Coping with Trauma

If you have PTSD (whether or not formally diagnosed) or have encountered trauma, and it still impacts upon your life now, then you may have symptoms such as:

• Flashbacks and nightmares
• Recurrent, intrusive memories
• Avoidance of people, places, things that may act as a trigger or reminder
• Emotions such as fear, anger, guilt or shame
• Hyper vigilance, sleep problems or feelings of detachment
• Changes in behaviour, interest and activity levels

 And you may also experience depression, anxiety, stress and a loss of confidence. 

PTSD & Flashbacks

With PTSD it is common to suffer with distressing flashbacks, where your body experiences a surge of adrenaline along with vivid memories of what was seen, heard, smelt, tasted and touched at the time of the traumatic event.

And with all that comes the fear that was experienced originally. In effect, you are right back there in the traumatic event.

This is why it’s often said that PTSD survivors work on two clocks: the ‘real world time’ clock, which ticks forward in the same way for everyone, and the one that stopped because of the trauma.

How To Overcome Trauma and PTSD

Just because you 

may have experienced an event that could be described as traumatic, it doesn’t mean that you will experience PTSD and the symptoms listed above (in fact, it’s possible to get many of the symptoms above without any traumatic event having taken place).

It all depends on the meaning given to the event and whether you have been able to process it in a way that lets you move forward with increased knowledge and learning for the future.

And in effect, to overcome PTSD that’s what you need to do – to help your mind process the event, keep the learnings and understandings and add them to your knowledge database to help you keep safe in the future.

I’ve helped many people to take this step. For example, I worked with:

• A former army soldier who had been trapped on duty and came under heavy fire. He feared for his life in that moment and ever since had lived in a state of high alert, aware of every movement around him and unable to relax or switch off.

• A client who had been involved in a horrific road accident when younger – she was run over while crossing the road. In addition to the on-going physical pain, she had struggled with fear around roads and driving ever since.

• A client who returned home to his shared flat to find his flatmate had hung himself. Ever since he had experienced issues with anger and guilt.

Time to let go of the memory?

Whether you are suffering the impacts of a traumatic event or have emotional memories that bother you and impact on how you live your life now, there are steps you can take to let go and move forward in a positive direction.

When you are ready to take that step towards feeling better, give me a call on 01353 669941 and we can set a date for a free initial consultation – your first step towards taking back control of your thoughts and feelings.

To your healthy mind and body,

Dan Regan

Hypnotherapist & Coach

www.elymindcoaching.co.uk                            

Free initial consultation