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 Healing the Wounds of War:
The "New Medicine" Techniques for Combat PTSD
By Susan Hannibal
The American military provides the finest training and has the most sophisticated weaponry in the world. All marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen know that personal sacrifice is inherent in the job of service to country. Sometimes the sacrifice is exposure to trauma that impacts emotional and/or physical health. Sometimes the sacrifice is life itself. Spouses and families of military personnel also make huge sacrifices and suffer "collateral damage" when their loved one is suffering from the effects of trauma.
It takes uncommon courage to face down an enemy combatant. It also takes uncommon courage to look your own pain in the eye and not deny it, repress it, run from it, or attempt to anesthetize it with alcohol, drugs or other addictive behaviors. You don't have to be a substance abuse expert to understand addictions. People drink, use drugs, spend money, overeat, because they want to feel better. Simply put, addictions are anesthesia for pain. Unhealed trauma is painful, and it fuels many addictions.
When you make the decision to heal, when you decide to enter the eye of your own internal storm, you will emerge from the other side healthier, happier, peaceful and more in control of your life than you've ever been before.
The needs of the veteran suffering from symptoms of PTSD, Post-Traumtic Stress Disorder, are unique. He or she has to contend not only with the menu of symptoms below, yet may also be resistant to seeking treatment for fear of career damage or being seen as "weak." The military doesn't regard needing surgery for an apendectomy as "weakness" yet some commanders continue, apparently in the name of "readiness," to instill the archaic perception that training and toughness can supercede brain physiology. It CAN'T. PTSD is not a mental illness. Nothing is "wrong" with you if you have PTSD, something HAPPENED to you that is still affecting you because of stress hormones that made changes in your BRAIN, and those changes need to be put back into proper balance. Some veterans may have had the symptoms for so long and have experienced no relief with talk-therapy, group therapy or with medications, that they believe nothing will work. However, stuffing the emotional fallout of war doesn't work either.
What is Trauma?
A trauma is any past event or series of repetitive traumatic events, (a traumatic pattern) which causes us, when we think about it today, to feel difficult emotions such as fear, anger, grief, guilt, sadness, regret, shame, heartache, etc. A trauma is an intensely stressful event during which a person suffers serious harm or the threat of serious harm or death, or witnesses an event during which another person (or persons) is killed, seriously injured, or threatened.
Severe trauma can also result in a kind of numbness when we think about a traumatic event. In some cases, we may remember very clearly what happened, we just can't feel any emotion about it. That doesn't mean that damage has not occurred, it usually means the painful emotional charge connected to the event was detoured and pushed down (repressed) into the body/mind to protect us from being overwhelmed by the experience at the time it occurred.
Sometimes we have no conscious memory of the event at all. Psychologists call that dissociation. Dissociation happens when an event is too painful or frightening for the psyche to deal with, so our consciousness "checks out" in order to psychologically survive the trauma. Overwhelm, terror, a sense of helplessness and vulnerability are some of the building blocks of PTSD.
Traditional classification of traumatic events:
- Abuse
- Emotional
- Physical
- Sexual
- Catastrophe
- Serious and/or fatal accidents
- Natural disasters
- Terrorism
- Violent attack
- Animal attack
- Assault
- Battery and domestic violence
- Rape
- War, battle, and combat
If the trauma is horrifying enough, or the victim is young enough, it might only take one experience to incur serious damage. When a person has been exposed to extreme trauma, the emotional and energetic charge of the trauma is imprinted and held in the mind, body and spirit. It remains stored there, causing an array of emotional and physical problems until it is healed and released. In the military, trauma used to be called shell shock or battle fatigue. Now it's called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
Symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Symptoms of PTSD are generally of three types:
- Intrusive
- Dissociative states (emotionally "checked out")
- Flashbacks
- Intrusive emotions and memories
- Nightmares and night terrors
- Avoidant
- Avoiding emotions
- Avoiding relationships
- Avoiding responsibility for others
- Avoiding situations that are reminiscent of the traumatic event
- Avoiding counseling and treatment
- Hyperarousal
- Exaggerated startle reaction
- Inappropriate outbursts of anger
- Extreme vigilance
- Irritability
- Panic symptoms
- Sleep disturbances
Intrusive memories and emotions interfere with normal thought processes and social interaction. Flashbacks include auditory and visual hallucinations. Flashbacks can be triggered by ordinary stimuli such as a low-flying airplane or a loud noise, anything that brings to mind an aspect of the event. Nightmares and night terrors also feature aspects of the traumatic event. People with PTSD commonly avoid stimuli, for example violent movies, and situations that remind them of the traumatic event because they can trigger symptoms that may include panic attacks.
