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PrintTaking Out Trauma
75% of people who experience trauma will eventually dream it out (the brain’s built in way of releasing emotional arousal) or eventually be able to talk about it. This causes the memory banks of such people to re-locate traumatic memory into ‘narrative memory’. They’ll know it was bad at the time, but it won’t feel bad to think and talk about it any more. The remaining 25% have persistent trauma. Weeks, months, even years later it will still feel very current and awful to even think about, let alone discuss. As you’d expect, these are the people who also make the best hypnotic subjects. The traumatic memory doesn’t fade for these people and is logged as a current not a past threat.
Their brain will be on the look out for anything that reminds them of the initial trauma. This is the way the protective emergency part of your brain errs on the side of caution. So, for Dr X, all old people felt threatening because one had actually been.
Trying to get someone who is deeply traumatised to ‘talk about it’ may only make it worse as ‘getting back into the memory’ re-traumatises the person. Dr X couldn’t talk about the initial attack at first. Had I insisted on making her talk about it in detail to ‘explore her feelings’, her session would have been painfully distressing and ineffective.
As trauma becomes encoded instinctively through the REM state, it is best treated by accessing the same REM state – and this can easily be done through relaxed hypnotic trance. Relaxation and disassociation are key to lifting trauma quickly and comfortably. Dr X needed help fast.
Next, The Rewind Technique
