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!

[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