PTSD Complications
Complications develop in people with chronic PTSD and delayed onset PTSD. These may include the following:
- Alcohol and drug abuse or dependence
- Chronic anxiety
- Depression and increased risk for suicide
- Divorce and separation
- Guilt
- Low self-esteem
- Panic attacks
- Phobias
- Unemployment
- Domestic violence
In 1988, it was estimated that 40% of Vietnam veterans had problems with drug abuse, and almost one-half of these veterans had been divorced at least once.
People with chronic PTSD and complications often become unemployed because severe symptoms interfere with their ability to perform their jobs and function socially in the workplace. Statistics show that PTSD is more prevalent among war veterans than among any other group. The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey reports that approximately 25% of U.S. veterans, men and women, were still suffering from PTSD in the early 1990s. Men with PTSD identify combat and witnessing someone else's injury or death most often as the cause of their condition. Women identify physical attack or threat most often as the cause of their PTSD.
Some vets experience guilt, especially in the case of injuries or deaths involving children, which place them in conflict with their spiritual beliefs. The veteran may feel that he has to deny pain in order to maintain the tough military identity and not admit to having been affected by combat for fear of career damage or shame. There may be a tendency to deny that war traumas have impacted pre-or post-war problems in a veteran's life such as drinking or other addictions, relationship difficulties, or unemployment.
The combat vet has to deal with not only having witnessed trauma that happened to others, he may also be a traumatized perpetrator, having killed enemy soldiers or civilians.
For example, I recently treated a veteran of Somalia and the 1991 Gulf War for fear of flying. He was being sent to Iraq and was terrified to fly. Upon taking a history, he had experienced a previous traumatic flying incident in Germany 10 years prior. We neutralized the traumatic memory of that incident, which he felt as a fist-sized ball of anxiety in his solar plexus. He rated his fear level when thinking about the incident as a 10 on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being low and 10 being high. After a few rounds of EFT tapping that took about 10 minutes, he felt much relieved physically and emotionally on the issue of flying, but the fear was not totally cleared. The emotional fear "charge" was down to a 1, but he still felt a golf ball sized ball of fear in his solar plexus. It wasn't until we went back into his childhood that we found the root of the fear of flying, which was when he was a child and a passenger while his mother drove. He felt she was an erratic driver, he had no control, and he felt vulnerable and unsafe when driving with her as a boy. That thread of "I'm not safe unless I'm in control" was underlying his present fear of flying. He also would never let his wife drive if they were together.
He applied EFT, which is tapping with the fingertips on selected meridian acupoints on the face, trunk and hands, to himself with my guidance. We cleared the issue of "driving with Mom," treated the anticipatory anxiety about flying to Iraq once more, and the presenting fear of flying went to a zero.
The next day as a test, he got in the car with his wife and let her drive. He was able to do that without anxiety, or any "back-seat" driving, she happily reported. He flew to Iraq three days later, and called from a re-fueling stop in Europe to tell me that in spite of some significant turbulence, he was comfortable and did not experience any anxiety on the flight.
