r/longtermTRE

Why does it seem like many people here have spiraled into chronic ailments from beginning TRE?

As far as I understand, the model is shake --> integrate --> experience new baseline --> shake again --> ...

But it seems like every other post I read is a story of how someone tried TRE or did it for a little while and all of a sudden "unlocked" some kind of ailment that lasts a while? People dealing with depression or anxiety chronically.

I am looking to introduce TRE to a few relatives, one of which who is very much stuck in freeze, and I am worried that even with a practitioner something bad will happen to him. Like he will somehow open a big can of warms that he can't easily close, and this might God forbid cause a spiral downward.

Is this possible? Should I be worried, or am I misinterpreting the posts? I'd really appreciate if someone can help me make sense of this in more than just a few words. Thanks.

Never used a yoga mat before. I have prayer rugs but I assume lying down on a yoga mat would be much more comfortable.

I see different types of yoga mat on the online store. PVC, TPE, NBR in 4,6,12 mm. Which one is suited to TRE?

I have an environment I really like. I like my flat, I have great friends and a supportive family, I enjoy my job, the place I live, and I do things I enjoy. And still it’s really difficult for me to feel a sense of safety inside myself.

I live alone and in the evenings my biggest desire is often to have someone to cuddle with. I find myself thinking about past relationships and I’ve realized that dating gives me a lot of co-regulation. I think I’m craving a sense of safety that I don’t fully feel right now.

I’m a normal weight, but I’ve gained a few kilos over the past months. Even though I’m mindful about my diet and exercise regularly, the weight isn’t coming off. I notice I can spiral for hours about my body and how unhappy I am with it. I’m starting to wonder if this is less about my body and more about trying to create a sense of safety through control.

I’m wondering if it’s possible to build a deeper sense of safety through practices like TRE. I don’t want to constantly rely on other people for regulation and I also don’t want to be stuck in obsessive focus on my body.

Has anyone experienced something similar or found ways that helped them work with this?

Anyone else get a particular taste in mouth after doing TRE? For me it’s kind of bitter almost slightly chemical taste.
I’m wondering what this could be, could it literally be stress hormones or more likely to be psychosomatic?

Hi everyone,

I started doing TRE a few months ago, in the beginning under the guidance of a therapist. When I first started, it felt amazing and I did it daily.

Then I started having the problem that I couldn't get up from the floor after doing TRE, because my left lower back and upper left leg hurt so bad I couldn't move and had to wait it out. I stopped TRE for a few months. I recently returned to it and already on day 2, it was so bad that I nearly passed out.

I would assume that for some reason my muscles clamp up during TRE and pinch a nerve, but I'm not sure. I was always careful to stop the session when I felt my body had enough and rarely did more than 5 minutes per day. Does someone have a similar experience or know what I can do about this?

Thanks in advance!

I've been diagnosed with sleep apnea, Unfortuantely it prevents me from fully doing tre because I'm too tired and unregulated for that atm. I wondered if this condition is related to tre somehow? As maybe having some tension might stop the breathing at night?

Hello!!

I’ve done a TRE exercise before: experienced shaking, and didnt really notice much afterwards.

I come from a history of deep dysregulation in my nervous system (oscillation between freeze/fight flight).

My question is: does TRE really need to be done consistently on a regular basis to heal a dysregulated nervous system?

Can I just do it for a couple of times and see some meaningful results?

I’m also planning to do SE + Brainspotting + EMDR.

Hi all :) loooong time lurker here. I've done TRE a handful of times in the past and would like to do it more regularly, but have had a hard time committing to a consistent practice. I've been stuck in a bought of depression which has me feeling a bit stuck, so it's been hard finding the motivation to commit to anything really - especially TRE. So, I would love to hear a bit of inspiration in hopes it might help me get unstuck. Mostly, how have you integrated TRE into your day to day routine? What time of day do you usually practice? Does it vary? Are there specific things you do for integration that are also part of your routine?

Thanks all <3

Today exactly marks my 1 year of doing TRE. I've made so much progress in this year, for which some background is needed to understand my dissociation issue that I am deeply struggling with. I will try to keep it concise, while also giving some background on my experience of this journey, because I hope it might be helpful to others.

I have experienced three distinct stages in my journey so far, and I am now in the third and what I believe to be the final phase. I will call them the Tremoring phase, the Anxiety phase, and the Dissociation phase. To skip the background story and get to the real issue, go straight to The Dissociation phase.

