Most people with PTSD have experienced a traumatic interruption of their sense of reality. This violation of one’s normal sense of safety and well-being brings with it intense feelings of fear, horror, and helplessness, overwhelming coping strategies for everyday stress.
Unable to discharge the terrible intensity of the experience, the psyche responds by trying to repress and isolate the memories. A kind of emotional quarantine is established, producing something like an emotional cyst. It may be necessary to isolate the trauma just to continue daily tasks and survival. Unfortunately, this process requires enormous amounts of psychic energy to maintain and is generally not very successful.
People with PTSD are often triggered by small, seemingly inconsequential stimuli, from the sound of a misfiring engine, to a particular smell, to the expression on a stranger’s face. These apparently innocent stimuli are linked to the original memory and cause a breach in the protective wall. This can trigger flashbacks or episodes of anger, depression, insomnia, or self-destructive behavior.
In an effort to prevent this activation, people with PTSD may become reclusive, obsessively avoiding certain situations or people. This list can grow over time, severely restricting normal activities. They may resort to alcohol or other numbing agents in an effort to quell their “fight or flight” reactions. This often leads to a downward spiral of dysfunctional and deteriorating relationships.
For some, the effort to maintain repression will begin to cause memory problems, lethargy, difficulty concentrating, or emotional numbness. So much effort is being made to isolate the trauma that there is little energy left for normal life.
Unfortunately, most forms of traditional therapy offer little or no relief from these symptoms. Because they rely heavily on the client recalling, verbalizing, and discussing her memories and feelings, most conventional therapies go directly against the client’s desperate need to stay safe through repression. Sometimes well-meaning therapists can do more harm than good by strongly reactivating memories and strengthening related neural pathways.
A treatment method that has Showing very promising results for PTSD relief is EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). EFT or “tapping” operates on the premise that all negative emotions are a disruption in the body’s energy system, the same network of energy meridians used by acupuncturists.
Instead of using needles, the EFT practitioner has the client tap specific acupuncture points with their fingers, while going through a systematic process of focusing on emotions, physical sensations, and memories. When applied correctly, the technique often provides immediate relief. Repeated rounds of tapping often bring about a complete discharge of the negative emotional intensity associated with a particular memory.
The memory itself is not erased and may in fact become clearer and more detailed, however the accompanying feelings (fear, guilt, anger or horror, for example) simply seem to disappear. Attempts to re-stimulate these feelings by recalling the memory in ever greater detail are usually unsuccessful. Follow-up, even months later, usually shows no return of these negative feelings.
A great advantage of the EFT process is that there are several well-established procedures that allow trained practitioners to carefully download memories without re-traumatizing the client. All certified professionals are trained in “telling a story” and “trauma without tears” techniques.
EFT is also a remarkably effective method. Fully downloading a specific memory of a traumatic incident can take, on average, between 20 minutes and an hour. These seemingly miraculous results are possible because EFT addressed the root of the problem: the disturbance in the client’s energy system, rather than the memory itself.
As specific memories are downloaded one after another, a “generalization effect” begins to take place and similar memories automatically begin to lose their intensity. In other words, if a soldier has 100 traumatic war memories, it may only be necessary to tap on ten or twenty of them to achieve complete relief.
EFT has been used effectively to combat veterans, police officers, firefighters, and EMTs, victims of sexual assault and other forms of violence, survivors of natural disasters, accidents, terrorist attacks, and child abuse. As traumatic memories “collapse”, the energy that was supposed to repress them is restored and many related problems, including physical complaints, tend to resolve spontaneously.
EFT is a relatively new technique and is still considered “alternative” so it may not be covered by most health insurance plans. However, given the lack of effective conventional treatments for PTSD, EFT’s history of rapid results may make it the best and most cost-effective approach for many PTSD patients. And because many EFT practitioners can work over the phone, sessions are accessible to almost anyone.