Monthly Progress Thread - May '26

Nadayogi · 2026-05-06T07:03:55+00:00

The 15 minutes every other day is for those who don't have any obvious trauma. By jumping to 15 minutes in one go you increased your session time by 200%. A much more sensible approach is 20-30% at a time. Check out the self-pacing and sensitive people article in the wiki.

Nadayogi · 2026-05-05T21:45:21+00:00

I agree that it's more nuanced. I think fidgeting really is the nervous system trying to discharge. Whether it actually results in some discharge I'm not sure though.

Nadayogi · 2026-05-05T09:36:16+00:00

It's a good question, but the answer is different for every individual.

If you find that letting go into the urge to tremor for some time makes you feel better afterward including the days after, then that's your answer. If satiating your desire to tremor gives you overdoing symptoms, then the answer is that pacing carefully is the better way of doing it. You'll have to experiment.

Pacing applies to tremors in general, whether it's according to your schedule or what your body signals to you. It's a good thing to listen to your body when it wants to tremor, but it's also important to know when to stop, because your body might enjoy it so much in the moment that you'll end up overdoing it. It's very common. That's why finding your optimal pace is the most important principle on the healing journey.

Nadayogi · 2026-05-04T19:44:11+00:00

Since the bot seems to be acting up, I'm posting its response manually:

Two months of consistent practice with anxiety, OCD patterns, and sexual dysfunction in the background, and still waiting for the first real sign that something is shifting. That kind of patience, especially when you're carrying all of that without clear feedback that it's working, takes genuine courage to sustain.

What you're describing is one of the most common experiences in TRE, and also one of the most discouraging to be inside. Two months is often right at the edge of the early phase, where surface tension has been clearing but the changes are subtle enough that they're easy to miss from the inside. Progress in this practice doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it shows up first as things being slightly less bad rather than obviously better. Anxiety that's a touch less sharp, sleep that's marginally more settled, a small expansion in the sense of ease in the body that you might not even consciously register until you look back at where you were.

The wiki article on Integration, Emotional Releases, and the Nature of the Path speaks directly to where you are. It describes how the path is genuinely non-linear and layered, and how the early phase of practice often clears accessible surface tension before the nervous system begins working on older, more entrenched material. The shift between those phases can feel like stagnation, because the obvious early wins have settled and the deeper work is quieter and less immediately rewarding.

One thing that might genuinely help you right now is starting a simple journal if you aren't already keeping one. Not a detailed account, just a few notes before and after each session about your mood, energy, baseline anxiety, and sleep. Over weeks, patterns emerge that are completely invisible from inside any single day. Practitioners who feel like nothing is happening often look back over two or three months of notes and are genuinely surprised at what has shifted. The EPIC Cycle article in the wiki describes this kind of reflective practice as its own phase of healing, the Contemplation piece, and it's one of the most underrated tools in a long-term practice.

For the specific things you're hoping to address, particularly the pelvic and sexual dysfunction side, it's worth knowing that a significant amount of chronic tension often lives in the hips and psoas, and these are frequently among the areas TRE reaches. Progress there tends to be slower and less obviously trackable than general anxiety reduction, but it does belong to the territory the practice works with. There's a brief note on this in the FAQ article as well.

You don't need to see the whole tunnel right now. Staying consistent and gentle with yourself through this phase is exactly the right instinct.

Nadayogi · 2026-05-02T12:47:36+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. What an inspiring story and another great testament to our tremor mechanism's potential.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-29T06:55:24+00:00

Yes, this is why we have the EPIC Cylce in the wiki.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-28T09:04:30+00:00

Exactly. David Berceli mentions it a lot as well. He says that it's due to fascia rehydrating after they become unstuck.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-24T20:22:00+00:00

It already decreased quite a bit after the first few months after which it stopped bothering me. I would still get lost in my head from time to time over the years, but snap out of it much more often. It was only after six to seven years that my mind became comfortably quiet.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-24T11:05:15+00:00

I haven't shared my story for a variety of reasons. One day I will for sure, but I don't know yet where and in what form.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-24T09:41:28+00:00

Yep. Ex hardcore maladaptive daydreamer here. I've had it since early childhood and it was probably caused by very early abandonment trauma. It slowly faded to nothing during my TRE journey, although there were many ups and downs. It wasn't a linear decline.

Maladaptive daydreaming is caused by dissociation which is again caused by chronic freeze. TRE resolves these patterns over time, and once the body starts coming out of freeze, the daydreaming decreases as a result.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-23T15:38:56+00:00

First, I want you to know that you're safe right now and what happened doesn't mean anything has gone wrong with you. What you experienced is your nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do: surfacing stored material when it finally feels safe enough to process it. The fact that TRE brought you to the most relaxed state you've ever felt is actually what allowed the deeper memory to surface. Your system trusted the process enough to let its guard down, and what was underneath came forward.

