Breakthrough in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder  (PTSD) Treatment

Trauma is a life changer. One minute you are bouncing along and life is great and the next minute something happens that changes everything…

Sometimes the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can come on overnight but more often they do not. It may seem for a few days or weeks or even months, that you have survived relatively unscathed by what happened. But over time you may notice changes: difficulty breathing sometimes, growing anxiety, panic attacks, flash-backs and/or difficulty sleeping. For some people these PTSD symptoms lessen overtime, for others they get progressively worse. Before you know it, you can be a prisoner in your own home-hardly able to get through your own front door.

 This is very frightening and isolating and can lead to a vicious cycle of growing isolation, anxiety and depression; and overtime, a complete loss of confidence and the ability to live your life and go about your daily tasks in a normal way. In its most extreme and debilitating form the results of trauma can lead to a complete break down in the ability to function in all or almost all areas of life: the loss of the ability to maintain important relationships; hold down a job or complete a course of study. In the past this condition was known as Shell Shock and thought to affect only soldiers. Now it is known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and widely recognised to also affect some (but not all) survivors or witnesses of violence, rape, child sexual  abuse and terrorism, as well as people affected by war and natural disasters. Debilitating PTSD symptoms can also be caused by more common experiences, such as bullying, car and industrial accidents and emotional abuse.

The good news is that there is now a PTSD treatment that can reduce and in some cases eliminate altogether many of these PTSD symptoms: allowing the person to get their life back. It is based on a much better understanding from neuroscience of what is happening in the brains of survivors of trauma.  The Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux discovered that what are usually thought of as “triggers” for trauma symptoms (particular smells, noises, objects etc.) are actually sensory memories from the traumatic event that are being ‘held onto’, by the Amygdala, part of the emotional brain. One of the roles of the Amygdala is to act as our “security guard: keeping us safe from harm. The Amygdala uses these sensory memories as warning signs to mean that the person is in life-threatening danger. Professor Le Doux discovered that these sensory memories are unconscious and non-verbal & are processed & stored separately from conscious, verbal memories of the trauma. This explains why people are often unaware of what the “triggers” for their symptoms are. When anything like these patterns are present the Amygdala turns on our “Fight or Flight” emergency response system which is what generates the symptoms (read more about this here).

At MindFully Well we believe that it is possible to empty the Amygdala’s Sensory Store (moving the sensory memories that act as ‘triggers’ into Long-term Memory). This effectively eliminates  or reduces the symptoms that are so debilitating and allows the person to live their life, as they would like to, again. In fact, there is growing evidence that this is the case (see here). Furthermore, the process involved has a number of additional advantages when compared with mainstream approaches to trauma counselling:

•   It does not involve re-living the trauma
•  It does not involve re-experiencing the pain
• It is non-voyeuristic (the therapist does not need to know the details of what happened)
• The client is deeply relaxed throughout.

When we use this approach to treating trauma we find that many people are able to return to living their lives as they used to live them, before their world was devastated and turned upside down by trauma. They start again to be able to do things that they have not been able to do, sometimes for many years. Of course, they still have the memory of what happened, but crucially, It becomes like any other bad memory: something in the past that doesn’t affect their ability to go about their day to day lives.

By Ann Marie Taylor – MindFully Well Psychotherapist who holds clinics in Dublin Southside & in Greystones, County Wicklow.

If you are suffering from the effects of trauma, all counsellors – psychotherapists in the MindFully Well network are fully trained and qualified in the PTSD treatment methods mentioned in this article. They will be happy to help you.

Call us – we can help!