How Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Works

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Dr X was an intelligent and articulate psychiatrist. She had also developed a terror of old people. A grey head or a stooped posture was enough to cause her heart to race and her palms to become sweaty.



She had diagnosed herself as having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – an excessive firing of the fight or flight response. She had taken time off with stress and told me that it had got to the point that just catching sight of a grey haired person over sixty five was terrifying for her. Her life was becoming unbearable.

She had read about the famous ‘rewind technique’ and had heard that I could do it. She also told me she knew exactly why she had the problem and where it had ‘come from’.

Her plight highlights one of the great fallacies of psychotherapy. Freud and his followers argued that if you discovered ‘root causes’ of a problem, then the problem would dissolve. But, as Dr X and many others have found, this is not the case. Emotional patterns can run despite us knowing why they do and how they originated.

Dr X knew all too well that her trauma stemmed from a shocking incident which took place one afternoon in the psychiatric unit in which she worked.

Near death experience

An elderly man, a resident in the unit, suddenly attacked her and tried to strangle her. The incident was all the more nightmarish because she discovered, as she fought for her life, that this seemingly frail and harmless man in his 70s was immensely strong! Fortunately, the other staff came to her aid and rescued her. But in those moments of terror Dr X went into a state of frozen fear – a type of trance state which occurs at times of great threat. In this state, her instincts were open for programming – identifying and storing the patterns that would alert her to such a dangerous threat in future. Now, whenever she was confronted with anything that even vaguely reminded her of the initial trauma, such as seeing an old person, this would act like a post-hypnotic trigger, and she would go back into the terror trance again. She knew what was happening, but she just didn’t know how to stop it.

Next, Unconscious Programming

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