A soldier, while discussing the possibility of using hypnotherapy to tackle PTSD, once said: “I just want you to know I am not going to do it if you start banging on about my childhood. Every therapist I have seen asks me questions about my childhood. What has that got to do with anything?”
Well, the answer is, an awful lot, and just understanding that, while being open to the impact it may have had on you, gets you half-way there on the road to curing PTSD.
The reason is vulnerability.
To learn more, watch the video below or read on:
If you think about yourself now, and how capable you are, even if you are struggling, you are probably aware that everything that has happened to you in life has made you pretty tough, at least on the outside. This is why you find PTSD symptoms so debilitating.
However, imagine yourself as a toddler of two or three years old, or just a baby. Imagine what resources that baby had when things happened around it, or to it, that were traumatic, scary, terrifying even. What could it do? Could it run away? No. Could it fight back? No. Could it do anything to ensure its own survival? No. It was totally vulnerable, subject to whatever the adults around it wanted to do.
But, as we are finding out, by talking to so many people in hypnotherapy, babies know exactly what is going on around them, what is being said, and the danger they may be in.
This creates an emotional storm in their small bodies, of fear, hurt and anger, which triggers an autonomic reaction, to protect them. It might be a fight reaction, a flight reaction or a freeze/pull out of your own body reaction. From that moment on, whenever you meet stress, you will always react the same way, and if you meet enough stress, your PTSD symptoms will follow that same path – fight, flight or freeze.
There is a part of us, deep down inside of us, which Sigmund Freud termed the ID. The ID is the part of us charged with keeping us alive. It is our primeval survival mechanism. It kicks in when we believe our lives are in danger. People talk about an adrenalin rush in times of danger, but it might actually be an ID rush, rushing up to protect you; insulate you.
There will have been a moment in your life, generally when you were very young, when you first took a sharp intake of breath and thought ‘but how will I survive this?’ or ‘I might not survive this.’
Your life might not have been in imminent danger. It might have been when your mother or father left the family home, or you were separated from one or both of them for other reasons. Or, if you were born to a mother with post-natal depression, you might have suddenly thought: ‘what if she doesn’t feed me? She isn’t paying any attention to me.’ It might be a realization that you have been born into a loveless, dangerous, home environment and you have no idea, as a tiny baby, how to negotiate it.
You might be scoffing at this by now, thinking how would a tiny baby deduce any of this? But over the years that we have been treating PTSD, and taking people into hypnotherapy, this is exactly what they remember thinking, feeling, or experiencing.
Every Catch hypnotherapist has treated patients who have experienced the most acute memories of very early childhood, which formed their view of the world in a ‘snapshot second’.
A mother having post-natal depression is a predisposition to PTSD in the child later in life. So too is premature birth, where the child is ripped away from everything it knows, and constantly placed under the stress of painful interventions.
A mother or father suddenly leaving home can make a toddler feel immense heartbreak. The tiny child does not know what to do with these emotions and builds walls inside to contain it. At some point those walls have to come down.
The importance of childhood adversity is finally being recognized in medical circles. Two NHS consultants wrote a paper in 2018 in which they posited that ALL mental illness is caused by adversity in childhood.
Catch hypnotherapists have found it is not what happens in adulthood that causes PTSD – that is just the trigger; the spark – it is what happened a long time ago, even if what happened in adulthood is WORSE. It is all relative to the age at which you experienced it. The emotions, the feelings, the physical conditions you feel now are all feeding off that first experience.
So how do we change the past if we don’t have a time machine?
Well, in essence, we do. The human body is an excellent time machine. Using CATCH hypnotherapy, we can help you relax your body completely, and we can help you go back to the exact point that your ID was first terrified it would not survive, and you, with the wisdom of your advanced years, can comfort that younger you, explain it is over now, and it doesn’t need to go round and round in that ‘washing machine of emotion’ any more.
You will learn why everything has been so stuck for so long. You will remember things you didn’t remember; generally the thing that is upsetting our system the most now, is the thing we do not remember. But once you see it, and understand it, it all starts to make perfect sense. That insight allows your body to defuse the triggers which have been holding you hostage to these emotions and feelings for so long.
Catch hypnotherapy is a very gentle, insightful, process, using the powers of your body to unravel the triggers of the past. People love the sensation of total relaxation and marvel at what they see and understand.
If you would like to find the root of your problem, and eliminate it for good, have a wander through catchptsd.com, see if there is a therapist that appeals to you, and give them a call.
We are here to help!
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