The Tremoring phase was just that. I am extremely fortunate to have had this entire year free and financially stable to work full-time on my TRE journey, and I spent the first 5 months tremoring away most of the trauma stored in my body. The tremors happened in the following order: psoas, pelvic floor muscles (including anal sphincter), diaphragm, chest, throat, and finally facial muscles, with the less important trauma stores of glutes, quads, core, and feet interspersed in between. 5 months is extremely quick given the timespan usually given in this subreddit, but I had so many days without anything else to do other than TRE. I used to tremor for hours every day, eat, lie on the couch, do emotional integration, and go for walks/exercise, and that allowed me to quickly release and process large amounts of trauma in a very short amount of time without getting overwhelmed. (Note, I was only able to tremor for hours a day in my psoas, as it has very deep trauma stores with relatively light emotional charge. During the peak weeks of my psoas work, I was doing at least 6 hours a day of intense psoas release, with one day even hitting 11 hours. The other muscles, especially the pelvic floor and diaphragm, I was only able to tremor 15-30 minutes at a time, as their trauma stores are much more intense and concentrated.)

The Anxiety phase is where I had to deeply rewire the threat detection habits of my nervous system. After these five months of progressively emptying my body of the main trauma stores, the tremors became much softer, sparser, and without any emotional or traumatic charge. But still, when I was out in public, or even at home, I was in a constant state of freeze and tension. This tension was encoded into my nervous system, and with most of the trauma stores in my body gone, I was able to efficiently rewire. The first month of this phase, I had to rewrite chronic muscle tension that my nervous system was actively and needlessly maintaining. Then, I suddenly experienced more relaxation when I was out in public (I had always had absolutely crippling social anxiety up to this point in my life). I realized that I was no longer freezing just being around people. There were several layers of this, and I had to do specific exercises like just randomly standing still in the city center around people, to teach my nervous system that being visible is not threatening, or go to a café, and just sit and do nothing and be open and approachable, to learn that there is nothing threatening about that either. Through this kind of exposure, I was able to learn in a matter of days that social situations were not threatening. In the final part of this phase, coping structures themselves started to be dismantled. For example, I had to learn to let go of desperately wanting to control my future from the present, or that my dreams for my future were not safe, or that nothing was guaranteed in life. These were mental coping structures that I was holding onto, and they died during waves of panic as my body desperately tried to cling onto them, but eventually learned that the panic was not necessary and there was no real threat. This was by far the most excruciatingly painful phase of my entire TRE journey, but it fundamentally changed how I feel internally. No longer frozen, no longer chronically stressed, no longer living in a world full of threats.

The Dissociation phase. That did not mean that everything was fine, however. After the Anxiety phase, when there were no more threats my nervous system had to dismantle, I was left with an extremely intense state of dissociation. It took me even a month to recognize this. I spent two weeks being chronically overstimulated, overwhelmed, and distraught just from existing. Trauma leaves you unable to deal with the stimulus of the world, and closes you off from experience. For me, with most trauma tremored away and anxiety dealt with, I was unable to deal even with existence, so that I had to drown myself in my phone and distraction. I have improved in this, and for about 2.5 weeks now I am able to survive without actively dissociating myself from the world with my phone. But I am still deeply struggling. Most of the progress I have made so far is in understanding the problem itself, so let me try to explain it.

There are two states of existing in the world, dissociated and present. When you’re present, the world has many different dimensions. My room is the best example that I have experienced this. My dissociated view of my room is a vague 2 dimensional picture of colors, and my eyesight is really not sharp at all. But I know that much more can be seen. Because my room is a mess, so many random items lying around everywhere because I needed to drop them somewhere and in the past I was too dissociated to think of a proper place for them. There is dust on many surfaces because I have been too dissociated to see it. There are many stacks of shoeboxes from a project that is very meaningful to me, but I had to abandon it for a while and it is mostly forgotten right now. There are clothes lying on the floor because I drop them there instead of throwing them in the laundry basket. All these things have a reason for being there, things have history, meaning, soul, depth. To see all those characteristics of an item, or a place, or a person, that is to truly be present and to true see something. But for the most part, I just see colors and shapes, and I am unable to interact with any of the deeper meanings and implications of these items, unless I am really forced to (do laundry only when I really have no more clean clothes, otherwise the pile of laundry is invisible).

