Hypnosis and Combat Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Part 2

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is actually a great description of this bedeviling human experience. No one likes stress, but most of us find ways to manage it. “Sure, this has been a hectic week at the office, but Friday’s coming and I’ll go to a movie or get together with friends and unwind”. The person struggling with PTSD, however, can find no release from their STRESS. What ever worked before to relax no longer works. This stress brings DISORDER to their lives. This all started after, “POST”, a TRAUMATIC experience. Suffering may continue long after the precipitating trauma - a month, a year, and decades. This unremitting stress, then, is the first feature of this painful condition. Folks with PTSD often experience emotional numbing - they have shut themselves off from their feelings because they are just too painful. They are often hyper-vigilant...always watching and “on guard” emotionally. Flashbacks are common to the PTSD sufferer. Without warning, they find themselves re-experiencing the horror of the trauma that started it all. Veterans struggling with PTSD may find themselves re-experiencing the terror of battle, smelling the exploding ordinance, seeing their comrade lose a limb or the enemy approaching, hearing the cries of the wounded. It is not unusual for someone enduring pain to seek solace in sleep. As soon as the suffering veteran falls asleep, however, they are haunted by night terrors. I know of some veterans who are lucky to get four or five hours a sleep a night. It’s just too scary. Because they find no relief in waking life or slumber, self medication becomes attractive to many PTSD sufferers. This can compound the pain in an already horribly disordered life. Cognitive difficulties often present themselves. The ability to concentrate or hold a train of thought may seem to fly out the window. PTSD sufferers often do not even understand the things happening to them. We can’t communicate what we don’t understand ourselves. Communication suffers at home and at work. Holding down a job? Sometimes impossible. Family life can be torn apart. One of my students, upon receiving her assignment for a term paper, told the class. “I’m going to do my paper on combat related PTSD. My Dad is a Vietnam vet, and we could never understand why he just couldn’t be with us.”

We’ve made enormous strides in our scientific understanding of PTSD from the days mentioned in last month’s article. We’ve mapped much of the neurology explaining the phenomena often called “unconscious mind”. All of us have encountered this aspect of our experience that seems to “have a mind of its own”. We try to stay away from that extra treat while on a diet but to no avail. We really are going to start that exercise program and then don’t. We’re in a new social situation and we tell ourselves “Be calm”. We find, once again, that there are dimensions of ourselves that are not under conscious control. This “automatic pilot” aspect of our experience includes learning’s imprinted biologically in our autonomic nervous system and even in our muscles. The scientist philosopher Michael Polanyi and the cognitive behavioral therapists who have adopted his explanation refer to this as “tacit awareness”. It is the stock and trade of the hypnotherapist. Certainly, PTSD sufferers wrestle with emotions and thoughts beyond their ability to consciously control as any of us do. But there’s more to their story.

Trauma does things to our neurology that we are only beginning to understand. Normally, the process of encoding starts as information travels from our sensory organs to the thalamus. From there, neural signals are conveyed to widely distributed sensory cortices and then to the memory areas of the frontal lobes. Here interpretation of information is made and meanings are assigned based on prior memories. The hippocampus acts as a conductor coordinating neural activities in numerous areas throughout the brain. Trauma, however, involves different neural pathways. Joseph Le Doux demonstrated this in the early 1990s. When we process trauma, some neural information goes directly from the thalamus to the amygdala and skips the important processing that occurs in the sensory cortices and frontal lobes. This direct root to the more “primitive” amygdala and center of emotion prepares us for a rapid survival response in face of danger. It does not, however, allow incoming sensory information to be integrated with the vast resources of prior memory and learning’s we all possess. This rapid response system may ensure our survival then, but it leaves us “on edge” without a conscious way to “gear down” from survival mode. In my opinion, that is one of the reasons hypnosis is as effective as it is in addressing human trauma. It addresses human experience beyond the conscious level.

Since the subject of anatomy has been broached, I want to briefly mention our “subtle” anatomy. This is not foreign to the readers of The Body Mind Spirit Guide. All ancient peoples knew of what they variously referred to as “chi”,”manna”, “the power of The Holy Spirit” or a myriad of other names. This is all quite controversial in some “scientific circles”, but not all. Tough minded scientists such as Rupert Sheldrake of Cambridge University present insightful and compelling arguments for the reality of what he calls “Morphic Resonance”. Stanford scientist William Tiller has demonstrated that subtle energy phenomena is quite amenable to empirical scientific investigation. I don’t want to belabor this controversy since MBS readers need no convincing. I mention the subtle anatomy because I’ve found, as many others have, that it is effected by trauma. Chinese medicine recognizes it. Shamanistic traditions as well. In Thought Field Therapy, Emotional Freedom Technique, or Energy Psychology, this reality is called “perturbation”. Many trained folks will see blockages, irregularities, or foreign energy objects in the bodies that make up our subtle anatomy. Healers and health professionals from many persuasions are increasingly apt to take these dimensions of anatomy into consideration as they seek to address the pain of human trauma. Those who do find beneficial results. I’m often astounded as I see the pain of human trauma seemingly melt away with various subtle energy approaches. It’s my fervent hope that cooperation between all healing professions increase. Human suffering is more likely to be alleviated by us sharing our wisdom and offering mutual support than by us arguing or fighting for professional “turf”. Though their profession represents a large variety of styles and approaches, I believe hypnotherapists are especially likely to make use of techniques that address subtle anatomy and that this also contributes to their high success rate.

Next month I’ll talk about some of the approaches I favor when I help (notice I said “help”, not treat) folks who endure the continuing pain of trauma.