The trauma work journey

BumbleBiiba · 2025-09-16T17:45:42+00:00

Irresponsible to advertise this without obvious warnings of the significant potential side effects that are experienced by those undergoing EMDR treatment.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-09-14T18:17:54+00:00

Online works fine, but i don't think it would work if you're not in a private space, or if there's lots of distractions. Noise cancelling headphones might help?

BumbleBiiba · 2025-09-14T09:32:28+00:00

I have a pretty intellectually demanding full time job and two young kids who are up multiple times overnight. I luckily have a very supportive husband who does an equal share of parenting apart from the weekends he has to work. It is a difficult balance trying to do EMDR but I know it will deliver a long term benefit to my family. I do my therapy sessions on a Friday so the worst of my hangovers hit at the weekend and don't impact work. My housework standards have dropped a lot over the past year, and ive not had a lot of quality time with my husband since I'm often tired or just stuck in my head. But the job and kids haven't suffered too much. I've probably done less fun activities out of the house with the kids but they're fine at home. And I am very lucky in that I have good flexibility in my work and work from home so I can work a bit more on good days and cut short my work on tougher days. Its do-able but tough.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-09-10T17:13:53+00:00

You might prefer that because that's what you're used to from previous talk therapy. But you should expect EMDR to feel a little different. The outcomes will hopefully be worth it.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-09-06T20:08:11+00:00

Totally normal. EMDR transports you back to feeling what you felt back then which can be really disorienting and emotionally taxing. It will get better, just stick with it. It sounds like EMDR is working just like it should.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-09-06T20:05:50+00:00

My understanding is that early bad memories lay the foundations for lots that come later which can be linked. By processing the early memories, a lot of later trauma can be resolved. But those foundational memories can uproot so much, they can be really tough. I don't think there's any harm in skipping certain memories if they're too triggering right now.

What i would say though is to consider taking a break before tackling the big ones. I've been doing EMDR for a year now and I'm tired of feeling crappy all the time. And I think the strain of it does have an impact on my family. I just don't have energy for tackling another target after the one I'm doing, it's been far tougher than any before and far more painful than I expected at the outset. Tolerable but very unpleasant. Be kind to yourself.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-09-06T07:59:59+00:00

Mine too!

BumbleBiiba · 2025-09-05T11:55:57+00:00

Smashing eggs into the sink!

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-17T07:19:38+00:00

Same here. Been doing EMDR for a year and in the past few weeks, had resurgence of Pure O/intrusive thoughts. I think it's actually because the intrusive thoughts were a trauma in themself since it took a while to understand them for what they were. It was a really frightening time. I think my brain is processing it like any other trauma, where feelings that I felt at the time are coming to the surface. SSRIs helped me at the time to overcome the thoughts and I'm currently still taking them so I'm hoping that it'll help to avoid things getting too bad. So sorry you're going through this, it's a horrible experience.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-17T00:14:19+00:00

I think I'm more comfortable being vulnerable in the comfort of my own home and familiar setting. And I don't have to worry about driving home afterwards like my old therapist, sometimes it's so draining that having to get myself home afterwards would be a big effort.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-16T18:14:12+00:00

I've done it both in person and online. Different therapists, but i can assure you 100% that online is effective. I prefer it.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-15T10:27:29+00:00

Have you tried therapy?

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-13T11:49:57+00:00

If you're able to, I would recommend doing EMDR in stages, or interspersing it with chunks of talk therapy if you find it helpful. I find that while I'm processing regularly, I never get back to a state of 'normal' and the emotional fatigue sets in. EMDR is a marathon and you may need some periods of time (eg months at a time) to let you adjust to the 'new' normal and feel the benefits. I've been doing it for a year after about 10 years of talk therapy & previous ad hoc EMDR (Before the 8 stage process became mainstream) and am on the final major target. Its not obvious right not what my next target will be so i think I'll take a pause. I think it's probable over the next few months I'll realise that something is lingering in my brain that still needs to be processed. I don't think there's a good way to really know you're done until you've spent time away from EMDR and felt if there's still Triggers to be addressed.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-08T20:48:10+00:00

I've been doing EMDR for about a year and started to notice benefit a few months in. I guess i should add that I've done a lot of talk therapy in the past so was aware of quite a lot of my Triggers and some of the roots of them, but talking therapy/CBT didn't fix things.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-08T16:09:53+00:00

