There are actually three Post Traumatic Stress diagnoses – PTSI, PTSD and CPTSD. It’s an alphabet soup!! But to explain it here, I am going to use a walnut and a paving slab. That’s all I need. Read on, or watch the video.
Imagine you are a walnut. You are tough and hard on the outside. You have had to be to get this far in life. But inside, you are pretty soft and easily damaged, like the nut in a walnut. It wouldn’t take much to damage the inside of that walnut, so it keeps that tough shell around it. Imagine that something happens to that walnut – to you; something that could damage it – something strong enough and awful enough to bring a force against that walnut, like a paving slab.
If I was to pick up a paving slab, and smash it down on top of a walnut, it would probably break open. But if I was to just place it down on top of the walnut it wouldn’t break. It would just create a huge pressure on it, but that shell would probably stand up to that one paving slab. This is physics. There has been no force; just mass.
This one paving slab is a visual image of a Post traumatic Stress Injury – a PTSI. Something has happened; the body has absorbed the weight of it; it is de-stabilizing the body, but over a few weeks or months the walnut, the body, will adapt to the weight and carry on.
Now, imagine not one thing has happened to you, but several; five, ten. Every time another paving slab has been lain on top of that walnut, on top of you, that weight has got heavier. However, the shell is tough. It can withstand an enormous amount of pressure. But inside, everything is screaming, ‘get it off. I can’t function. It’s too much. It’s too heavy.’
You may be scared of what might happen if it does crack. Cracks may be beginning to appear and everything those paving slabs represent may be slipping inside you, reminding you, making you feel the same emotion you felt then, now, or giving you sudden images; pictures. This is PTSD. You struggle to go on. You appear normal to everyone else, but this weight is constant.
You feel fatigued; stressed. You don’t have any patience for anyone else. It is all you can do to keep yourself upright, let alone show any empathy or sympathy to others. You may drink, or take drugs, just to escape that heaviness for a while.
Now, imagine you have not experienced a handful of traumas but many, since you were very small. Imagine you have 50 paving slabs, not 10. Because you have had to adapt, resist, keep going, you may have the toughest walnut shell possible. Yes, it isolates you from others, but if that is what it takes, you will do everything to make that shell thicker and thicker. But then one day, something else happens, and another paving slab comes down on you, and even your ultra-thick shell cracks, and then just collapses under the weight of those 51 paving slabs, and you are pinned beneath all those emotions, all that pain, all that hurt. That is CPTSD. That is physics. Eventually, the weight of the mass will crush the lighter object. The medical profession calls it complex-PTSD. I call it cumulative-PTSD. Cumulative traumas. No one knows how many paving slabs their shell will stand up to. But what is certain is one will be too many.
The medical profession has no idea what to do at this point, because there are so many symptoms, such high emotion, and nothing seems related. It is just one big mess. They say C-PTSD is untreatable, but CATCH hypnotherapists know exactly what to do. We know how to help you bring yourself out from under that crushing weight; understand what happened; address it; discard it; until you get down to that very first paving slab which was the start of it all. The one that started the pile. When you understand what that one represents, everything crumbles. All the weight will come off, all life lessons learned. Then you get your life back. It sounds hard work, I know, but not as hard work as carrying that load you have been carrying for so long.
With hypnotherapy, everything is examined while in a deep state of relaxation, which makes everything so much clearer, and so much easier to handle. As our grandparents used to say, ‘the only way out is through.’ And it couldn’t be more true in the case of PTSD and C-PTSD. But CATCH hypnotherapists will be with you all the way, supporting you, until the task is done. Why not give us a call, get a free consultation, and see how we might help you. We are here to help!
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