Therapy processing a nightmare

In therapy this week I processed one of my recurring nightmares. I have this nightmare quite often. The nightmare is where a man, one of my abusers, is holding me down.

I feel trapped, and like I can’t breathe. I always wake up crying, unable to breathe, and in complete panic.

We worked with Eileen using EMDr to process the nightmare. It was very hard but so worth it to work with it. We worked with the feelings associated with the dream, and the impulses that came up which was to push the man off of us.

Eileen got out her gym ball and she held me and we pushed on it hard, as if we were pushing our abuser away.

At the end of the session we felt really good, we didn’t feel trapped, or panicked, and we were feeling empowered.

We didn’t feel helpless like we had done at the start of the session.

We still have a lot of work to do with our dreams, but this dream is processed now, so I am hoping that it will not reoccur. We’re going to work on changing some of the endings to our dreams too over the next few weeks.

Dreams can be so scary. We do have quite a lot of nightmares, where we’re either being attacked, killed, or hurt in some way.

I do have to say that doing EMDR is very helpful.

Author: Carol anne

I am 40 years young. I'm blind and I have dissociative identity disorder, I also have complex PTSD. I blog about my life with these disorders. I live in Ireland. View all posts by Carol anne