Do not let anyone tell you that PTSD is for life, or that recovery is a painful and slow process, or that 'you can learn to walk again but the PTSD will always walk beside you' This is, generally, just plain wrong: you can recover.
Start the film to find out how - or read on below...
There are two kinds of bad memories:
One: a bad thing happens, it feels awful at the time but gets slowly better. A year later you are coming to terms wiith it, five years later it's history. It may not be pleasant history, but it's history.
Two: a bad thing happens and it stays stuck at the back of your mind. Every time something reminds you of it you feel bad, perhaps as bad as you did when the event was really happening. Perhaps you think it really is happening again. Perhaps you dream about it, in terrible dark dreams that wake you in a sweat, maybe several times a night. Ten years later it may be even worse. This is trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.
The difference between the two kinds of memory is in the place where they are stored. Traumatic memories are stored partly in the amygdala, a part of the brain that looks after the fight-or-flight reflex. When the amygdala sees something that matches the original trauma, it sets off the alarm bells just as it did when the event was really happening. Sometimes its pattern-matches are so strong the whole brain is commandeered into re-enacting the original trauma. The solution, originally proposed by Milton Erickson in the 1960's, is to allow the whole brain and body to re-experience the trauma in a partially dissociated way while staying very calm, so that the amygdala can learn that this memory is not really life-threatening. Modern versions of his technique are used by a number of therapeutic schools, but the most refined version, developed by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, is the human givens rewind technique.
As well as being simple, safe and extremely effective, it is a very humane way of treating trauma. It does not involve talking over the traumatic events - in fact the patient does not have to describe them at all, just give them a name and watch them on an imagined television screen while in a highly relaxed state.
The non-voyeuristic nature of this treatment makes it highly suitable for victims of sexual abuse, and the highly relaxed state makes it a safe way to treat military personnel who might otherwise be prone to acting-out their trauma.
In most cases the nightmares, panic attacks and flashbacks of PTSD resolve straight away. However, there may still be other things to be done to relieve depression that often accompanies PTSD, and in some cases the main traumatic pattern is relieved but other memories then surface which are not related to the pattern that has beeen detraumatised. These memories are treated in the same way as the original trauma.
