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The
Critical Response
A
trauma is any situation that threatens your physical or
psychological well-being and causes you to experience
uncommonly powerful emotions. There are three options when
we feel we are in danger: we can fight, flee, or freeze.
How we respond is determined by our
characters as much as by our environments, but there are
general signs and symptoms of a stress reaction: anxiety,
grief, poor concentration, forgetfulness, headaches,
fatigue, loss of appetite, numbing, anger, restlessness,
irritability, fear, nightmares, hyper-vigilance.. When
symptoms persist or become too intense, it is time to seek
help from a professional with experience in trauma
treatment.
The Negative Trance
Some
people experience traumas so overwhelming that they get
stuck, similar in ways to a needle skipping on a record. The
frightening event is long gone, but the body persists in
responding as though it were happening all over again. When
the mind and body froze, it unwittingly locked itself into a
negative trance, a negative feedback loop. For that reason,
an essential part of working with trauma is “de-trancing,”
so that the event can be put in the past, where it belongs.
Body
Memory
Most
of the exciting and wonderfully successful work being done
in cases of traumatic stress is in the area of mind/body
medicine and energy healing. Treatment options include:
hypnotherapy, Reiki or Therapeutic Touch, Somatic
Experiencing, Classical Homeopathy, EMDR, and Thought-Field
Therapy. They are all based on the notion that the mind and
body are one organism and that thoughts and words have real,
physical impacts.
Case History: The Disappearing Tic
“A”
came in for terrible twitching and fear. She was so
hyper-vigilant that she wouldn’t even close the office door.
We started by focusing on environmental triggers to rule
them out. We charted sleep, meals, and stress triggers,
carefully managing them. Twitching episodes seem to be more
disruptive and frequent when she was tired, disturbed, or
hungry. Symptoms were diminished but not gone. There was
obviously more at work within her. What purpose did the
twitch serve? What was its mechanism? When did it start?
When we explored further with hypnosis, we amazingly
discovered that she had had a traumatic injury to the area
in which the twitch originated. With a combination of EMDR,
body work, and hypnosis, she has happily eliminated it
altogether She is married, successful in her career and
unimpeded by old fears and pain.
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For information on a
workshop/lecture on this topic, please
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