Hi kayak, welcome to PC and the PTSD forum.

I have experienced what you are describing. It happens when I get overwhelmed and I simply can't put things into words and I get very tired like you are describing. What you can try doing is when you begin therapy ask your therapist to take a few minutes with you doing a relaxing technique. What my therapist had me do is close my eyes and picture a blackboard in my mind, a big black board like they have in a classroom. Picture the shelf with the chalk and picture yourself picking up a nice big piece of chalk and write the number 10 on the board, then find the eraser and you can smell the chalk on it and take the eraser and erase the number 10 and then write the number 9. Keep doing this "slowly" until you erase the number one. This exercise should help you feel much more relaxed.

Often just getting to therapy itself is exhausting and I always found rushed and stressed by the time I got up the stairs and through my therapist's door and sat in the chair and often I would get very tired just as you have described.

What also helps is keeping a journal so when you think of things you can write them down and what helped me is deciding what I wanted to talk about in therapy instead of feeling like I was on the spot.

When one experiences a trauma they tend to "freeze" and get overwhelmed and often there is much more "shock" and "fight, flight, freeze" and "no language" or normal processing. And going to therapy can mean a lot of pressure to "talk" and often not even knowing "how" or where to start. The desire is there, but one can get overwhelmed surprisingly easily and this is when that tired feeling can happen.

So, if you get that way, it's better to take some time and do some relaxing exercised like what I just described. What this does is it helps your brain realize nothing is urgent and you don't have to produce any cortizol which is probably what you had been doing before you even got to therapy where you were already all pumped up and that can most definitely in itself be tiring, but what your mind really is looking for is to calm down.