Really appreciated!

I will add comments below, to relate to you and also where it differs from your experience, maybe you still find it interesting, or it could give information to anyone reading about what I should try to deal with my issue more efficiently. Also, it's me thinking out loud lol.

Ah I'm glad you got better from this.

My side comments would be that when I meant I got immobilised, I meant that I literally could not move at times. I stayed in whatever position I was. Sometimes even in public, in a shop, in the middle of the street, stuff like that. This would last 30-60 minutes before I could get myself to move again (sometimes if I tried really hard, I could move say, a hand, but it would be jerking uncontrollably instead of doing what I wanted it to do, so I decided staying immobilised was better than that). And for me emotions were all turned off for over a decade for the outside world beyond the little safe bubble I would live in with too much loss of functionality. When they tried to come back, I had both positive and negative but neither was very realistic emotion especially initially.

Ah this part is definitely familiar! This is what I had for a year that I called the "borderline" phase and I did get trauma that triggered it. Though probably in your case your emotions were less disorganized than mine and more readily accessible. It's cool you had luck with finding an online therapist for this and that it actually works.

Interesting, but I think my trauma was more intangible-emotional than tangible-physical. Also extremely heavy so it was blocked out for a whole decade. I guess I never saw a therapist that could deal with that sort of issue. For some reason all the trauma stuff I've read up on focuses on the physical issues as a way to fix the trauma... I guess because PTSD is often from a physically threatening situation. Mine was nothing like that. Not physically threatening, just emotionally. No worries though, I still found this somatic experiencing an interesting method when reading up on it .

If someone could work out a method to do this process for purely emotional trauma without any physical component then that could be what I need. Especially if it's some method targeted at genetically alexithymic people (I am, and that complicates things and it's part of why I would be susceptible to emotional trauma in the first place I think).

Pendulation seemed like a very interesting concept/method. I could apply the concept to myself in a personalized way but I'm not sure it'd be the most efficient way to get somewhere finally uh... like I would have to go very very slowly. Maybe my **** is just too extreme, with having been disconnected from emotions for a decade after my instincts deciding a long time ago that I simply could not *exist* (emotionally) in this world among people.

My problem with mindfulness is again that it targets the focus on the tangible-physical-sensory... That focus to me is easy, trivial. Immersing deep enough in the body though does result in my brain trying to connect to the trauma emotions but the problem then is that some parts of the emotional system in my brain seem to be really disconnected (beyond just alexithymic-undeveloped, too) so I would just get the fake sensation of emotional pain that's not really a proper emotional state so it cannot be managed with any kind of emotional management technique or otherwise.

Only thing to do then is withdraw from the pain and rest again. Which I guess on the surface sounds like the pendulation approach, except it is not towards actual improvement. Or it's so slow it's not efficient and not effective eventually either. Because, no processing of the issue happens, neither in the "active/hot" state, nor in the "passive/cold" state, obviously. The sweet spot where processing can be done is just not reached this way. Or maybe it tries to process a tiny little bit upon contact until it's instantly too stressful (i.e. impossible pain). But I doubt there'd be any processing happening. Not until later I'd consider the situation and the entire issue intellectually - but that's also very inefficient due to missing the emotional information most of the time.

Ok sounds like you are definitely more in touch with your feelings than I am

(Hhahaa me trying to draw feelings. OK that was a funny moment.)

This sounds very good and btw yes I can see where you related to me. Because I did/do have that issue too with stuck emotions and energy etc.

It just looks like I can't release them purely via the physical means or just by crying etc. I needed extreme stress to even be able to release emotion in terms of expressing by crying or even more raw expression than that. (I mean therapists could not help me access any feelings at all. This was the only thing that worked in accessing, not intentionally of course.) And it doesn't actually get the original trauma processed for me or make my brain more resilient in dealing with problematic stuff (emotional stuff). When I say processed I mean I need to process it on an intellectual level too...

Can I ask how long you cried each day? Because I guess it was not overwhelming but instead not too much so it still had a visibly healing effect on you...?

I had a 3-week period of extreme reaction uh... to the trauma coming out, actually that happened by getting retraumatized strongly enough. If that makes sense. I was crying literally for hours until I felt like I caught the flu, plus I had very bad chest pain (it was a strong sensation of it burning, half physical, half emotional, it was not a proper emotional state again). So uh I didn't allow myself to do that anymore because I could see it was not working, I was just sinking into it all. Overwhelming response for the brain means you can't get past it, imo, so not healing that way. Then I approached it in a very slow way. Not mindfulness, no focus on the physical at all, for me the very opposite worked for a while instead. Intellectualizing like crazy. I know all psychologists say don't intellectualize but if that's the only way for me to get started... well again, if there is a more efficient process I'm all ears.

I guess if there is nothing out there for this type of issue/person I am, then I just have to continue developing my own methods, but your input definitely helped, reading up on stuff you listed and reading your experience overall gave me more ideas (for both the parts that are similar for us and for the parts that are the opposite/different) and also extra hope.

I hope I made some sense, I'm not feeling well enough atm to organize my writing better now. But do ask if something was unclear, please.