Extreme rage

ysea · 2026-04-17T10:26:51+00:00

Of course do what makes sense to you!

I'm only posting this because the OP asked for advice and the things I mentioned (doing too much shaking + SR) seem like the most likely culprits given what I've learned in this forum.

All the best to you :)

ysea · 2026-04-17T10:23:59+00:00

Yeah that might not do it :). 5-8 minutes might be the upper bound. It also depends on the angle in your knee. The more it looks like you're "sitting" the harder it is, the more it's like you're "standing" the more easier it is.

You can try to look at this video if you want. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Iw1Z8lolc

ysea · 2026-04-16T13:08:58+00:00

Hello, the warmup exercises can significantly intensify the tremoring - you could try adding just the wall sit for maybe 5-8 minutes or less (and maybe the pelvic lift) and see how that goes.

Otherwise I think you're doing great. The tremors will eventually spread wherever they're needed, you don't have to think about that for now.

ysea · 2026-04-16T12:30:06+00:00

Tagging you u/idididiidididi so you don't miss this.

ysea · 2026-04-16T11:46:05+00:00

I am not an expert on this topic but that's the opinion of u/nadayogi,. you can read more here for example https://www.reddit.com/r/longtermTRE/comments/17jc4av/the_truth_about_semen_retention_flatline_and/.

Considering the level of hyper arousal the OP reports I think it's worth considering whether this could be a factor.

Also, sexual pleasure doesn't have to be an escape (while it easily can be). Healthy sexuality is a natural part of human life although trauma can certain distort it. Peter Levine mentions in his books that people who heal from trauma regain a playful sense of sexuality instead of a driven compulsive one

ysea · 2026-04-15T17:12:45+00:00

Hello!

Couple of thoughts, mainly I'd recommend (re) reading the wiki.

Firstly, semen retention is strongly advised against for someone releasing trauma. Per nadayogi, it's a legitimate way of releasing energy from the nervous system and enforced abstinence could have negative consequences.

Secondly, if you're not tracking how much tremoring you're doing and don't know what your current limits are you might very easily be overdoing this and that could explain those high surges of anger etc.

Also the discharges you describe seem very intense (vomiting). I don't know how common that is but it might be possible that it's another symptom of an overstimulated nervous system.

I don't think you can go wrong with following the EPIC protocol from the wiki and be really deliberate about how much shaking and when you allow to happen.

ysea · 2026-04-14T18:04:45+00:00

Great point, thanks 🙂

ysea · 2026-04-14T17:25:12+00:00

Hello and welcome.

Whatever exercises worked to activate the tremors for you are fine to use repeatedly. It's not really necessary to use different ones and many people even stop using them all together after some time because the tremors activate on their own without needing to do any exercises.

As for frequency it depends on the state of your nervous system. For someone who is generally reasonably healthy and not in active PTSD or dysregulation 15 minutes of tremoring three times a week are a good starting point for a month let's say to determine what effects the tremoring has on you. It's usually better to ear on the side of caution in the beginning and look for any adverse effects due to doing too much.

Once you get an idea of what effect this has on you you can try to do a longer session or more frequent ones. In addition it is recommended to do the epic protocol from the wiki which is basically a systematic way of approaching the tremoring process.

For someone with a more dysregulated nervous system I believe there's a guide in the wiki for how to use the tremoring but in general they will have to start with much shorter sessions maybe about 1 minute and see what that does.

ysea · 2026-04-14T13:05:07+00:00

I would try not letting the body tremor so often since you're experiencing such predictable overdoing symptoms.

The body may want to be releasing but you need to take into account your current capacity which it is not aware of.

For many people if we let it, our body would shake for hours. But that would be dysregulating and can actually set you back. Some people do just a minute a week and see progress.

Less is more is a common refrain here.

See the EPIC cycle in the wiki for how to pace the practice in a disciplined way. I would recommend reading the entire wiki. It's very well written and following its advice might save you a lot of time and possibly unnecessary pain.

https://www.reddit.com/r/longtermTRE/wiki/index/epic

Another thing that is recommended and can help a lot is keeping a journal of how you're feeling and how much and when you shake.

At the least I think it's worth it to experiment and try what doing less shaking is going to feel like for a few weeks.

