Learn to relieve PTSD and phobias in one session

Every practitioner knows that trauma is a part of many problems. But very few know to what extent, and more importantly, how to treat trauma quickly. And if you treat people with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) or severe phobias, you'll know these are among the worst things to live with.

But it's not just PTSD. (As if that weren't enough.)

Depression, anxiety conditions, obsessive thoughts, OCD, addictions and substance abuse - all these problems and more are often ‘powered' by hidden trauma. So when you've got a client whose depression you just can't lift, an addiction that just won't shift, or anxiety that keeps coming back no matter what you do, it's worth considering that a trauma may be driving it.

And then, when you know trauma is present, what do you do about it?

Since the first World War, psychologists and psychiatrists have been trying to treat trauma in a myriad of frightening ways:

• having sufferers relive the trauma again and again, making the symptoms worse not better
• using critical incident stress debriefing as a standard practice for helping emergency services deal with traumatic experiences in the line of duty
• inducing diabetic comas via insulin injection
• using anti-anxiety or anti-depression drugs for years with no improvements.

And of course using cognitive therapy to treat trauma is nigh-on impossible - that's like trying to tether a raging bull with sewing thread.

So what treatment does work for trauma?

To understand this, we need to first see exactly what trauma is. So let's get back to basics. What exactly is happening when someone has a traumatic flashback? For example, a guy who has been in a war zone is walking down the street and a car backfires. Instantly he feels as if he's back in the front line and reacts as if a bomb has just gone off nearby.

But he knows he's on a normal street, so what is going on? It's as if he never took off his combats. His brain has ‘pattern matched' the backfire to being similar to the sound of gunfire or explosions and triggered the ‘fight or flight' response in him. He is flooded with adrenaline and his overwhelming instinct is to run. In his brain there is what we call a ‘global pattern' for loud bangs, created by the focusing effect of the terror he experienced in battle. This is very different to the pattern you and I have for it, which will make us jump but once our brain figures out what caused the bang, it steps down the alert procedure. However, this global pattern in the ex-soldier's brain has no context to it (in other words, it doesn't matter where he is when the sound occurs, or what else is going on around him). His brain has decided that this sound is so closely linked to potential death that it warrants being a global pattern that goes off at the slightest provocation. So our job as a practitioner is to turn this global pattern back into a contextualised one. Or in other words, to stop his brain setting off the alarm when he hears a bang. We need the soldier to be able to hear a car backfire as just that.

But how can we do this when traumatic memories are so powerful?

Anyone who has ever treated a traumatised person knows that even talking about the traumatic incident can catapult them into a highly emotional state. And once they're highly emotional again, you can do nothing until they calm down. So this tells us that we have to somehow approach the memory without them becoming emotional. And this is where the Rewind Technique comes in.

Although it seems almost too simple, the Rewind is a precision instrument.

When you're dealing with a traumatic memory, you need to approach it carefully and quietly, like tiptoeing up to a sleeping tiger.

The structure of the Rewind and the language used is precisely designed to hold the client in a specific relationship to the memory so that it can be re-processed by the technique and contextualised. This way, as we explained above, it can stop being a global pattern firing off alarms all over the place, so there are no roaring tigers in your therapy session. And the beautiful thing about the rewind technique is that you don't even need to know any detail about the traumatic memory - so it is highly respectful to the client.

The Rewind Technique Course

My company Uncommon Knowledge have been training practitioners in how to use the Rewind Technique for many years. We did this for 10 years as part of our professional level diploma course, and subsequently through our online training course. Our online course is recognised by the Red Poppy Company, an organisation dedicated to enabling traumatised war veterans to get access to fast, effective treatment, and the UK's trauma register.

We have now created a brand new format for the course, a combination of video, live calls and home study materials in a lovely new online space called Uncommon U which we created specifically to make online learning easy and enjoyable.

This course will run again in 2013, please enter your details below to be notified

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