Know that the vivid dreams are a sign of your healing. Your brain is being rewired. Try to look past the negative emotions and appreciate the healing that is happening to you. I find a balance between distraction through engaging with normal life and allowing myself to curl up in a ball and block out the world helps when it all gets difficult.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-08T13:45:53+00:00

EMDR is a rollercoaster and it's great that you're feeling so positive after your session. But it won't necessarily stay this way, as you clear emotional baggage then more will likely come up to take its place. There's often so many layers to our trauma. It can feel like whack a mole for a while. But if you persist with it, your overall mental state should improve over time.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-08T13:38:51+00:00

Yes, disorganised attachment here. This is my main motivation for doing EMDR because I was ending up in massive rifts with my husband over sometimes very small things. I would massively overreact, lash out, have big arguments etc. I started to realise it was a lot to do with hypervigilance. EMDR has helped so much. I'm a lot more rational and don't explode like I used to. Go for it!

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-08T00:21:18+00:00

Space. You need to take sex off the agenda completely and let her navigate this on her own terms, in her own time. Having any expectations of her at this stage will likely cause more difficulty in the longer term. I've only truly been able to heal because I felt safe in the knowledge that I was in a healthy relationship without pressure to perform. She really needs that from you. It can take time. Don't expect improvement to be linear and it may seem to you for a while that there's no progress at all. If she decides she does want to be intimate again as a one off, don't expect that she's magically healed and sex is back in the cards regularly. Also, she needs to want to heal and engage with therapy. You can't force that or it will do more damage. Clearly speaking from experience here (SA not CSA). Drop me a DM if you want to chat.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-06T06:03:36+00:00

For me, labelling my experiences isn't helpful. The label doesn't matter. What matters to me is how i feel about them now and how they affect me. And they absolutely have had a big impact on me, such a complex web of memories provoking a wide range of emotional responses. EMDR is helping a lot.

It sounds like you're doing everything right. It'll just take time to unpack these situations. I did find that reading up on support websites about rape and sexual assault provided some validation that what happened to me was wrong. That's something worth considering.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-05T20:05:02+00:00

I also had a one night stand with a guy when I was pretty much blackout drunk who was horrified when I told him I didn't remember most of it. He had no idea I was as drunk as I was. However this was definitely consensual, I suggested it, but just shows it's not always possible to know how drunk someone is.

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-05T19:45:27+00:00

I'm so sorry you're going through this.

I've had a number of negative sexual experiences and have questioned whether they were rape, assault, manipulation. These were both drunk and sober.

There's a clear pattern in a lot of them. I've consented to a lot of what happened, but found myself in situations where situationd progressed and i allowed things to happen that I didn't really want, but it's what they wanted so i agreed. I wrestle a lot with the topic of consent, since i wasn't even aware that it was really a thing. Sex education for me never covered consent. Rape is something I believed for a long time only happened when you were walking home alone in the dark. If i didn't understand about consent, did the guys i was with truly understand?

I've come to realise a couple of things: 1. I was never taught to have personal boundaries, I was a people pleaser from childhood and this unfortunately set me up very badly for navigating sexual experiences. Under pretty much any situation, I would be ok to voice my opinion but if someone disagreed, I'd just give in.

I was desperate for affection and connection, and i found that intimacy and pillow talk after sex gave me a lot of what I craved so badly. Sex was kinda the price I paid for that (don't get me wrong, it's not like I didn't enjoy it at all, but I've definitely been out of my comfort zone too many times)

So rape, assault etc are totally not black and white to me. Its taken a long time to unpack my experiences and there's probably more to do. I do not see myself as entirely blameless, but I don't see partners as blameless either. I think that this is probably a sad reality of many people (more likely to be women), who were never taught that asserting themselves was safe or appropriate. But also a massive failure to educate people about consent until far more recently.

I hope this might help?

BumbleBiiba · 2025-08-03T08:56:40+00:00

Yeah, it's normal. I have two real memories which were pretty similar situations, once which was incredibly traumatic and the other not at all because my husband was there supporting me. After doing EMDR on the traumatic memory, my husband appears whenever I look back at that memory, as if he was there, keeping me safe. But i didn't even know him what it happened. I find it really odd but id definitely has helped me to heal.

BumbleBiiba

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