This is old but I want to say that my drug of choice is propanolol. It's a beta blocker or a blood pressure pill. It treats all of the physiological responses to anxiety from my PTSD.

My problem is that after 18 years of severe abuse, my body is wired to survival mode and doesn't have any in between responses. The propanolol forces it to slow the heck down, chill, so I can think and react instead of holing up for protection.

I have tried ativan and xanax and they really didn't do anything for me. If I took 2, I got sleepy, but I didn't notice any relief of symptoms. It just slowed me down but it didn't stop the bad parts of the anxiety.

For me, propanolol STOPS the bad parts of the my anxiety cold. In fact, I'm going to take one in just a minute because I can't seem to shake this anxiety this morning.

There were some trials testing propanolol with people who have experienced recent trauma to try and prevent PTSD from ever occuring. Those were successful but not sure if they were ever replicated. I think there was at least one miliatry trial testing propanolol as well and I know there's some research on them giving it to people with speaking anxiety before they are asked to present in public.

As far as other medications that no one has mentioned, a doctor once prescribed me a trial of risperdal for PTSD, I took it for 2 nights and decided it was too risky to continue. He gave it to me out of an offshoot of more military research where they gave risperdal to a lot of veterans with combat PTSD to help with the dreams, stress reactions, etc. I can't speak as to whether or not it worked because I only took it for 2 nights and it was right after I had a super bad experience w/another medicine, so I wasn't up for experimentation.

Glad to hear the EMDR is working for you. My clinical supervisor is a specialist and she swears by it but my last supervisor swore it off... I like to believe it does work really well for some people but I have no professional or personal experience with it just yet. I wanted to try it the last time I went to therapy but my psychologist didn't believe in it... so, there ya go.