People come to psychotherapy and counseling because they need help. Primarily, help is requested for an array of disruptive symptoms in their life that continue to persist in spite of their best efforts. Common symptoms that draw people into therapy include insomnia, the inability to stop worrying which leads to ongoing anxiety, the feeling of pervasive unhappiness or depression, as well as other physical and psychological symptoms that are very hard to pin down as directly related to earlier traumatic events. Let me provide you with some background and then some examples.
When people suffer a traumatic event, there are all kinds of possible consequences that may ensue. Frequently it is the case that these various traumatic consequences take care of themselves and fade away over time. But there are situations that because of the depth or duration of the particular trauma that these symptoms tend to actually get worse over time. A significant problem is that most practitioners are not sufficiently trained to recognize that these various symptoms are a direct consequence of early traumatic experiences. Let me give you some examples.
Chronic and persistent physical health problems often result from previous trauma that sometimes lead to PTSD. Some examples include fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivities, chronic headaches along with dermatological and musculoskeletal complaints. It is usually the case that people suffering from these conditions will first go to their primary care physician for help and some hoped for treatment. It is often also usually the case that their doctor will prescribe medication that may temporarily help alleviate some of the more acute symptoms, but typically never gets to the root of the problem. Frequently therapists and counselors will attempt to help with the presenting problem without being able to discern or consider the underlying cause. Many trauma researchers now agree that trauma changes the brain and at the same time simultaneously changes the body. In essence, this results in dysregulation of the biochemistry of the brain and hormones throughout the body. As a consequence, many of the physical symptoms I refer to above end up as persistent physical complaints, all due in large part to underlying unresolved emotional trauma. Another component of traumatic residue that will often persist overtime affects people cognitively and psychically.
Along with the above-mentioned physical symptoms, many clients that I see who have PTSD complain of recurring intrusive thoughts and flashbacks of traumatic events. Additionally when people have dissociated, they will report memory lapses and trouble with their mental focus, concentration and sustained attention. Dissociation happens when a part of our consciousness actually checks out and leaves our physical body. When this happens people experience a sense of unreality and a certain perception of feeling distanced from what is happening right now. Sometimes it’s described as an out-of-body experience. This contributes to a sense of time distortion or inability to track time in a linear way, along with a propensity for obsessive thinking that can turn out to be the predecessor to obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s important to note that there are significant emotional and behavioral consequences of unresolved trauma and PTSD as well.
People who have suffered significant trauma frequently report feelings of shame and humiliation along with accompanying depression or anxiety. I have had clients tell me that they felt numb and even experienced a sense of internal deadness, as if a large part of them actually felt dead inside. Other frequent emotional and behavioral effects of unresolved trauma include feelings of terror, anxiety and panic out of the blue, such as a panic attack when people often report feeling that they are dying. Additionally, unresolved trauma generates feelings of anger and rage that are often disproportionate to the event that stimulates it. Loneliness, alienation along with feeling isolated from others can lead to despair when one is feeling hopeless that anything can change or anyone can help. When people feel like this, it’s very difficult to consider reaching out to ask for help from a therapist, counselor or even a family member. These feelings of despair and hopelessness are some of the major reasons that people fall prey to substance addictions as a form of self-medication.
In my opinion, a major insufficiency of cognitive behavioral or talk therapy is that when a person’s brain and nervous system has been traumatized, the person finds themself compelled to direct his/her focus away from language and verbal content, and to zoom in instead on nonverbal danger cues. These cues are frequently nonverbal and include subtle movements of the body, facial expressions, the tone of the person’s voice and other perceived threat related information. When a person’s nervous system is calm, attention can finally be directed to ideas and the meaning of words that is the very essence of cognitive behavioral therapy. Consider that the so-called primitive brain cannot process cognitive solutions that are of higher intellectual or cortical functions. This is particularly true when dissociation has occurred and the part that carries the memories of the event has left and is out of one’s normal awareness.
When emotional trauma persists longer than six months, the person is considered to have PTSD or posttraumatic stress disorder. People who are subject to this persistent trauma disorder experience heightened reactivity and extreme sensitivity in the parts of the brain that process emotions, sensations and images (often agreed upon as the amygdala or the storage center of emotional memory in the brain). This is why different imagery techniques, direct and indirect hypnosis, multiple embedded metaphors and storytelling and of course, shamanic journey work are all so helpful in targeting the trauma that cognitive based approaches cannot. Simply reviewing and talking about a traumatic event that happened in the past cannot resolve the issue most of the time. In fact, it can tend to be re-traumatizing that actually exacerbates the client’s current symptom complex.
Dynamic Energetic Healing® interventions, with its primary emphasis on energy psychology interventions, manual muscle testing and shamanic imagery utilizes strategies that mostly bypass the rational intellect “left brain” of the client, thus making a profound impact to create rapid changes as the energy body is directly targeted. As this occurs, traumatic residue that’s been stored as information fields in various parts of the body-mind matrix are identified, targeted and released. It’s simply remarkable.
Posted on April 20, 2013
Howard Brockman, LCSW
Howard Brockman
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