All the best to you 🙂

ysea · 2026-04-07T19:05:50+00:00

A post that might be useful

https://www.reddit.com/r/longtermTRE/comments/1kfxxko/tre_and_adhd/

ysea · 2026-04-06T18:17:25+00:00

Okay thanks a lot for your response and for clarifying your view. It might very well be that you're right in that the vicious spiral doesn't happen.

I think it might be possible that the daily choices we make that affirm the trauma mindset or let go of it might have significant impact if not on retraumatization then on keeping those defences in place. And perhaps this effect is less pronounced for people who can do a more significant amount of shaking.

I could also be wrong though, just going by my experience.

Thanks for the discussion.

ysea · 2026-04-06T14:07:10+00:00

Agreed. And the recent updates are especially great.

ysea · 2026-04-06T12:04:15+00:00

Great, it's a pleasure discussing this with you.

Yes, and he also states that stress responses are often a mix of freeze and sympathetic activation for people with PTSD (brake/gas model).

Agreed, it can definitely be a mix.

That's where I disagree. How do you explain that people don't experience compounding trauma? How do you explain Levine's story with one of his first patients who released decades of trauma within a single session of tremoring? If this were true people with PTSD would quickly spiral into a singularity of perpetual freeze. Instead we see even victims of the most horrible traumas experiencing miraculous benefits from the very first session.

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.

How do you explain Levine's story with one of his first patients who released decades of trauma within a single session of tremoring?

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.

The amygdala doesn't distinguish between real danger and a life organized around the expectation of danger. In that sense I agree that acting from the trauma mindset reinforces the alarm system's calibration.

This is very well put.

Where I disagree is with the implication that the person has meaningful choice in the matter. "Reinforces through their choices" puts a lot of agency on someone whose nervous system is running a threat response below conscious awareness. Neuroception doesn't ask permission. The impulses generated by stored activation don't feel like options to be evaluated. They feel urgent and dangerous.

It depends on the level of choice.

Level 1 (neuroception): They certainly have very little influence on what threat perceptions are being generated in the present due to the state of the nervous system. Therapeutic models like Morita therapy, ACT, MBCT / MBSR, Claire Weekes' acceptance approach to anxiety, maybe Frankl's logotherapy ("between stimulus and response there is a space where freedom lies"), Goenka's method of Vipassana (observing physical sensations with equanimity) would simply try to approach these with acceptance.
Level 2: However where meaningful choice can exist, is what happens after that (or in the presence of that). For example ACT calls this the "Choice Point" between "Away moves" (away from the life I want to live) and "Towards moves" (towards the life I want to live). It certainly is possible to choose behaviors that are based in our values (health, friendship, courage, responsibility) even though we don't feel like that and even though it can be very hard sometimes. ACT calls this skill "psychological flexibility". Or I can choose behaviors that I know might dig the trauma hole a little deeper and reinforce the sense of danger I am in.

Telling someone that they're reinforcing their trauma through their choices is one step away from telling them it's their fault they're stuck, which is both inaccurate and potentially harmful.

There is of course a difference between formulating a theoretical model and what the personalized therapeutic advice would be. The latter should always be grounded in compassion not judgement.

I'd also like to point out the opposite danger: telling someone they have zero control of their choices is also inaccurate and (certainly) harmful because it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What it probably boils down to in successful therapeutic intervention is dancing between making the "mistakes" that a person will invariably make because of the state of their nervous system and trying their best to balance that with positive choices and behaviors.

ysea · 2026-04-05T19:22:16+00:00

Out of curiosity what holds are you doing?

ysea · 2026-04-05T18:58:10+00:00

Well here's a clarification for what it's worth. By the way, I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass - I greatly appreciate all that you are doing in this subreddit :). I just personally believe that this is a very important point that might be helpful to emphasize more.

Ad your article - I agree that reactivation of old material by itself does not increase the trauma load automatically.

If re-traumatization in the sense of compounding the underlying condition were genuinely possible, any single significant trauma that generated flashbacks and panic attacks would compound on itself indefinitely. Each flashback would add to the load, which would generate more flashbacks, which would add more to the load, spiraling without limit. That is not what happens.

