Nightmares, flashbacks, trauma
10/10/18 10:28
Probably one the most distressing side effects of trauma is the nightmares it can evoke. Nightmares attack when you are peacefully asleep and your conscious mind is off guard. By not dealing consciously with the nightmare, symptoms can worsen and the capacity to get a good night's rest may start to endanger your wellbeing. What should occur is the contrary. The memories which are essentially trapped at some point in time need to come out and be expressed and experienced in order for you to be free from them. Repressing them simply causes the initial pain to be prolonged unnecessarily for the rest of your life.
Most nightmares are repetitive in nature, and the surreal way in which your dreams replay the part of the trauma can make the experience appear to be far worse than it actually may have been in reality. Regular nightmares which aren't related to trauma have a tendency to be distinctive each time. Obviously nevertheless this is the way it goes. Our fears may be also reflected by trauma nightmares. You might start to dream that members of your household get hurt. You might start to fantasise that you just get hurt in another way. This is your mind expressing what it fears, instead of what occurred.
These dreams supply you with important details about what you fear. Traumatic nightmares are good in some sense. How can something be good? Nightmares allow you to know the problem is being worked on by your mind. Our brains are fabulous things. When we get hurt they act like computers replaying repeatedly the event, attempting to make sense of it. Our brains treat traumas as issues to be solved. Your brain is also attempting to take what happened to you and somehow make sense of it or to reduce the sense of overwhelm. In other words, to just get used to the idea that something horrible occurred. To get used to the emotions of powerlessness. Rather than dismissing them, drowning them out with sedatives or alcohol or staying up all night to avoid sleep, one should treat them as vital information.
The brain remembers that you've been hurt once and is attempting to give you details about where, how so that should a similar event happen again you could either avoid it in the future and be in a stronger position to know how to deal with it next time.
Hypnotherapy has an excellent track record when it comes to rationalising the stuck state of a nightmare, traumatic memory or flashback. Unlike most approaches to eradicate nightmares which rely on faith that the nightmare will eventually subside, hypnosis can effectively bring the memory out of its stuck state into an area of conscious awareness where it can be worked with and therefore eliminated. Nobody wants the fear that going to sleep is going to be unpleasant. If you are currently suffering from this unhealthy psychological imbalance and would like to explore options for curing the problem then please click the following link for more information and an opportunity to discuss your problem with a professional advanced hypnotherapist.
Wishing you a peaceful day
David Faratian
Dealing with trauma
20/08/18 11:04
Can Hypnotherapy Help With Trauma?
Put simply, most definitely yes. In the following blog I would like to delve into the very serious area of trauma based therapy and how EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitising and Reprocessing can help lessen if not completely eradicate any stuck memories or emotions in the past, as well as remove any recurring nightmares in the present.
So what exactly is EMDR? The idea that distressing memories could be eliminated and reprogrammed simply through rapid lateral eye movement sounds almost like something that would come out of a sci-fi novel. In fact this very process is one of the most available and scientifically accepted and verified therapies available today; even validated by the NHS. Eye movement desensitisation reprocessing has been used in clinical situations for decades and is used in many cases to be able to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, (PTSD) as well as conditions which relate to other common traumas and which invariably lead to nightmares and flashbacks. In a typical session the subject will be asked to think of the distressing memory while they rapidly move their eyes laterally from left to right. In most cases the person will experience a dramatic reduction in the intensity of the memory or the connection that they've created between themselves and the past memory and through EMDR they can, in effect, start to look at memory in a more natural way rather than with the heightened emotion that they originally attached to that memory. One of my recent clients said that following EMDR, she was able to evaluate and process what she had experienced in a more 'detached way'
So the question is how does it actually work? When a person is involved in any kind of trauma they become overwhelmed by the experience which in turn doesn't give the brain enough time to process the information at a neurological level. Unresolved, the memory quickly becomes trapped and unprocessed so essentially instead of it being a normal memory which can be stored in a non-permanent part of the brain a person ends up experiencing the distressing memory in all of it's sensory detail over and over again often in the form of flashbacks and or nightmares. By stimulating the left to right rapid eye movement the memory can in effect be brought out of it's trapped, 'fossilised' state so that it can finally be processed correctly, This in turn allows the the memory to lose its intensity and become more like a normal memory. Traditional counselling is not as effective at dealing with this area of psychology because speaking about the memory is only replaying it in the patient's mind and not really addressing the route which very often is at neurological level, overwhelming and very real to the person who is suffering. Repressed memories, especially when it comes to rape victims or people who have undergone specific traumas like a car crash can manifest spontaneously which can be very upsetting and debilitating. Through Hypnotherapy and EMDR these often deeply rooted psychological traumas can be brought out of the frozen state into the part of the unconscious mind where the memory can be trained to experience the event differently or eliminated altogether allowing the person to start functioning again. The removal of the stuck experience can very quickly lead to an elimination of flashbacks and nightmares, or at the very least, help greatly reduce the frequency and intensity of the traumatic thoughts. If you would like to find out how I can help you with this specific area then please click on the link below and request your FREE no obligation callback. All information is treated in the strictest of confidence.
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David Faratian