u/ClassicGreen1810

I recently decided to stop seeing my therapist of two years, which was difficult because, well, therapeutic relationships can feel quite significant due to the level of vulnerability and investment of time.

She is an EMDR therapist and for the past year we were doing BLS nearly every sessions for CPTSD, specifically childhood neglect from my mother, and my aged mother currently has been living with me for the past 7 years.

She spent maybe 3 or so sessions go over what I the wiki for this forum calls phase two — mostly focusing on the importance of meditation and once or twice she went over the container method with me, but never really talked about it again.

It had been rough for a couple of months of doing the processing with only a small improvement and I shared with my therapist that I felt like I had no good coping mechanisms that are habits or part of my daily routine.

She seemed surprised that I was not meditating or using the container, but I had been upfront that I found meditating really challenging and I had honestly forgotten the container method at that point.

Anyway, long story short, I spoke with someone else and they seemed concerned that my therapist wasn’t doing the container method at the end of each session with BLS.

Do others do it each session?

Thanks for any info, trying not to spiral that my therapist wasn’t as great as I had hoped.

I’m going through it. 42F, CPTSD, MDD, GAD, ADHD, a lil binge eating disorder and one therapist thought BPD once as well, so yeah, feeling pathologized and lost right now.

I started EMDR last year for mom trauma — she was emotionally and financial unstable and neglectful due to her own undiagnosed/untreated stuff — depression and AuADHD type of behaviors, which made communication and emotional regulation highly stunted in our house. She also moved in with me due to health concerns in 2018.

In 2019 I met my husband and in 2023 we married. He also has CPTSD and other issues and we (not shockingly) both trigger each others’ mom-trauma.

He was receptive to going to therapy and even started EMDR at my urging.

We both were doing EMDR for traumas we triggered in each other, at the same time, from last summer until a month or so ago.

So you can imagine, we were pretty much always hurting eachother in one way or another.

And I think my therapist is great, but I wish she had more trauma-informed practices and had given me more options to take breaks from EMDR but still build up my coping strategies.

Because damn, I was just white knuckling it through EMDR and my fatigue, control issues and binge eating have been ruling my life.

Then about a month ago I started TMS and took a break from EMDR.

The fatigue has been debilitating and my experience of the TMS “dip” has been severe - SI, toddler style meltdowns, outbursts of crying and yelling.

And even though I’ve been trying to get my husband to understand it’s not him causing it all of it, I haven’t been able get the support or communication I need either.

He’s AuADHD and I’ve been the one managing everything, but at this point I can’t manage anything, and last week my mom got diagnosed with a blood clot and then the next day I got a text from my husband saying he can’t do this anymore and he moved out.

In many ways I get it, my emotions are big and stay big. He can’t handle big emotions. I have been hurtful and cruel and scary and even though I’m trying to get treatment, it doesn’t absolve my actions.

It’s been brutal. I was able to convince him to come back and sleep in a separate room and at least take care of our pets because neither I nor my mother are super well equipped to do so right now.

I’m holding on, trying to get through, hoping the fact that I’m extra tired from TMS means that it might actually work.

Hoping that finding out more about EMDR and realizing in hindsight that we were probably retraumatizing each other, as well as my current situation with my mother retraumatizing me, probably means I need to look at re-parenting or IFS therapy first before I ever consider EMDR again.

That’s it, thanks for reading.