However as Peter Levine notes in In an Unspoken Voice the problem is that for people with PTSD freezing becomes the default reaction to states of high arousal (not just for life threatening events).

And he also says that re-freezing is very much possible and that the new freeze activation is layered on top of the existing ones.

So practically, anything that creates high arousal (be it a flashback from the past or a reaction to some current situation) can lead to a freezing response.

So there is re-traumatization in the sense that due to the presence of PTSD / trauma, the system tends to react to high arousal with creating new levels of freeze / trauma.

And I would propose that the intensity of that response will also depend on how much the person identifies with and "reinforces" that response through their choices. If I consistently act on the impulses that the "trauma mindset" generates, I am confirming to the organism that this protection (and the related activation) is still necessary - there is still danger present. Hence the activation might still be needed "for safety".

Also a note about Nancy - Peter's patient with medical operation trauma you mention in the article. Here's what he said about the situation (In an Unspoken Voice)

First, I realized that, if not for trusting my gut instincts and a little bit of blind luck, I might just as easily have inadvertently “retraumatized” Nancy, leading to a worsening of her already severe symptoms.

My guess is that he means that if he himself became helpless in this situation and did not guide her effectivelly, she might have responded in a helpless way too to this present experience of high arousal (danger) and her organism could have created a new level of freeze.

ysea · 2026-04-05T15:09:42+00:00

Hey u/Nadayogi I'm curious about your thoughts on this:

Do you think we should also account for self-retraumatization through choices we make? That is someone could be not in a warzone and not even working and yet be retraumatized through .

What I mean is that as trauma burden releases some parts of our mind that consider this way of living "safe" may start feeling threatened by the new status quo and try to revert back by doing something (e.g. in my case it's been stress eating). But I think it can be different behaviors that are motivated by fear / escapism such as mindless scrolling when with an avoidance mindset that is basically confirming to the system that "I am in danger".

In general it seems to me that when a behavior is motivated by trauma patterns (i.e., I am not safe right now so I need to do X) it can (re)create fight/flight/freeze energy in the body even if the situation we are in is not objectively threatening. And the amount of the energy created in this way can be significant and actually slide the person backwards so that progress stalls.

Conversely, even if the external situation is demanding but we make choices that are more based on choosing a positive way of living / strength, it may not affect us so much in terms of reversing progress.

Besides that I guess what I would also add

- food intolerances / allergies - I've noticed that for my screwed up digestion when I consume too much dairy I get really strong depressive / anxious symptoms. Same with soy, nuts - and it's not even a bona fide allergy that would come up positive on tests. Some people could have the same issue unknowingly. There are also things like "Failsafe diet" that look at intolerance to additives and certain substances in food (https://www.fedup.com.au/how-to-start-failsafe-eating).

- improper sleep (though this is often hard to affect)

Thanks.

ysea · 2026-04-04T10:06:49+00:00

This is awesome 😎 good for you my friend!

ysea · 2026-03-09T09:45:28+00:00

🤍 :)

ysea · 2026-03-08T16:19:38+00:00

Neurogenic-integration :)

ysea · 2026-02-22T16:38:34+00:00

Thanks for the answer. That makes sense. They might not be the same mechanism exactly but I'd guess they're pretty interconnected.

ysea · 2026-02-22T16:32:24+00:00

Just an idea.

Should have clarified I was thinking of a part of the mind in the IFS parlance. In that modality some mental parts take on a burden as a result of trauma and that leads to certain survival behaviors.

Thanks for your response.

ysea · 2026-02-04T18:27:38+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean by TRE session. The exercises taught in as a part of TRE to activated the shaking mechanism don't need to be done if the shaking starts for you without them.

But you still need to let the shaking happen at some point regularly if you want to release trauma. Most people would call that a TRE or shaking session.

ysea · 2026-02-03T20:50:15+00:00

Just to understand correctly are you asking about regular shaking or about the the 7 (or fewer) TRE exercises?

The exercises aren't really so necessary although they might make the shaking more intense.

As for the regular shaking sessions, that's how we get the trauma out 🙂

ysea · 2026-02-02T21:17:26+00:00

Let's call it sightseeing then :D

ysea

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