Energy psychology can be a useful bridge between these two emotional polarities for the veteran, since it's relatively painless, usually non-traumatizing, and doesn't require talking about the trauma during treatment, only thinking about it. When he is pushed to talk about his experiences over and over in the style of desensitization, he is being re-traumatized over and over again. Patients who find therapy painful and who do not get better in a reasonable period of time, (and in some cases get worse,) may terminate therapy, drink more or do more drugs, or even commit suicide. If the trauma is severe, there are techniques to access the "circuit" that the trauma is tied to without having the patient "go there" directly. These gentle EFT techniques are called the "Movie Technique" and the "Tearless Trauma Technique." Groups can be effectively treated with the "Borrowing Benefits" technique. More information on them can be found at www.emofree.com, the website of the Emotional Freedom Technique, a meridian-based energy therapy.
Is Energy Psychology a Replacement for Therapy?
Use of energy psychology fine-tunes and enormously accelerates the healing effects of traditional therapy. With these techniques, the stored emotional trauma can be addressed and released indirectly, without putting the client through the pain of re-living what happened to them. Energy psychology techniques are a valuable and powerful enhancement to traditional talk-therapy.
Benefits of Using Energy Psychology in the VA
More patients can be served in the same amount of time using group EFT sessions, using the "Borrowing Benefits" technique, in which the group is asked to silently "bookmark" in their minds a charged incident that they can rate on the 1-10 scale. When they've done that, they turn their attention to the therapist and another patient who are working together to lead the group. The group members tap on their meridian points along with the patient and therapist, turning their attention to the demo patient's issue, not their own. At the end of tapping along with the demo patient on his/her issue, they return in their minds to their own issue and rate it once again. In most cases, they will find a significant decrease in the charge or it may even be gone. Rounds are repeated until everyone has a complete clearing.
Patients are easily taught the tapping to apply to their own issues between sessions, and once learned, have EFT at their disposal as a lifelong portable healing method. EFT and the other energy psychology methods are non-invasive, private, easy to learn and apply, have no known side effects, and nothing bad happens if it is done "wrong" or applied to the wrong problem or issue. The worst that can happen with EFT is that there may be little or no reduction in emotional intensity in certain patients for a variety of reasons, but no harm is done at any rate.
Energy psychology, like hypnosis, can reach subconscious material that may be blocking healing that talk-therapy cannot reach. When an issue is treated with EFT, the client will often finish the round of tapping, reflect once again on the presenting issue, and come up with an unsolicited change of cognition automatically. With cognitive therapy of course, changing the client's thought patterns is usually a challenge and the more traumatized they are, the harder it is to change their thoughts.
Where are the studies and the proof?
A study that showed the efficacy of using EFT on small animal phobias was published in the September 2003 issue (vol. 59, #9) of the Journal of Clinical Psychology. There is also a page of energy psychology research listed on the website of Dr. David Feinstein, www.innersource.com. More clinical research is in progress and will be published in the near future.
For 100 years talk-therapy has basically been the only game in town, but it has a dismal record with severe trauma, as compared to energy psychology. A veteran may be in therapy for years and have some improvement, but his life doesn't heal in the same way or as fast as with energy psychology.
These techniques are relatively new, less than 30 years old, can seem weird to perform, (tapping with fingertips on the face, trunk and hands, humming, counting, rolling eyes,) and are outside the "accepted" paradigm of what therapy is supposed to look like. If clinicians can get past their initial skepticism and simply put energy psychology to an honest test, they will be amazed at how easily, quickly and permanently, in most cases, traumatic stress can be healed. That translates to huge cost savings, less staff stress and burnout, and an effective way to handle the coming tidal wave of trauma from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Susan Hannibal is a medical intuitive/ healer and author. Her international private practice is based in Vista, CA, near San Diego. Her second book, Emotional Detox: Healing the Trauma Patterns That Harm Your Body and Ruin Your Life is in progress. She can be reached at erasePTSD@aol.com.
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