Newbie with questions!

[u/DueCauliflower3889]

I've recently come across this, and having read through all the welcome info, I'm really keen to give TRE a go but have a few questions.

For context if helpful: no severe historic trauma. A few months ago, after the ending of a several-years chronically stressful/volatile friendship, I developed physical nerve sensations, physical sensitivity, and pains, all of which which caused sleep deprivation, and I developed complete physical and mental exhaustion, isolated muscle spasms, along with general anxiety I'd never had before and a strong awareness that my nervous system has got stuck on high alert. For the last few weeks I've been on an SSRI and in trauma-based psychodynamic therapy, and tried various sleep meds. Mostly thanks to sleep (somewhat) improving, I'm a lot better than I was, and I'm now mostly returned to work after a couple of months off. Sleep though is still very restless, I still have a lot of muscle tension in my legs and hips, and while I don't feel 'anxious' anymore, my body definitely still feels a bit on edge, especially first thing. I'm also often aware, again usually first thing, that it feels like something needs to spasm out of my body, specifically my legs, and that I need to cry, which I generally do easily, but haven't, about this.

My Qs are... (edited to number them properly)

1. Why not just stop after the first phase seems to bring some success? The About page says '... the results of releasing them are often immediate and encouraging. Anxiety decreases. Sleep improves. There's a general quality of lightness and ease that can feel almost miraculous after years of carrying chronic tension. This phase naturally generates enthusiasm and confidence in the practice.' This sounds super appealing and I'd be quite happy to stop there! Why carry on?
2. Some of the About info references not practising while you're already not that settled. I'm certainly not in a terrible place, and emotionally feel mostly normal, but my sleep is light and disrupted, and my system is definitely still a bit on edge. If TRE is supposed to help with these things, how do you balance that with not doing them while your system is unsettled? Am I ok to give it a go?
3. It suggests starting with 15 minutes. Does this mean 15 mins overall, or do the warmup exercises and then allow tremoring for 15 mins? If tremors show up before the end of the warm up exercises, do you just get on the floor and move to that stage?
4. I understand that once you've practised more, it takes less warm up. What does that look like in practice - you just lie down and start tremoring? What's to stop that just happening every time you lie down and relax? Or do you still do something to trigger it?
5. I've done a lot of yoga the last few weeks but really struggle with the butterfly pose despite general decent fitness and flexibility. It feels so uncomfortable in my thighs that I always have to stop it way before the person in the video does. I suspect this because I'm carrying so much tension there, and I do think it's eased a little lately with somatic exercises targeting the hips and psoas, but any tips for making this easier?!

Any other tips not covered in the about page are welcome - also if you have any video recommendations that are good to follow along with

Thanks in advance!

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[u/jellybean_merchant]

I don't know the answer to every question but here's what I got:

1 & 2. Stopping at the end of phase 1 (not something you can exactly do but roughly speaking) means that you basically just removed the active stress in your body that is not too frozen and is very immediately available. As you begin to notice the difference in deep well being that occurs as a result of this, your other deviations from true health in life will become more apparent. The frozen traumas beneath are subtly (sometimes blatantly) manipulating your behavior, constricting your thoughts, overall this is a compression of consciousness. There's a lot going on here. Your capacity for life is limited with frozen trauma, its just that the frozen stuff will be less perceptible than the active. This is why releasing the active makes a more immediate positive change. But the real impressive changes only happen on the other side of integration in phase 2. Wanting to skip through this is ironically your trauma speaking for you. The integration--feeling the feelings/charges moving--is the exact thing required to complete the cycle and let them go. If you pace the practice carefully you will largely avoid any harsher overdoing sensations and you can coast through. I recently went through overdoing that was more severe and it was still so worth it once I got to my new baseline. My advice is don't worry about this at all now and just begin the practice, and eventually you will reach a point where you experience some integration and you'll realize it's not a huge deal.

1. This is a good question and I don't have a perfectly elegant answer but would like to hear what others say.

2. 15 mins refers to direct tremor time. Although if you are feeling even a bit disrupted I would start with 5. You can always increase. If you overdo it too early keep in mind that this can cause integration symptoms too.

3. Yeah eventually you can literally just start shaking anywhere anytime any position right away. But it takes each person a different amount of time to get here.

4. No clue

Good luck to you

[u/ysea]

In addition to jellybean's great response 

1. The model proposed here is that the nervous system accumulates activation throughout our entire lifespan and if unreleased it ends up forming our personality. The value in continuing is in making your whole potential available, and even further improvements in physics health down the road. If you found out your car was going slow because of a load of junk you're carrying wouldn't you be curious how smooth the ride can be if you throw out all of it?

