My experience with EMDR has been that it makes you utterly feel like a child again. You are still an adult, but emotionally it feels like travelling back in tim

My experience with EMDR has been that it makes you utterly feel like a child again. You are still an adult, but emotionally it feels like travelling back in time. Like being a child in an adult's body. Much more than just thinking or talking about the experiences themselves. It brought up a lot of crying. It felt a bit like catching up on it, because I never felt safe to cry as a child. And with this I couldn't even hold it back and it all just came out. I like the way Bessel van der Kolk describes it in his book [0]. It is like the trauma stops being something that still haunts you today and that you can still feel like no time has passed, and instead it turns into a memory and something that happened in the past and that doesn't affect you anymore. It almost felt like magic, because it lifted a huge burden seemingly effortlessly. And that was after ~5 years of regular psychotherapy. It doesn't fix everything, but it made parts of the trauma pretty much disappear. And yes, I would very much recommend therapy in general. Here are some thoughts on this from a discussion a few months ago [1]. There are lots of good points in that Ask HN in general. [0] If you like somewhat technical books I can recommend The Body Keeps The Score [0]. Very much not a self-help book but the observations of someone working with people's traumas. https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-th... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22261226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22261226