Rewind for Trauma

It is important to note that traumatic memories can be formed in a matter of minutes. This is an important fact, because it helps us appreciate how it is possible to rewind, or reprocess the traumatic memory in a matter of minutes. Below I will summarize the gist of trauma, PTSD, and its treatment.

The Rewind technique is a powerful means of adjusting and healing the nervous system after having experienced trauma. It has roots in Eriksonian hypnosis. To learn the full history of the method, you can read it here. Having used EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) as my “go to” method for several years, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the rewind method overcame some of the limitations of EMDR. Furthermore, there is no need for you to articulate all the horrible things that happened to cause the trauma. To heal trauma these days, I used Rewind exclusively.

Trauma has similarities with phobias, in that both are triggered by perceptions, usually images, but also sounds and sensations. Seeing a picture of a snake can trigger phobic reaction of terror in someone who has a simple snake phobia. Seeing the same picture can trigger, in someone else, a traumatic re-experiencing of the time he was cruelly locked in a closet at age five by an older sibling, and he tossed in a snake, saying it was deadly poisonous.

Before going further, I would like to say that just because someone has experienced something life threatening and horrific, does not mean that they have PTSD. In fact, 70-80% of people who have terrifying experiences do not develop PTSD. Other people, for a variety of reasons, get “stuck” with intrusive memories, de-regulated emotions, poor sleep, and a re-living of the trauma. You could say that trauma is a disorder of time, or how time is processed in memory. When PTSD has set in, it means that the memory of the trauma lacks the little tag that says, “this happened in the past.” When the memory is triggered by association (as all memories are triggered), the memory comes up as though it is a present experience, with all the emotions and body reactions that took place at the time of the event.

You can test yourself for PTSD. Starting from a state of calm, bring to mind the memory that you think may be “traumatic”. Observe your bodily reactions, and see how distressing the memory becomes as you hold it in mind. If you began at, say, two on a distress scale from one to ten, then ramped quickly up to a seven or eight, and it didn’t subside, then you probably have PTSD. If it feels like something happening to you right now, as opposed to a memory that happened back then, you probably have PTSD.

I was speaking with a family member who had witnessed a bad automobile accident right in front of him, about an hour before. He was still agitated, and began to recount the story. “I’m sitting at the red light, then right in front of me I see…” I cut him off right there, and made him say “I was sitting at the red light…and I saw…” Each time he spoke in the present tense, I made him use the past tense. It was a most efficient intervention. I like to think that, had I not done that, he would have gone on to develop at least a bit of PTSD.

When the memory is not being triggered, the emotions and body reactions are simmering in the background, so to speak, circulating around, not properly “digested”, or “processed.” I have used the analogy of the brain looking and functioning somewhat like the digestive system, the intestines in particular. Our brains take in experiences, as food is taken into the intestines. We extract what is useful, store what we can, and excrete the remainder. We also take in experiences, but a traumatic experience is the equivalent to having eaten a half cooked bean and ham loaf that has also started to go bad. It sits in the stomach, then slowly and painfully makes its way through the system, generating foul gas and pain along the way. The foul gas and pain are the equivalent of the outbursts, avoidances, poor relating, addictions and bad feelings that are symptomatic of trauma. Trauma treatment is the equivalent of a good belly massage, rotating and pressing out the stuck material, and a laxative, making short work of the bad situation, getting back to normal. (sorry if that was a little gross, but it is the best analogy I know).

Another thing not often appreciated, is the prevalence of trauma in children, both t and T, small and large T trauma, as we say. The large T traumas are events such as beatings, rapes, witnessing family members die, and so on: obviously horrific for anyone, and especially so for children. When children experience those things (more frequent than you imagine), the impact is deeper, because it contributes to the foundation of the entire personality development. The thing to understand, though, is that because children are more sensitive to being abandoned, and because they are so dependent upon the approval and acceptance of parents, and because their capacity to understand has some limitations, they are more tuned to any potential loss; therefore, sometimes all it takes to create a traumatic memory is a badly timed remark, a harsh word, or an idle threat. The more sensitive and intelligent the child, the more they take everything to heart, and the easier it is to create a traumatic groove in their little developing nervous systems. Most of those kinds of “small t” traumas show up in patterns of thinking, perception, belief and relating. They are often at the root of addictions. The good news is that once identified, they can be defused with the rewind technique.

When trauma occurs in childhood, both large and small, short term or a years long pattern, the work of therapy is more sensitive and complex. Because safety is paramount, the process cannot be rushed. The memories are often not available to be reprocessed; it is wrong, even highly unethical, to go digging around looking for bad memories. When your real Self determines that a memory is ready to be filed away properly, to be finally de-traumatized, the memory becomes available, and the right therapist comes onto your radar. It often seems miraculous, how that happens.