guilt – Page 10 – TFT Trauma Relief

Helping Soldiers Adjust to Civilian Life

Soldiers Return with Invisible Wounds

Soldiers are prepared for combat operational stress. The Army has drilled them, trained them, polished them.

What happens when they come home and have to adjust to the “surreal” world of civilian life? Once you have lived next to life and death as your daily reality, and perhaps gotten so familiar with the stress of combat operations, returning to mundane life can make everything feel out of whack.

Retuning warriors often feel out of sync with family or civilian life, after what they’ve experienced. With prolonged exposure to high-stress, the brain may actually adapt to this lifestyle of danger — so that danger brain messages feel normal. The harder part of what they’ve experienced may be coming home!

I teach classes in media and communication at Chaminade University in Honolulu, which offers classes on all the military bases. I work with all branches of the military, as well as their spouses.

Many students walk into class in high states of stress. While I am not a therapist, and I don’t do any treatment or diagnosis, as a teacher I need to make sure that students are fully functioning and engaged, in order to make the classroom experience as positive as possible.

Sometimes students come to class after just hearing traumatic news, witnessing something terrible or even have just been a part of something very disturbing. Continue reading “Helping Soldiers Adjust to Civilian Life”

Relieving Senior’s Trauma from Financial Scam

Financial Scam Causes Shame for This Senior
by Mary Lou Dobbs

I call my mother every day. One particular day was different. My 85-year-old mother let slip a comment: “Pretty soon I will be able to take care of all the grandkids in my will.” I asked, “What do you mean, Mom?”

“Oh,” she said, “I’m not ready to talk about it right now.” An alarm went off, and I was like a firefighter heading to a blaze.

My parents are on a small fixed income. They, like most loving grandparents, have spent years bailing out grandchildren, choosing to sacrifice their own needs.

I knew how precious little they had. I reminded my mother that I had provided her with an 800 number so her calls to me are always free and asked her to tell me more when she felt ready.

Two days later the bombshell exploded: “Hi, this is Mom. Now I feel ready to tell you that I won six million dollars, but I have to send money to some third-world country by Monday in order to claim my prize.” Continue reading “Relieving Senior’s Trauma from Financial Scam”

Healing Life-Long Trauma with TFT

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Ruth tells her story of living in Austria when Hitler came to power and the effect of those events on her life. Working with Dr. Bray and using Thought Field Therapy helped her gain peace and relief from Traumatic Stress.

TFT Relief After Decades of Flashbacks

Like Acupuncture for the Mind

By Michelle (Miki) Butterworth

Having regressed to my life as a 4-year-old—crouched, screaming and fighting off imaginary blows—I was hospitalized for the second time in 10 years. The first time, I had been released after four days as the safety of the hospital had brought me out of abreaction (the reliving of events as if happening at the present moment), and my functions returned to normal.

This second time though, the flood gates opened and spilled over my years of insistent denial. The physical, sexual and psychological traumas of childhood poured forth.

Many devoted healthcare professionals worked with me over the next 20 years. Blessed breakthroughs did come in the way of integrating the past with the present and changes in the way I acted out that pathology.

However, after trying every new therapy for PTSD that came along—the night terrors, flashbacks and regressions continued.

After retiring to Sedona Arizona, and though living a wonderfully rewarding lifestyle, I still suffered from PTSD. Just seeing something familiarly violent on a television show might trigger days of dissociation, self mutilation (the act of inflicting pain on self by cutting) and regressions.

Having learned over the years that PTSD symptoms are never completely eliminated, I dealt with these episodes as they came by staying recluse for periods of time. After one recurrent triggering event left me suicidal, I again sought help from the mental health community.

I was introduced to a therapist who, after listening to my story, asked if I would be willing to try an unconventional therapy that involved tapping on points of the body while recalling the trauma. I politely told her, “NO!”

Spiritually devoted and as open a person as I am, I was not going to spend time and money on some ‘Sedona Woo-Woo’ technique.

I suggested we stick with regular therapy.

Two sessions later, she mentioned she would be out of town for the next month (doing her woo-woo in some other country). Continue reading “TFT Relief After Decades of Flashbacks”

TFT, Soldiers and PTSD

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Dr. Robert Bray discusses using TFT to aid those who suffer from PTSD.

Relieving the Smell of War

The Smell of War

By Suzanne M. Connolly, MFT, LCSW

The Gulf War was a short war and a war with few Allied casualties. And yet one young soldier, we’ll call him “Gary,” left a large part of himself back in the large flat desert to the North of Kuwait.

He wanted that part of himself back.

The war was officially over. The multitude of invading tanks and infantry had retreated and formed a long contiguous line stretching from the North of Kuwait and into Iraq. The tanks had been disabled, most burned by the Allied Forces beyond recognition. The bulldozers had plowed the Iraqi tanks into trenches, sometimes inadvertently burying live Iraqi soldiers, still entombed in their sandy graves, arms sticking up here and there from the sand.

Gary’s job was to bury the dead. Cleanup duty.

The sight of charred Iraqi bodies and eyes still staring out from burned corpses haunted him. But even more, it was the smell of charred flesh he remembered most. It was a smell that wouldn’t leave him.

It had been over a year and Gary was still paralyzed by the sights and especially the smells of war. He was not available to his wife. He was not available to his two small children. And work was not going well.

Gary numbed the sights and smells with the bottle when possible, providing his only relief but causing even more problems in his life. It was the only form of relief he could find, despite some attempts at therapy.

Gary thought that the idea of tapping while he focused on the sights and smells frozen in his memory was a little crazy, but he was willing to try anything. As we tapped, Gary reported that the visual memories began to fade and seemed far away and lost their charge.

The smells from the past that seemed to permeate his world in the present didn’t go away as easily. But they, too, eventually disappeared with more TFT. Soon Gary was present to his family and doing well at work, no longer haunted by the sights and smells left behind in the desert.

He was finally home.

Excerpted from Callahan Techniques’ latest book, The Tapping
Solution: Tapping the Body’s Energy Pathways