Trauma
and Recovery, Part 1
I would like to offer a message of honest hope for
veterans suffering from PTSD, and their spouses. I would like, specifically, to offer a plan
of attack that may be better than the one you are pursuing now.
I myself was recently diagnosed with “severe, complex,
PTSD with dissociation”, as a result of a series of as-yet unremembered events
that happened to me or that I was a part of some time before age 2.
This diagnosis is about as bad as it gets in the trauma
domain, but it fills me with optimism and confidence in the future, for many
reasons.
First and foremost, this diagnosis was only made
possible by therapeutic advances, specifically a technique called
Multi-Dimensional Eye Movement, which itself is a part of a larger method
called “Emotional Transformation Therapy”.
20 years ago, when I did seek out therapy, there was nothing that could
have touched this, much less helped resolve it.
Secondly, it allows me to give a name to a feeling I
have not been able to name. One of the
aspects of unresolved trauma is a sense of emotional disconnection. If you have PTSD, you know what I am talking
about. You feel like you are going
crazy, and you don’t know why. You can’t
run from it, but you can hide from it in alcohol and drugs and other
distractions. In my own case, I have managed it with a relentless application of will, but this saps psychic energy that can be put to better uses.
This disconnectedness is one aspect of trauma; the other
is the “intrusion”, the flashback, the inability to stop seeing images,
smelling smells, hearing things, thinking thoughts, and feeling again things
from long ago. This is the classic PTSD
symptom.
Here is the good news: if you can remember what it is
that is bothering you, very good techniques exist now to treat it. If you have not tried Eye Movement
Desensitization and Reprocessing, you should.
And before I describe it, let me make an important
point: the default therapies the VA offers, at least in my understanding, are
not only largely useless, they in many cases make things worse. They are fifty year old techniques that
should be discarded, but socialized medicine makes progress difficult. Specifically, they use what are called
exposure, or immersion, or in vitro methods, which ask you to go through the
memories or triggering stimuli over and over.
This is stupid. The goal is to
PROCESS the trauma, go through the trauma, so that you can make it go
away. It is not to retraumatize you over
and over.
And another piece of good news is that you can almost
certainly self fund your own therapeutic journey. Most of the new methods allow
for tremendous progress in as little as 1 2 hour session. I paid $150/hour for 6 hours of therapy, and
that $900 was some of the smartest money I ever spent. Any serious alcoholic is spending at least $60-$100/week on booze, so if you can get off the bottle your payback on this
investment is rapid.
And what you are doing is getting rid of the very valid
and understandable reasons you drink. If
you go to an AA meeting, you will see a lot of vaguely sad people who miss
their old friend, but had to quit because it was killing them and their
relationships. In my view, most all of
them have untreated PTSD, likely from things they can’t even remember. What you are doing here is treating the root
of the problem.
This is good news as well because the VA takes forever
to treat people anyway. So ignore
them. Ignore what insurance you do or do
not have. Pay cash.
And if you don’t have somebody local, schedule a trip to
go somewhere, and book 2-5 days of 2 hour sessions. Your sanity, your mental health is worth
it. This is a battle, and this is the
battle plan.
Returning to EMDR, you have perhaps heard the idea that
trauma permanently rewires your brain.
It appears to be true that it rewires the brain, but not true that that
damage cannot be undone. EMDR exists specifically
to facilitate new connections, so as to enable the processing of trauma, and
cessation or substantial mitigation of symptoms.
And the techniques as I have experienced them are
simplicity itself. First off, while you
are talking with the therapist, he or she will give you a headset that puts
alternating tones in your ears; and combine this with little modules that
vibrate alternately, that you put on your hands. This helps balance the brain hemispheres, and
facilitates processing of information, with trauma merely being painful
information.
What you will do is establish a hierarchy of traumas,
and if you can remember everything that bothers you—I can’t, which will make my
own treatment a bit trickier—then you are in an excellent position. As I understand the process, you can either
start with the least traumatizing memory, or most. Which is chosen will depend on you and your
therapist.
