Spotlight on Post-Traumatic Stress

By Julia Van Tine

In her freshman year in college, Laura Curry* was raped at a party. Dazed, she wandered the neighborhood until her friends found her. She told no one, and the rapist was never charged.

A few months later the flashbacks began, once while she was kissing a man on a bed. “When he rolled into a position similar to the rapist’s, I freaked,” says Laura, today 39 and a fitness trainer in Minneapolis. “That’s when I knew I needed help.”

Laura consulted a therapist, but talking about the problem didn’t help, she says, and she soon terminated their sessions. The flashbacks continued, and in her sophomore year, another therapist diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a psychiatric ailment that can occur after experiencing—or even witnessing—a life-threatening event. In the next six years she graduated, landed a job and climbed the corporate ladder, married, and divorced. She also went through seven therapists.

PTSD has always been associated with combat veterans, but as Laura’s story suggests, they’re not the only victims. In fact, as many as 70 percent of us experience or witness an event that can trigger PTSD—a car crash, a rape, a crime, a natural disaster, abuse. And up to 10 percent of Americans will suffer from it at some point, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Symptoms can include flashbacks, jumpiness, insomnia, nightmares, guilt, and emotional numbness. Women are affected twice as often as men, perhaps because they’re more likely to experience the kinds of trauma, like rape and abuse, that can cause PTSD.

It’s not clear why some people develop the disorder and others don’t, but researchers say the brains of sufferers tend to have higher-than-normal levels of stress hormones. The job of one of these, norepinephrine, is to activate the hippocampus, the part of the brain that governs long-term memory. When the hippocampus gets flooded with too much of this chemical, the result may be searing memories experienced as flashbacks or intrusive thoughts.

There’s no standard treatment for PTSD. Some patients benefit from antidepressants, others from different forms of therapy, such as the cognitive-behavioral approach, which aims to change how we feel and behave by changing how we think.

And recently therapists have begun combining cognitive-behavioral therapy with New Age relaxation techniques—with striking results. One theory is that these treatments work by bypassing the more evolved parts of the brain, which govern thought and speech, and engaging its primitive areas, where images, physical sensations, and feelings are experienced.

“It’s in the sensory and emotional channels of the primitive brain where most of the trauma is processed,” says psychotherapist Belleruth Naparstek, a pioneer in the use of guided imagery who wrote Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal, and created programs used to help victims of 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombings, and the Columbine tragedy. “That’s also where most of the potential for healing is located,” she says.

Curry eventually heard about one of the techniques Naparstek uses, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a form of psychotherapy developed to treat victims of trauma. “My therapist recommended I try it,” says Laura. “I received 12 treatments and felt like I’d had two years of therapy.” Her symptoms never returned.

Since then, Laura has remarried, given birth to a son, and developed a thriving business. “EMDR allowed me to put the trauma to rest,” she says. “I feel healed.”

Some of the most promising strategies for treating PTSD, like EMDR, require a practitioner’s help; others can be practiced on your own. It may take some experimenting to find out what’s best for you, but here are some therapies to consider.

Bring Your Brain Online
The method: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

Have you ever woken up suddenly knowing the solution to a problem? EMDR may work by helping the brain process trauma in much the way dreaming can unlock insight. By inducing the eye movements similar to what’s seen during the sleep stage known as REM, or rapid eye movement, EMDR may allow the analytical left brain to link up with the emotional right brain and reprocess stuck memories, says Nancy J. Smyth, dean of the University at Buffalo School of Social Work.

The practice: Each session lasts about an hour and follows a standard protocol: You choose an image that symbolizes the worst part of the event and identify the emotions and physical sensations it evokes. You also come up with a negative way to describe what the image has come to symbolize for you (for example, “I am helpless”) and a positive statement that counteracts it (“I am stronger than I think”).

The practitioner will ask you to focus on the image, sensations, and negative statement first. Then she’ll move her fingers (or something else that will attract attention, like a light) back and forth in front of your face for about 20 to 30 seconds at a time. You’re asked to follow her movements with your eyes, and then let your mind go blank. After each set of eye movements, you report on whatever thoughts, feelings, and associations come up. This process continues until the negative associations fade. Then you repeat the process, this time while thinking of the positive statement. A one-time trauma, such as a car crash, may require one to three sessions, says Smyth. Repeated, continuous trauma, such as long-term abuse, may require 12 sessions or more.