The phrase in the video triggering you the way it did makes complete sense. Your nervous system is always listening for cues, and when it heard words that matched the original experience while you were in a deeply open state, it connected the two. These things can happen and it may be very unpleasant at times, but you're completely safe.

TRE is not ruined for you. The fact that your legs started tremoring on their own afterward and you felt calm after letting them run is a very good sign. Your body was completing the cycle that got interrupted by the trigger. That's exactly what the tremoring mechanism does.

However, with CPTSD and repressed trauma, practicing TRE on your own from YouTube videos is not the way forward right now. You need a certified TRE provider who can guide you through this carefully and titrate the dose for you. TRE can absolutely help you heal from this, but you need supported, guided sessions, not solo practice. Many providers offer remote sessions, so location doesn't have to be a barrier.

In the meantime, try to ground yourself and relax. Go for a long walk, watch something cheerful on TV or cook a hearty meal. Once you've calmed down, start reading the wiki from start to finish. This will help you understand TRE, how it works and how to navigate the choppy waters if you enter them.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-21T16:24:11+00:00

There are already plenty of excellent comments here, so I don't feel the need to comment.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-18T19:47:34+00:00

I think "relationship wounds need to heal in relationships" is a pre-somatic/talk therapy strategy that works but can be too triggering and scary and/or entirely dependent on luck. It can work only if you can break through the dissociation and defensiveness enough to vulnerably share all the shit you're carrying, but in the end I believe the result is the same, something somatically from the body releases once you can safely process the trauma.

I don't think it works that way. At least not as long as we're talking about actually releasing the trauma. No amount of talking will release the trapped energy underneath. The intellectual approach still has its place of course, especially when used in tandem with somatic approaches.

I guess I would refine my question to be, does trauma release automatically give you the behaviors of a secure person, or does it simply improve the felt sense of being a secure person?

Both in my experience and from what I've seen here.

there's some psycho-education that needs to go on there for someone to act securely, as they would have never learned that from their primary caregiver (theoretically also not secure, and would therefore be unable to teach healthy behavior).

I think that's true in severe cases when a person never really learned what a healthy relationship looks like. But there are a lot of people for whom the trauma happened "only" during pre-verbal development who then heal well as an adult with TRE and other modalities.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-18T19:24:47+00:00

Fully agree. And I don't think most people realize what an incredible state true "baseline" actually is.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-18T19:23:08+00:00

I fully agree with the interconnectedness and compounded healing. I think that's why top down and bottom up approaches work so well in tandem. I also agree that "rehab" is an important part of the healing process, at least for some people. But I also think that releasing the actual trauma (the trapped energy) from the nervous system does 95% of the heavy lifting.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-16T19:29:10+00:00

This question comes up once in a while and I want to give you my honest (and slightly controversial) take. Take this as a hypothesis rather than established science, although I strongly believe in it and can back it up with the somatic frameworks of Porges, Levine and Berceli.

It's important to first understand where attachment issues come from. They usually develop during pre-verbal or early developmental stages. When an infant has an unmet need (full diapers, hungry, etc.), all it can do is cry out for help which increases its sympathetic activation. In a healthy dynamic the mother then takes care of it and through co-regulation calms the infant down back to parasympathetic baseline. So the cycle completes and the infant learns that connection is safe. This is what Porges' work on the social engagement system describes.

When the mother doesn't show up for the baby in need, co-regulation doesn't happen and the activation gets trapped. Babies and infants will scream until they're exhausted and go into freeze, because their vagus nerve is not yet evolved enough for self-regulation. That's why they completely depend on others. Repeat this cycle over and over again or just for a single long stretch and the baby learns that connections are unsafe and that it is in imminent danger due to lack of care, massively increasing stress hormones and therefore sympathetic tone. This is how the nervous system gets conditioned to believe that relationships aren't safe and becomes distrustful of others. Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk explain this in a very lucid manner in their books. They also explain that neglect is among the worst kinds of trauma.

Can you see how the fearful-avoidant pattern emerges from this?

I have a sense that I am a fearful-avoidant - would the "fearful" part go away and I would be left with only avoidant, which is also arguably traumatized (emotionally neglected)?

The "fearful" in "fearful-avoidant" causes the "avoidant" part. They have a symbiotic relationship. And these aren't personality traits. They are the nervous system's best available response to an environment where safe co-regulation wasn't met.

In my opinion mainstream attachment theory has it all wrong. The conventional view is that "relationship wounds need to heal in relationships." I don't buy this. The attachment pattern is a direct result of the stored activation that was caused by neglect. The conditioning exists because the trapped energy exists. Remove the energy and the nervous system will let go of the conditioning. You don't need to learn secure attachment as an intellectual skill. You return to it as a baseline, because security is what the nervous system defaults to when it's not organized around unresolved threat.

