I will add, on a related note, that what I am feeling is that trauma is like a horror movie where you just had to stop watching at some moment. By now, most Americans have been acculturated to watch in movies the most horrific scenes of torture, murder, grotesque images, and other violence. I saw a kid at Infinity War who could not have been older than six. It was likely a single mother, and I felt some pity for her.
Be that as it may, the first time you see something awful in a movie, you cover your eyes. You look away. You just can’t stand to see it. It is just too emotionally painful. You get over this with conditioning, but that moment still happens at least for the more sensitive among us. Certainly it happened with me. I hated horror movies for a long time. As I have shared, I forced myself to watch the whole Saw series and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then called it a day on horror movies. Watching those was useful. As I have also shared, it reminded me of my home, at the emotional shadow level.
But to my point, PTSD is the equivalent in some real world situation. You can’t physically pull your body out of the scene, and you may not be able to cover your eyes or ears, but you stop processing emotionally. There is an increase in tension that reaches a fever pitch, then POP, nothing. It all goes blank emotionally. It is like it is happening to someone else.
To make the PTSD go away, though, you have to finish watching the movie. You have to complete the loop. In the real world, whatever the stress was, it has presumably ended, and likely ended long, long ago. Stress can reach a high pitch, then come down. Everything calms down. The movie ends, and people walk out of the theater chatting. But you never get to see that part if you are stuck.
One hypnotic technique I have read about is double dissociation, where you watch a mirror of yourself watching the movie. You don’t even have to see the scenes the double is watching, but you do have to see that double watch it all the way through to the end. This may be very effective for simple trauma.
Complex trauma is an emotional loop. What you are “watching” is a cascade of feelings which were utterly overwhelming at one time, which had to be suppressed and buried. In principle, though, it is the same, with the difference that it is a kinesthetic movie versus one that you can confine to the visual and auditory pathways.
I feel this. I feel this today. The movie is starting to come back to me.