I know that it works. But what are the real, physical things that are happening during and after treatment?
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Not really sure, but my one experience with it was bad bad bad, which I take responsibility for – because the *thing*/memory came up and instead of telling my psych, I panicked, shut down and pretended I didn’t see/feel it and also pretended I was A-OK! Thanks, bye!!
Later the day I had a major panic attack after it opened up another abuse memory relative to it, and not long after drove off the road because I was disassociating. When I got home I went into full PTSD trigger mode (pre-diagnosis) and was in hysterics & absolutely convinced people were watching me and someone was going to come through my windows and get me.
Ended up having an after hours call with my psych and went to stay with a friend for a couple of nights, but the whole episode lasted about two weeks and scared TF out of me.
I’m not saying EMDR is bad, just saying I think it’s VERY important that if something comes up, you gotta let it out. It felt like I got stuck in the trauma response rather than moving through it. I decided I didn’t have the capacity to handle stuff like that coming up at the time and that was about 3 years ago and haven’t gotten back to it yet, but open to trying again one day.
EDIT: I know sometimes we don’t seek therapy until we REALLY need it, but actually doing some stuff, like this, can be good to do when you’re in a better/stronger place in life andore able to emotionally handle what might come up.
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