violent conflict – Page 8 – 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”

TFT Studies in Rwanda and Uganda

I’m very pleased to report that a study conducted by the TFT Foundation in 2008 has been published in this month’s issue of International Journal of Emergency Mental Health.

Connolly, S., & Sakai, C. (2012). Brief trauma intervention with Rwandan genocide survivors, using Thought Field Therapy. International Journal of Emergency Mental Health, 13 (3), 161-172.

I’m also pleased to announce that the TFT Foundation has recently been awarded a $5,000 grant from ACEP (Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology) to be used towards research that the Foundation will be conducting in Uganda this June: Using Thought Field Therapy to Treat Victims of Violence in Uganda. Many thanks to ACEP–and to Suzanne Connolly, MFT, LCSW, who submitted the proposal for the grant.

The TFT Foundation’s mission to Uganda is in response to a request from Father Peter Mubunga Basaliza of the Catholic Diocese of Kasese for a TFT trauma relief team to train 36 community leaders in Kasese in TFT trauma symptom reduction techniques.

The grant money will assist the TFT Foundation as it joins with the U.K. TFT Foundation and the Mats Udal Humanitarian Foundation in an effort to conduct the study in conjunction with the requested training.

The objectives of the TFT Foundation’s mission to Uganda this June are:

To continue developing and scientifically validating a model in which local community leaders can be trained to treat community members in the aftermath of large-scale disasters, especially in regions where trained professionals are scarce.
To relieve the distress of those suffering from trauma and promote Post Traumatic Growth (PTG).

Please push here if you would like to donate towards these efforts.

Healing Life-Long Trauma with TFT

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Mv8HHOd7pA8#!&rel=0]

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, Soldiers and PTSD

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOAZoOSdW40&feature=youtube_gdata_player&rel=0]

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

Rwandan Orphans Project Recommendation

This letter was written by the director of the Rwandan Orphans Project in support of the upcoming TFT project in Uganda, a collaborative humanitarian mission between the USA-based TFT Foundation, the U.K. ATFT Foundation, and the Mats Uldal Humanitarian Foundation, Norway.

The project will follow the TFT Foundation’s large-scale model for trauma relief which includes giving humanitarian relief through TFT and training local leaders in TFT so that they can continue the work after the relief teams have left. The project will also include a 3rd TFT/PTSD study, as well as a TFT/malaria study led by Dr. Howard Robson.

If you would like to help us promote world peace and relief from suffering through the upcoming Uganda project, you may donate by clicking here. However much you can help is greatly appreciated.