And the therapist will then take out a stick about 18”
long, with a color on the end, and simply move it back and forth horizontally,
and ask you to follow it with your eyes as you think about that memory. If your experience is anything like mine,
this will elicit a powerful reaction.
You might shake, you might feel deep sadness, you might feel terror, or
disgust, or nausea. And it will
build. It will get larger and larger,
then it will crescendo, and dissipate.
And you will then close your eyes, take a deep breath, and sit there as
long as you need to to let the feeling subside.
As I understand it, with simple trauma—which is to say
single traumatizing events that you can remember—a couple run throughs of this
may be sufficient to make the intrusions disappear permanently. My therapist said she has often gotten
substantial resolution in a single session.
And I want to be clear, this is really not “talk therapy”
in a classical sense, where the therapist starts out “tell me about your mother”. It is not confessional, and you don’t have to
sit there endlessly talking about feelings.
Many rightly fear this as useless.
It is task oriented.
It is “what are the problems”, then the implementing of a solution. It is efficient in a great many, perhaps
most, cases.
And there is an add-on therapy for unresolved
grief. According to my therapist, PTSD
among veterans in particular is often oriented around mourning the deaths of
comrades, or mourning the deaths of those they have killed. It is the survivor guilt.
The solution for this in many cases—75% is the number
the founder has been using—is a modified EMDR called Induced After Death
Communication. I have not personally
experienced this, but the gist of it is that it enables a brief contact with
the dead person, a brief communication, the substance of which is usually “I am
alright. I am fine. Let me go.”
And it does not matter what your beliefs are. If you are an atheist, that is fine. Many veterans who have benefited from this technique
were skeptical, but left with tremendous relief. I will post a link to a video on this at the
end of this where they discuss their experience.
And it would be foolish of me to say that this one
method will help everyone. But what I
want to say is that methods have advanced, and that I have absolute confidence
that if you persevere, you will prevail over your demons.
There is the Multi-Dimensional Eye Movement I
mentioned. This consists in creating a
bundle of colored wooden sticks—each color has a meaning and target—and slowly
moving the bundle through your range of vision until something is
triggered. In my own case, I triggered a
deep feeling of sadness, and the image of blood on the floor. I still don’t know what it was, but it was
powerful, very real, and unsuspected. It
was probably the most therapeutically useful thing that has ever happened to
me.
Then the therapist will slowly rotate the wands to see
if one direction or the other relieves that feeling. Then he or she will move it away from you,
which creates relief. This is a way of
directly contacting traumas and releasing them.
There is a light therapy which is also a part of
Emotional Tranformation that is apparently very useful. Again, this is not talk therapy. This is getting at synapses and allowing them
to self correct. Our brains have a
powerful ability to regenerate.
There is Somatic Experiencing, which is something I am
looking at. Prey animals in the wild
often experience violence. They will be
chased by some predator, get away, then shake for a while, then allow that fear
to dissipate completely. Despite
spending their lives at risk of sudden death, they remain relaxed. This shaking apparently helps resolve trauma.
Part of my own therapy for some time has been doing what
I can to help others and improve the world.
I know firsthand the pain that PTSD causes, and this letter is written
in the hope of helping some person get through it, and to bring relief both to
them and their loved ones who care for them, but are largely helpless.
You are not helpless.
This is the substance of what I am saying. It is my understanding the VA, unless things
have changed–and the news in the last month makes this seem doubtful–is worse
than useless. Your insurance does not
matter. You can and should seek out
effective treatment modalities. They
exist, and you have access to them over some period of time.
I wish you all the best!!!
Somatic
Experiencing: http://www.traumahealing.com/somatic-experiencing/index.html
P.S. If you know anyone with emotional problems, they may be the result of unresolved trauma and grief. Please forward this link to them. Also, of course, if you know anyone who certainly has PTSD. This world is filled with bullshit. I am doing what little I can to help address this.