends, they feel drained, and if they stay too long, they feel like they’re likely to snap or cry.

Do you notice the lack of words that express emotion? Yes, the word “feels” is there, but it’s used to describe actions - crying, snapping. The speech is cognitively descriptive; they’re using words to narrate what they did or plan to do.

Then I asked about a specific moment: “About to snap - what does that feel like?” I asked them to step aside from the thoughts and showed them an emotions chart (I use my own, linked below).

Suddenly, the cognitive wall broke. They said: “I feel frustrated. I feel impatient. I feel very irritated at the slightest things.” I offered “uptight?” and they said yes.

These are emotions.

I returned to the “zoned out” state with the chart. They pointed to: Lost. Unattached. Overwhelmed. Indifferent. Sleepy.

I showed them the contrast: their initial description was entirely cognitive - “keeping track of work” - while their actual experience contained nine distinct emotions. The organized, functional language about schedules was the dissociation itself.

Please note - Do NOT do this without proper resourcing. I open the cognitive barrier ONLY if the client has a resource they can use to manage those emotions. There’s a very good reason the mind uses intellectualisation to create a sense of “emotional numbness,” and you need to respect that.

The reason I opened up the can of worms in this case was simple: without feeling emotions, clients have no idea where to use the resources they’ve been taught. I mean, the resources are for when you’re overwhelmed, anxious, etc. But if the client is intellectualising, that trigger never comes, so the resources become useless.

In such cases, gently improving emotional vocabulary and then applying resources to the emotions that come up is what I’ve found helps.

2. The Overthinker/Planner

This was another interesting presentation: The client starts planning and thinking about how to reply to a message. Or during conversations, they’re planning what to say, trying to frame a reply… they feel like they don’t “fit in.”

Sometimes there may be a neurodiverse component, yes, but a lot of the time these are just emotions like hollowness, confusion, self-doubt, and anxiety, all wrapped around a cognitive action. Being occupied with the planning and thinking helps them avoid facing that bundle of 3-5 emotions underneath. That would sting a lot.

Such clients are sometimes in a state of freeze/shutdown underneath and function only because of this cognitive dissociation. Opening up to those dissociated emotions risks overwhelming them and making the situation worse by deepening the shutdown - what’s sometimes called trauma flooding.

Capacity building using resources becomes again very, very important here. Processing is a secondary concern; you first need good resources to build trust in their own system and empowerment to tackle their thoughts and life’s stressors.

I use multiple resources - from Vipassana meditation courses, to splashing ice-cold water on the face, to suggesting swimming (if they’re open to learn), to meditation (if it doesn’t shut them down), walking, yoga (sometimes). My point is that it’s not just about protective figures and containers and light streams… resourcing needs to be holistic.

3. The Dismisser

Another form I’ve seen: This client dismisses the trauma itself. Ask about bullying and they go… “Lol, that happens to everyone, right? I don’t think about it.” Ask them how it felt back then… was it fine? Their tone of voice and facial demeanour changes, and they say it wasn’t fine.

Again, based on their other presentations (if they also show signs from the examples above), I may not delve deeper here… lest the emotions that come out overwhelm them. For lack of a better generational slang - sometimes delulu is solulu, until you have enough resources to open that Pandora’s box.

I’ve written about these before, in a more creative way (the Guardians article, blended beliefs post), but I thought I’d drop the raw presentations here. The doubt parts, the “why did they do this to me,” the ones wanting justification, reasons, “trying to explain themselves” but knowing they’ll never be heard… all are, I feel, just cognitive-level dissociations by the mind to distract from the underlying emotions. Asking the client to keep these thoughts aside and just focus on the emotions and sensations has helped me move past the blocks and help clients process them at the somatic level (again, this is with solid resources at hand, because the emotions were dissociated cognitively because they are strong and may overwhelm the client).

Anyways, I feel this is a shared experience and can unsettle both clients and therapists, so I thought I’d shed some light on it to normalise it - why it exists, and how to gently approach it.

I would love to know from tappers how other therapists have addressed such tendencies and how therapists approach clients with numbness/emotional blunting because of cognitive dissociations.

Also, here's the link to the emotions chart I use and share with clients to build emotional vocabulary: https://drantoniodcosta.com/work/Emotions-List.html

Also, we have an AMA here on r/EMDR today - May 2nd and 3rd - Holly Forman Patel, EMDRIA Certified EMDR Therapist, EMDRIA Approved Consultant, and EMDRIA Approved Basic Trainer will be taking your questions on EMDR therapy and misconceptions: https://www.reddit.com/r/EMDR/comments/1sxbiw0/ama_announcement_emdr_therapy_common/