The same with people. They are alive, they have feelings and emotions and facial expressions, they have a way of dressing, and body language, and presenting themselves, that can all be deeply felt and seen. If another person is attractive, they can carry a deep layer of magic and beauty and warmth and joy. A person has so many dimensions that can be seen and experienced all simultaneously. But all I can really experience is a caricature, a body that moves and eyes that are looking somewhere. I have beaten my social anxiety, and I can have a basic functional conversation with a person, but without being able to experience another person, I am utterly unable to socialize and connect with other people in any meaningful sense of the word.

This is improving for me, very, very slowly. Recently, on sparse occasion, I have been able to glimpse a small sliver of the state and meaning of my room. I have been able to look at things, or hear things, or feel things (feelings are mostly flat and non-existent for me though),  and sense the meanings behind it just a tiny little bit. But it’s hardly anything, and spiritually, I feel deeply sick, lonely, wounded, and humiliated.

The past two weeks, I have taken two psychedelic mushroom trips (psilocybin, I live in the Netherlands here so I have easy legal access). On those occasions, I was able to experience the world more deeply, and these experiences have given me some insights into what kind of experience and presence is possible. And, even during those trips, I was still mostly dissociated and I think that in a healthy, present state, it is possible to experience so much more than I did during those trips. Additionally, in the aftermath of these trips, I have grown slightly but noticeably in terms of presence. For example, after the first trip, I noticed that while I’d quit dissociating with my phone, I was still dissociating with my thoughts. If you have ever tried meditation, you will be familiar with how your mind will lose interest in your object of meditative focus and run off in all kinds of wild directions of thought. This is also dissociation, as your mind uses your thoughts against you.

I do not know what role, place, or purpose psychedelics should play in my fight against my dissociation. I have learned about presence and dissociation from the experience, and I have experienced decent enough growth in the aftermath of using it, but I am very uncertain whether the growth is definitive and lasting, or whether it is just an aftereffect that will dissipate as the afterglow dissipates.

I am deeply, humbly asking for guidance and help from those who have when through this process before and have arrived at this state of undissociated presence through their TRE journey. I am very aware that everybody’s journey is different, that others may have experienced this process of de-dissociation and acquiring presence very differently, and that for this reason advice and guidance is so hard to give and follow. This has also been the reason why I have explained my journey and problem so far with this much detail, and I hope that we can find some common ground in our experiences.

So, please, if you have finished TRE or are further along, let me know whether there is anything that I can do to help this process other than the hard, painful passage of time spent trying to meditate and be present. I know that perhaps, eventually, I will get there, but right now I am too lost and confused not to reach out and ask for something better.

Hello TRE people, I have just had two self initiated sessions of TRE from videos down there in the wiki, it's such a nice feeling after the session. The first session was characterized by strong, rough shakes, almost something like heavy metal rock music and the second session a day later was an intense involuntary vibration in my pelvis, like driving a Toyota Land Cruiser on washboard corrugation. What do you think to help a newbie out?

Hi everyone. Beginner ish question of something that happened that I’m not sure how to make sense of. Over the weekend I was unwell and went to the ER. It was something more mild but I did need help. However I catastrophise a lot and it’s linked to my trauma, nobody helping me and me needing to do everything I can to survive as I feel like nobody is there for me.
I’ve been doing SE and IFS for a few months with a therapist and it’s going great, I’m intentionally avoiding TRE after overdoing it last year.

A couple days after this, I wake up in the night (rare) to my left shoulder tremoring, I think. Although, if I think it was tremoring then it probably was. I didn’t get back to sleep and felt okay that day, didn’t think too much of it.

That night, I do some self regulation exercises I learnt from SE, nothing crazy. I sleep fine too but I wake up feeling like I’ve been hit by a bus: severe fatigue that left me bedbound all day. I feel better today which is the next day. The only way I can make sense of it in my mind is my body discharging the stress from the weekend a couple of days later out of my system, whilst I’m sleeping. I have also felt burning/heat in my forearms which I had when I overdid TRE before.
I haven’t experienced any spontaneous releases outside of SE, let alone tremoring. If I was going to have a release I would not think it would be tremoring as I haven’t done that in a year.
Why did this sleep tremoring cause me such negative side effects if it’s meant to be a ‘good’ release? I didn’t incite it obviously. I don’t expect to feel nothing with SE and TRE but the fatigue was really bad.