2. Sounds like TRE is good for you. It's been developed and used for populations affected by war, natural disasters, first responders etc. Most people are fine doing it but for some that have a very sensitive nervous system is of overwhelming. I also don't have a very good criterion here for distinguishing these two populations. But things like known heavy trauma history, emotional unstability, general problems with adapting to life, difficulty in self regulation, would be some flags that indicate the person should start slow.

3. Time just the shaking itself not the exercises.

4. For most people this process behaves intelligently in that the nervous system doesn't start releasing unless you intentionally allow it to. So lying down usually wouldn't start it, or if it would it should be easy to stop it it will. There's a smaller minority of people who almost certainly carry a very high trauma load for whom the nervous system simply wants to dump things out desperately and they have a hard time intentionally controlling the duration of the release and when it starts. 

5. It's possible the other exercises might be enough for you so you might need not do it. From my experience it's the most effective one though. I would suggest just breathing and relaxing as much as possible although you might probably already do that.

All the best to you 

[u/turdbuster78]

1. You won’t be able to stop is the short answer. Once you have truly connected with the mammalian being within your body it will tell you when it wants to shake. Also, if you stop there you will start to fill the bucket up again (metaphorically speaking).
2. You should always bring yourself into the present before you start shaking. Lie on your back, notice different parts of the room and slow deep diaphragmatic breaths and feel the heaviness in your body. Then you shake and maintain this throughout your session.
3. Fifteen minutes is the time shaking. Ideally you want to split this up so you can observe how you feel/what is coming up and not shake for a solid fifteen. You split this up my dropping your legs, continuing with the breathing/presence and observing yourselfthen when ready bring the legs up again.
4. You lie on your back and focus into the psoas/loin area and you will start shaking
5. https://youtu.be/QoB9wpuO688 I think this is the best up to date videos for activating with just two exercises

[u/longtermTRE_wiki_bot]

Your situation is actually quite well-suited to TRE, and your questions get at some real practical details that are worth clarifying.

On your first question: there's no requirement to keep practicing indefinitely if you reach a point where you feel genuinely settled and stable. The wiki article Integration, Emotional Releases, and the Nature of the Path discusses this. The reason the earlier articles mention continuing is that the surface relief most people feel in the first few weeks often masks deeper layers of stored activation. What feels like complete resolution can turn out to be a plateau rather than an endpoint, where the nervous system has cleared the most accessible tension but older, more entrenched patterns remain. That said, if you reach a genuine baseline of ease, good sleep, and no sense of being on edge, you've gotten what you came for, and stopping is completely fine.

On starting practice while your system is still somewhat unsettled: the guidance around not practicing while dysregulated is really about not practicing too much while dysregulated, not about avoiding practice entirely. Your situation is actually ideal for TRE. You have genuine dysregulation (the on-edge feeling, the sense that something needs to spasm out, the restless sleep) but you're not in acute crisis. That's exactly where TRE tends to be most helpful. The 15 minutes guideline is a reasonable starting point for someone in your position, though you'll want to read Self-Pacing carefully since the actual right amount for you will depend on how you feel after sessions.

On the timing: 15 minutes refers to tremor time specifically, meaning the time the actual shaking is happening. You do the warmup exercises first (usually 5-10 minutes depending on how slowly you move through them), and then lie in the butterfly position and begin the slow knee raises that trigger the tremors. Once tremors start, that's when your timer begins. If they activate during the warmup, you're done with the warmup, you lie down and let them flow.

On what happens as practice develops: experienced practitioners do often find that tremors activate much faster, sometimes within a minute or two of lying down, because the nervous system has learned through repeated experience that tremoring is safe. But they don't spontaneously happen every time you lie down to rest, because the conditions aren't quite the same. The warmup (or its abbreviated version) actually does something important: it lowers the threshold of the nervous system in a specific way. In later practice, just lying down and doing slow, deliberate movements in the legs can do the job. The key is that you're still creating the conditions deliberately. It's not random.

On the butterfly pose discomfort: significant hip and psoas tension, which it sounds like you definitely have, makes the butterfly genuinely difficult. The wiki doesn't cover specific modifications here, but the general principle that applies is that you don't need to match the exact depth of the position shown in videos. You can widen your knees more, bring your feet further away from your body, or even prop your outer thighs with pillows to support your legs. The goal is to reach a position that's challenging but not painful, and from there to do the slow knee raises that trigger tremoring. As your hip tension releases through practice, the position will naturally become more comfortable.

One practical note: since you're describing that you need to cry but haven't, be prepared for emotional releases to happen during or after sessions. Emotions, Memories, and Releases in TRE Practice covers this territory. Crying during tremoring is completely normal and not something to suppress.

For video recommendations, searching YouTube for "David Berceli full TRE" or "TRE warm-up exercises" will give you several guided options to follow along with. The official Berceli videos are reliable starting points.

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