I definitely agree that starting with EMDR may not be the best choice for everyone.
I recommend starting with plain ol' regular talk therapy, and I think it's more important to find a therapist you connect with as a person than to try a specific form of therapy. If you get along with that therapist, it will work a lot better. Someone can be the wrong therapist for you without being a "bad" therapist (but of course bad therapists do also exist).
I did regular talk therapy for two years before starting EMDR. When I started EMDR, I also started with a LOT of "resourcing" (building the sense of connection I had to positive things that grounded me and helped me to cope). Many EMDR therapists do not have this emphasis on resourcing. I think it's VITALLY important to do lots of resourcing, as EMDR can be triggering and bring a temporary increase in symptoms at times.
Regardless of what kind of therapy you're doing, I think it's also really helpful to listen to YouTube videos such as guided meditations or reiki, as they are surprisingly good at getting the body out of the physiological state of trauma. CPTSD has physical manifestations, and those are not well understood in the medical industry. The same organ that creates the manifestations of your emotions in your body (your innate immune system, which is you inflammatory response) is involved in CPTSD somatic symptoms. So you have to learn to control your inflammatory response to get out of the physiological state of trauma. This can be done via identifying which particular inflammatory triggers generate the biggest response in you personally (as our inflammatory response is unique to each person, like our fingerprints). Histamine is the most important neurotransmitter associated with the inflammatory response, and histamine is responsible for MANY of the mental health symptoms that people all over the world experience.
It significantly contributes to irritability, hypervigilance, rage, violence impulses, self-harm urges, suicidal ideation, jealousy, codependency, obsessive thinking, echolalia, flashbacks, anorexia, anxiety, hallucinations, depression, self-criticism, and a more. It also causes things like alertness, intuition, sexual arousal, creativity, religious experience, humor, and euphoria. There are many different kinds of histamine receptors, and they exist all over the body. Histamine can cause an enormous array of symptoms, especially in combinations with all the other chemicals in your body. Histamine is mainly responsible for what emotional differences there tend to be between men and women, because of the very different effects testosterone and estrogen have on how histamine is used in the body.
Again, the medical industry is still almost entirely oblivious to this information, so it's difficult to hear a real medical professional talk about it. But I know Peter Levine mentions in one of his books that doing an elimination diet can be really helpful in terms of CPTSD recovery. He says this is a very difficult process, but I think it's THE most important in terms of what a huge improvement in symptoms you get for your trouble. Therapy didn't work for me until I got my histamine under control, and then it started working CRAZY fast.
Antihistamines cause interactions with other drugs so it's important to talk to your doctor before adding even an OTC antihistamine if you are already on any medication. If you're not safe to take antihistamines, you can do a lot to reduce histamine naturally with diet and lifestyle changes. If you can take antihistamines, they're basically a cheat code for CPTSD recovery.