But again, it couldn’t exclusively be from the tremoring. My body was in a heightened sympathetic state which it needs rest to recover from. I just can’t really wrap my head around it and it making me feel so bad. Although now I sound like I’m contradicting myself haha.

Dear friends,

Over the past months we've talked about thawing, about anxiety and where it comes from, and about the practical tools for working with the nervous system as it heals. This month I want to talk about something that sits underneath all of it. Awareness. The canvas on which the play of experience and life itself happens. 

Awareness is beyond thoughts and emotions. Beyond the concepts of pacing, integration and all the various aspects of practice. These concepts remain as relevant as ever, but when we take a step back and put some distance between the experienced and the experiencer, something magical happens.

In contemplative traditions this capacity is called the witness. At its simplest, it is the ability to observe what is arising in awareness, thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories, without being entirely identified with it. To feel grief and know that you are the one feeling grief, without becoming it. To notice the anxious thought without becoming the anxious thought.

A useful image is awareness as a canvas. Everything that arises in experience appears on that canvas like a projected image. The canvas itself is unchanged by what appears on it. It doesn't grasp at pleasant images or push away painful ones. It simply receives whatever arises and allows it to pass. The practice is learning to rest in the canvas instead of getting lost in the images.

Let me emphasize that the witness is completely different from dissociation. Dissociation is a protective splitting from experience that numbs sensation and creates a sense of disconnection from oneself. The system shuts down access to experience because the experience is too much to bear. The witness is the opposite movement. It turns toward experience with full presence, feeling everything completely, while retaining a thread of awareness that remains larger than what is being felt. Where dissociation closes, the witness opens.

Developing this capacity is genuinely difficult while significant trauma is still stored in the body. A nervous system under internal pressure generates a near-continuous stream of thoughts, worries, and reactive patterns, and the conditioned mind treats all of it as urgent. Every uncomfortable sensation demands a response. Every difficult emotion pulls for resolution. Trying to observe all of this from a place of calm, spacious awareness is like trying to watch clouds from inside a storm. If you have tried and found it nearly impossible, nothing is wrong with you. Genuine equanimity requires resources that stored trauma consumes.

And yet this is precisely the skill most valuable to begin cultivating now, during the stage when it is hardest.

When stored material surfaces, two things happen in rapid succession. Something arises, a sensation, an emotion, a fragment of memory. Then the mind grabs it and begins building a story around it. The sensation becomes evidence of something wrong. The emotion becomes a problem to solve. Within seconds, awareness has left the body and is lost in the head, spinning through narratives that feel urgent and real but are largely the mind's attempt to manage what the body is trying to complete. Every time this happens, the completion gets interrupted.

Training the reflex to catch this moment, to notice when awareness is about to leave the body and follow the mind into its loops, and to redirect it back into felt sensation, is the single most practical skill available for supporting your healing. It doesn't require a calm mind or manageable emotions. It only requires enough awareness to notice the pull toward thought has begun, and to choose the body instead.

In the beginning this will be difficult and the reflex has to be trained again and again. You'll often find yourself deep in a thought loop before the noticing happens. That's normal and part of the training. With practice it fires earlier and more consistently, until returning to the body becomes nearly automatic.

The same skill lets you recognize destructive thought patterns for what they are. The anxious mind generates its stories with tremendous conviction. Rumination feels like careful analysis. Catastrophizing feels like realistic planning. The critical inner voice feels like honest self-assessment. From inside these patterns there is no distance from which to evaluate them. The witness creates that distance. When you can observe a thought as a thought, the rumination becomes recognizable as rumination, the loop becomes recognizable as a loop. The patterns don't disappear immediately, but the spell of complete identification with them breaks. That break is where freedom begins.

When you practice this, start with what is safe and neutral. The feet on the floor. The weight of the body against the chair. The breath moving in the belly. These anchors are almost always available and carry less charge than the places where tension and emotion concentrate. From there, awareness can expand gradually as groundedness allows.

I also want to give you a glimpse of where this leads, because from inside the difficult middle stretches it can feel unimaginable. As the deeper layers of stored tension release through consistent practice, the internal pressure eases, and awareness begins to open on its own. The spaciousness that once required so much effort starts to become the default. The witness that had to be deliberately cultivated begins to arise naturally. The mind becomes calmer, and there is simply less driving it. Thoughts still arise, but in a quieter field, and they pass without the same gravitational pull. The canvas, once so crowded and restless, has more and more open space in it.

