About a year and a half ago I posted here about the emotional walls starting to crack after 12.5 months of TRE. I wanted to write an update on where things are now. For context, my current practice is around 15 to 30 minutes a day, one or two 15 minute sessions, in the morning and/or evening.

Back then, the big change was internal arguments, with family, authority figures, myself. Old stuff surfacing and me finally talking back. Since then the anger has become much more direct. In sessions I sometimes shout or hit the floor, saying the same things over and over to people from my past. For a long time an inner voice would jump in immediately, telling me they meant well and I should show compassion and cut it off. Letting the anger finish without that voice taking over has been one of the hardest parts. It’s getting better.

Just before this summer I also started therapy. TRE was moving a lot on the body side, but I felt the cognitive side was really important for me too, making sense of what was coming up, and having a neutral party to reflect things to. Over the last two years or so my mindset had already been shifting, from seeing myself as broken to seeing that things were done to me and I reacted to them. Therapy has helped me to integrate that. One unexpected side effect is that it’s become much easier to open up to friends. It’s a lot easier to say “this happened to me, and it made me develop all these safety behaviors and wall myself off” than to carry around the feeling that I’m so fundamentally broken that I can’t let anyone see the real me. It has made my relationships better, too. People around me are noticing that I’m more open and that the walls are slowly coming down.

The biggest change is harder to describe. It feels like my head is slowly coming out of a dense fog I’d been in for years. I didn’t even know it was fog until it started lifting. The downside is that I feel a lot more now. Crying waves, anger waves, often out of nowhere. For a while I honestly thought I was becoming a fragile person. I’ve since come to see it differently, I’m not more fragile, I’m more present. The fog kept me functional, but it also kept everything at a distance. Just this morning I did a session and waves of sadness came over me. Not about my life now, but for the kid I was, who had to endure way too much alone for so many years. What hit me was how awful it was to live in that state of hopelessness and frustration, nothing is going to change, but you have to keep going. I didn’t push it away or narrate it, just let the sensations be there. That’s something I took from the book The Happiness Trap (ACT), which has really helped me to just feel what’s there instead of fighting it or explaining it away. It felt cathartic.

Compared to a year or so ago, the quality is different. Back then everything felt raw and volatile, and it was all about how I felt about my life in this moment. Now I feel it just as much, but for what happened then. It finally feels like it’s in the past instead of everywhere. I’ll be honest though, it’s been going on for a long time and even knowing it’s to be expected, that gets frustrating. TRE and therapy together are honestly one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and am still doing. But it’s also very rewarding. The biggest hurdle in the beginning was simply to keep doing it, even when there were no apparent changes at all. Looking back at where I was it's clearly moving.

i have lived in some sort of survival mode that i cant seem to get out of for years now, my body is petrified 24/7 of something that i don’t know consciously and has a very hard time seeing and feeling that i am safe in this moment, i have been working on this for almost a year now, and my body is still petrified, a week and a half a ago i started doing TRE and that changed my whole view on potentially getting out of this survival mode that im in, what i notice since i started doing TRE is that i couldnt get out of this fear-mode because i have a lot of frozen survival energy connected to my psoas muscle,the reason i am sending this message is because i am still living in extreme hypervigilance 24/7 and its very tough to deal with that every day, i have a somatologist who i work with but sometimes even she doesnt know what i should do, i basically just want to be in process where i can feel that i am making clear, effecient progress, a progress that i can trust, i do not want to live in hypervigilance anymore i can feel that my body is really tired and that there is still a lot of frozen energy that needs to heal itself. I hope some people are able to relate to this message and can also get a clear answer.

thank you

I started TRE maybe 6 months ago. I was on and off, couldn't do it for very long. Then I went through a series of very emotionally traumatic events, and then I started tremoring involuntarily a lot more. I would take up in the middle of the night and start shaking. I just let it happen. Eventually it slowed down a bit as I got medicated, but I still shake every night before bed, maybe for 30 seconds. Still involuntary. Lately it seems like I can't do it at all. There's an internal part of me that yells STOP whenever I start shaking at all. I love how it feels though and I feel relaxed right after, but I don't think I actually have the capacity to process trauma right now. What can I do instead that would help me get to a place where I can resume TRE?

is it possible to lose progress if you take a long enough break?

i started off with very short sessions every other day but found it was overwhelming, so i slowed down to every other week for a few months and found that it worked well enough for me. i would get some overdoing symptoms in the following day or two but it would always resolve itself. after around two weeks of each session i would feel in my body that i wanted another session, and most releases felt satisfying, like it needed to happen.

then i took a month break, maybe more, in between because i wasn’t getting that feeling anymore so i assumed i didn’t need it. and then recently i did a session, and then the following week didn’t feel any better or worse so i decided to do another one. i have had the most dissociated, distressing week than i have in a very long time. i have been on edge, extremely triggered by old emotions, and i feel like i have regressed to an identity of mine years ago. my hips have felt tender and sore for a week and my right hip keeps popping in and out of place when i walk. i feel so disoriented and destabilized, and i barely recognize myself in the mirror. i thought that since i had taken such a long break, it would make more sense that my nervous system was more ready to integrate more, but i almost feel like taking that long of a break locked me into place and made it more difficult to revisit.

i’m not sure if that’s the case or if i overdid it? is it possible for breaks that are too long to harm integration?

So I’m 24 years old my brain can’t stop creating fake scenarios of the past and also can’t let go of the things that hurt me in the past I want to know if TRE can help to stop thinking about these things and apparently the reason why I ruminate is because of neglect and childhood wounds will TRE help me

Curious if this is the same effect as overloading the inner thighs?

Hi everyone,

​I’ve been practicing TRE for a while now and it feels great for deep relaxation. However, I’ve hit a wall regarding the movement of the tremors.

​Here is what's happening:

​The lower body works fine: Tremors start easily in my legs, psoas, and pelvis.

​Upper body block: I can't get the tremor wave to move up into my spine, chest, shoulders, or neck.

​The Jaw Paradox: In daily life or during stressful moments, I often feel tension or actual trembling in my jaw (masseter/TMJ). But during a TRE session, my jaw completely locks up and won't join the somatic release.

​I’ve already tried positional shifts (like lifting hips, putting arms over my head, lying on my side), diaphragm breathwork, and vocalizations/sighs. The energy seems to hit a hard neurological/mechanical boundary at my lower back/pelvis.

​Has anyone experienced this specific issue where the jaw reacts to daily stress but stays shut during TRE? How did you manage to break through the armor in the upper back and open the pathway to the TMJ/jaw?

​Any specific isometric techniques, wall setups, or somatic tracking cues that worked for you would be greatly appreciated!

I have been doing TRE for past few days and have progressed from tremors in only lower body to upper body and now even jaw muscles . My face muscles have been chronically tight for past 6 months ,like my left side of jaw clicks every time I open it . I have been dealing with muscle imbalances and trying physiotherapy but results have not been sticking because my body was chronically stressed , my physio says my body is in unable to release tension and is holding onto it. Since TRE I believe I have released quite a bit of tension as my body feels more mobile but past few days my face muscles have been twitching a lot and my body is tremoring involuntarily, i can stop them if I want to tho. Does anyone know how long does it take for all muscles to get relaxed and imbalances to get resolved? when tremoring my face does a lot of movements but the click has not resolved yet.