Trauma

Serious trauma is like a category 5 hurricane hitting your life. At whatever point you are in your life when the trauma hits; you and your life become frozen in time. If the trauma---let’s say sexual molestation or rape--- occurred when the female was 6 or 7 or 8 or younger, the female’s behavior, if she is now, for example, chronologically 37 years old, can be distinctly marked with the behavior of the 6 or 7 or 8 year old girl who was raped in her house by an uncle, cousin, or her father.

That category 5 hurricane of trauma terror is marked on the brain. It is imbedded deep within the amygdala of the brain where the senses of taste, smell, hearing, and sight are; where the raw emotions are, and, most importantly, where what Freud called the unconscious, and what neuroscience calls the implicit memories, are. With very deep trauma, there is complex trauma or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The little girl may have become a bedwetter; had nightmares; was hypervigilent; explosive; and seemed to always be besides herself.

But there is a wonderful intervention we use at MindBodyTherapeutics that neutralizes trauma------yes, you read it correctly! This intervention is called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). It is called this because through eye movement that follows the therapist’s fingers back and forth, sensitization of the trauma occurs and it is reprocessed as neutral history without the traumatic content. And this therapy is fast. Within 4 or 5 sessions of an hour each time, relief will be experienced.

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