Nightmares, flashbacks, trauma
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