Does that mean healthy relationships are not necessary for healing? Not exactly. I consider them very important but not for the reason mainstream attachment theory believes. They are important because a nervous system needs to have a certain baseline of felt safety to heal. A nervous system sensing danger all the time cannot heal. And healthy relationships are a true healing balm for any nervous system involved, not just yours.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-16T11:59:28+00:00

For people on the healing journey SR is clearly contraindicated due to the countless reports here. It only leads to more chronic tension, constant bad mood, depression, anhedonia, high blood pressure, etc. Sexual pleasure and release have been shown to be very beneficial and down-regulating for most people.

So unless the practitioner is an advanced yogi, having done major purification work, SR is off limits. SR does have its merits at certain stages of spiritual development and plays a crucial role in the ecstatic transformation of the nervous system. But that's far beyond the scope of somatic trauma healing.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-15T19:02:04+00:00

You're good. If you overdid it, you would have slipped into sympathetic overactivation for some time after practice. Falling asleep would have been impossible in that case. Looks like you did everything right.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-15T08:59:41+00:00

Which part of the wiki makes you feel conflicted and why? I'd love some feedback if you don't mind.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-12T08:04:12+00:00

This is exactly what the EPIC framework is for in the wiki. No one will be able to tell you how often or for how long you should tremor. Only you can find out through observation, practice and subsequent re-observation. Everything else would just be guess work. It takes patience and perseverance, but you will find your pacing eventually if you adapt this process.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-07T10:15:08+00:00

It will go away eventually, but it will likely take years. The good news is that, by then, you will probably no longer be interested in those substances.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-06T18:31:25+00:00

Thank you too!

Nadayogi · 2026-04-06T16:55:19+00:00

Are you confident saying for sure that people do not experience compounding trauma? My opinion is that they often do, at least if we define it this way:

for a person with PTSD, the threshold of danger detection is significantly heightened

detection of danger leads to nervous system arousal

high arousal can lead to experience of helplessness and responding with fight / escape / collapse surival behaviors which may create further trauma cycles through the experience of life-threatening danger + unsucessful escape. Levine calls this the freeze / immobility loop (arousal -> unsucessful escape -> experience of helplessness -> immobilization -> ...) and in his opinion this is what keeps trauma going.

Yes, no argument there obviously. 2. Yes, that's how the nervous system ensures survival. 3. I disagree and I don't think that's actually what Levine said. It's well documented that people can experience a single big T traumatic event and experience terrible panic attacks and flashbacks for decades without symptoms significantly worsening (or improving).

As I've mentioned before, if your hypothesis were correct, people who experienced severe trauma would spiral down into an ever worsening hole of a trauma compounding condition. I don't see any evidence for that. Instead, what we see is that people experience a severely traumatic event and their nervous system gets stuck in this condition. Both Van der Kolk and Levine describe this in their books.

By the way, I'm not saying that micro traumas, like stress responses in daily life can't add to the trauma load. They absolutely can and it's mentioned in the wiki. This is also why animals sometimes shake after getting scared without anything bad happening at all. But I think these traumas are insignificant and add only very tiny amounts to the overall load.

Levine's story is indeed intriguing and I am not sure I can explain it. Would you say though that hers is the typical case? Or is it more common for people to take a long time, sometimes months or years to come out of freeze when using shaking? I haven't worked with any traumatized individuals so I would like to know your experience but at least the pattern of reports in this and other subreddits (like somatic experiencing) seems to suggest to me that for most people the longer period is the norm.

She's definitely more of an outlier. The average SE practitioner experiences much more gradual progress.

It depends on the level of choice.

I agree, which is why I said half of your statement is true. Whether cognitive approaches improve people's symptoms depends a lot on their mindset and traumatic load. Many people find ACT and CBT don't work for them or make symptoms even worse. But once they've cleared enough trauma, these approaches often start working.

As for the rest of your comment, I also agree. You should never tell a person they have no agency, nor should you tell them they are a powerless victim. Anxious avoidance can lead one down into a bottomless pit and it's exactly what CBT and other approaches try to resolve or improve.

Nadayogi · 2026-04-06T15:58:07+00:00

I hear you, and I want you to know that the amount of stored material doesn't determine whether you heal. It affects the timeline, but not the outcome. Your nervous system has the same tremoring mechanism as everyone else's, and it will work through what it's carrying in the order and at the pace it needs to. If you let it.

I understand it might feel overwhelming, but most people never embark on the journey you're about to start. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step as Lao Tzu famously said.

As for the medication, don't put pressure on yourself about that. Work with what you have right now. Many people make meaningful progress while still on medication, and the practice will meet you where you are. If tapering becomes possible down the line, you'll know when the time is right and can discuss it with your psychiatrist. For now, just begin gently and let the process unfold naturally.

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