The somatic work and the awareness practice feed each other continuously. Developing the witness, even imperfectly, supports the release process by letting material move through without constant interruption from the mind. And the release process, over time, makes genuine awareness progressively more available. Every small moment of presence, every return to the body, is both a support to your healing and a seed of what will eventually grow from it.

Go slowly. Stay curious. Come back to the body, again and again. Make it your sanctuary.

Much love to all of you

Hey all,

Recently since a month i have been getting into yoga poses during the tre session. I don't tremor much only stretches which are similar to yoga poses. Mostly i get into hip openers and cry in that pose and also back and leg slow stretches.

I had done yoga before with a yoga teacher, similar yoga poses I get into while doing TRE but TRE poses are a bit overwhelming even though I do yoga nidra after session.

Also I am a bit addictive to these stretches as they feel soo good and happen randomly when not in session too

I don't tremor much only these streches. Is that normal?

Is yoga a form of TRE?

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!

Hey everyone, just discovered TRE and did my first 5 minutes tonight.

I have cptsd from chiklhood emotional trauma, and its something I uncovered about a year and a half ago or 2 years ago. I have since gotten to a place of understanding and general acceptance. I have slowly been developing self love that ive never felt before from myself.

That being said, ive dealt with dpdr for 12 years. Someday its tame, mild, or severe. Just depends. Ive also developed obsessive self evaluation that has really hindered my social abilities and has taken a toll on me mentally. I have jaw and chest tightness that comes and goes. Almost seems like im already thawing without tre but im not sure?

Im wondering your thoughts on this and if tre is right for me. Im hoping to resolve my mental health issues mentioned that have come as a result of uncovering trauma. Ive always been highly sensitive and a very anxious person. Its just been elevated over the last year, after I had gotten it all pretty under control the years prior.

Thanks so much and sorry for the ramble

Hi all,

It has been six months since I have started TRE and I needed some help and didn't know whom to reach out to, so I'm just posting it here. I just hope somebody can help me out.

I am a 25 year old guy with a private job in the IT sector. And I don't know man I am just feeling lost. I have been doing this for the last 4 years and each day when I wake up I feel like just quitting it. But I don't even know what I want to do in my life. Everything just feels like nothing matters. And I keep feeling like this from the last 3 years, but ever since I have started TRE I keep having these thoughts on a daily basis. I don't even know what would make me feel good anymore. I just feel completely lost.

Like what is the meaning of all this, it just feels like an endless loop of suffering 🫩

I've got a severe case of post viral fatigue that wrecked my nervous system. I've been doing mind body work but I'm not able to move much yet. Sometimes my body starts convulsing without a reason, mostly when I'm relaxing in bed.

Is this spontaneous TRE? Is it my body releasing tension and trauma from muscles on its own? I don't feel emotionally different when it happens. Last night my toes and feet were just convulsing for an hour, as well as my hips. It's like a tremor.

I’m wondering what someone who has experienced end-stage TRE actually feels. Are they still dominated by negative emotions, meaning that they still feel their mind being crushed by them? Do negative emotions still determine and control their actions and thoughts without them realizing it? Or do negative emotions no longer control anything?

And are there still negative emotions at all, or are they only present residually? Do they feel a permanent sense of happiness, or simply a permanent absence of negativity?

I have many other questions like this, and I would really appreciate it if people who have reached end-stage TRE could describe their inner experience in detail. I would like to understand where this practice ultimately leads.

Thank you very much.

two weeks ago, I did TRE for 2 minutes then two days later I did 8, and I’ve been getting flooded with emotions, lots of crying, a new tic, lots of fear and reactivity. like it even changed something in my personality, I started sharing my feelings more, oversharing sometimes and then feeling a lot of shame about the stuff I shared. I haven’t been able to function well and it’s been intense.
I feel a bit better today because I finally managed to get decent sleep.

I should’ve been more careful. I just got too excited after the first session because I sensed that it works and I wanted more of that calm feeling. I don’t know if this was bad. it was overwhelming. I’m gonna wait a while before I try again and when I do try I’m gonna limit the shaking to 1 minute at first and then wait.