User’s Tip: Choose a practitioner certified by the EMDR International Association (emdria.org).

Receive the Right Message
The method: Guided Imagery

“Guided imagery is a form of deliberate, directed daydreaming,” says Naparstek. It works, she says, by inducing a state of mind so relaxed that any healing messages stream straight into the emotional parts of the brain. Researchers at V.A. Gulf Coast Veterans Health Care System in Gulfport, Mississippi, found that just six weeks of listening to an imagery audiotape significantly reduced PTSD symptoms in a study of veterans. Naparstek is currently working with researchers at Duke University to find out whether guided imagery can also help women who’ve been sexually assaulted.

The practice: You can tap into imagery’s power by drawing either from your own personal cache of memories and fantasies, says Naparstek, or from the scenarios described in a guided-imagery book or audiotape. Try reimagining the scripts to include references to your own life.

Practice for 20 minutes, once or twice a day, for three to four weeks. If possible, do it in the same place, at the same time. “The best time is that dreamy period between wakefulness and sleep,” says Naparstek. Try to use all your senses during a session. “Remembering or imagining how something feels in the body can be very powerful,” she says.

User’s Tip: Working one-on-one with an experienced practitioner can be more efficient than experimenting with this on your own. To find an expert in your area, visit the Academy for Guided Imagery, at academyforguidedimagery.com.

Tap Into Your Emotions
The method: Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)

With EFT, practitioners manually tap on specific acupuncture points to stimulate energy channels, or meridians, while the patient is focusing on the event. Doing so can resolve disruptions in the body’s energy system that practitioners claim can produce negative emotions. In one of the few studies on the subject, South American researchers divided 5,000 people with several anxiety disorders—including PTSD—into two groups. The first were treated with the tapping method; the second received behavioral therapy and/or medication. At the end of the study, 76 percent of the tappers were symptom-free, compared to 51 percent of the control group.

Though EFT has its skeptics, experts in trauma research, including Charles R. Figley, director of the Traumatology Institute at Florida State University in Tallahassee, are cautiously optimistic. “We plan to study EFT here,” he says. “Millions of people could benefit.”

The practice: It varies by practitioner, but here’s the basic idea: The therapist asks you to tune into an image from the traumatic event. Then, with guidance, you undergo a first round of tapping while stating a positive affirmation, perhaps, “Although I’m afraid of airplanes, I accept myself fully and completely.” Then you follow a series of actions—counting, humming, making eye movements—while tapping a specific point. Then you undergo another round of tapping. Periodically, the therapist will ask you to rate your anxiety on a scale of one to 10. You’ll repeat the process until you reach one. While some people need multiple sessions, others report that a single trial is enough to make them feel better. And because you can learn to perform EFT yourself, you can use it anytime, anywhere.

User’s Tip: The official EFT website, at emofree.com, offers a free downloadable manual on EFT and information on how to find a practitioner.

Tune Into Body Wisdom
The method: Somatic Experiencing

This is a short-term approach that uses the body’s memories of the traumatic event to resolve symptoms. With somatic experiencing (SE), you let your body tell the story of your trauma, and revisit it in physical sensations and images. “Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the trauma itself,” says SE creator Peter A. Levine, founder of the Foundation for Human Enrichment in Lyons, Colorado, and author of Healing Trauma: Restoring the Wisdom of the Body. “They arise when the body doesn’t discharge the residual energy from the event. This energy stays trapped in the nervous system, where it wreaks havoc on the body and mind.”

Wild animals know how to shake off this excess energy, but our own more rational brains make it difficult to do so, he says. Using SE enables patients to repeat the bad experience—without becoming overwhelmed by it.

The practice: Through a combination of targeted questioning and sometimes touch, SE helps patients tune into how reactions to past trauma are stored in the body. Theoretically, by replaying your body’s reaction to the trauma, you can discharge locked energy. A session lasts 40 to 90 minutes.

User’s Tip: All SE practitioners complete a three-year training program (traumahealing.com).

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