PTSD can be healed- and that is the good news.
You need to be responsible for your own healing – and that is the bad news.
If reaching for a drink, engaging in risky behavior, gambling, drugging, picking fights, eating too much, eating too little, breaking relationships were therapeutic behaviors– our world would be a much different kind of place. Often what we think makes us feel good makes us feel lousy. How can that be? We are intelligent creatures. We are capable of making rational judgments, being reasonable, making things right, learning from our experiences and helping one another. Then why is it so hard to do the right thing, to feel the right way, to find the right direction and solve our own problems? The answer is that we are more emotional than rational. ‘Who me?’ we all think. ‘I’m rational.’ ‘What I do makes sense.’ We are all capable of sometimes being very, very emotional – and we all can hold a suspicion that our emotions may be more powerful than our ability to think. When we have feelings that may become too powerful we can have thoughts like, ‘calm down’ or, ‘that is not so bad’. Often we create thoughts to soothe our feelings. The reverse is true too: often we create feelings to soothe our thoughts, (like exercise.) We tend to balance our thoughts and feelings and our feelings with thoughts. Our sense of ourselves is a cycle between thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking.
Traumatic events can disorganize the cycle between thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking so that we can no longer have the ability to soothe ourselves.
We would like to have a magic bullet (medication?) or a therapy that can quickly rebuild our balance between what we think in our minds and what we feel in our bodies. Unfortunately medication and therapy work slowly and imperfectly. Unfortunately much of the responsibility to restore ourselves when we are shattered from trauma is our own responsibility. Therapists, friends, family can help us but we also have to help ourselves.
Anxiety, PTSD symptoms, and depression are sensations in the head and in the body. The emotional “logic” of sensation follows different rules that the logic of thought. Emotions are linked to various sensations in the body. Emotions are like waves. Emotions have a beginning, middle and an end. You can soften emotion and learn to ride the waves.
Think of healing from PTSD and trauma like learning how to walk, swim or ride a bike. You can balance and feel. Feelings are sensations linked to emotions. Healing skills can be learned and understood inside the body.
Healing from PTSD and trauma does not have to be painful.
The ability to re-balance the emotional mind and the emotional body takes about six hours over a few weeks if you utilize the healing protocol in “The Anatomy of Emotional Healing” www.theanatomyofhealing.com