CatchPTSD - Eliminate PTSD with Clinical Hypnotherapy

Did you know that most of the serotonin your body produces, to regulate your mood, is generated in the gut? However, when you are anxious and nervous your stomach tightens, your blood flow reduces, and the serotonin gets trapped in the gut wall. Serotonin is the building block of melatonin, so if you have no serotonin you also have no melatonin, so you don't sleep. This makes you even more anxious. It is a nasty vicious circle. The answer is not anti-depressants or sleeping drugs. The answer is clinical hypnotherapy, which relaxes the gut and allows the serotonin to flow again, calming your mood, and providing enough melatonin for you to sleep.

PTSD is like a string of fairy lights, where every light is illuminating something traumatic that happened to you. Right down at the bottom of the string is the plug, the root, the first time you EVER felt vulnerable. That first time is feeding all the energy, all the emotion, to each light in the chain. In clinical hypnotherapy your body knows how to pull the plug and turn the whole lot off!

PTSD is a whole gamut of symptoms, which come under the umbrella of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The symptoms of PTSD are specific to each person.One person might be deemed to have PTSD because of certain symptoms, whereas somebody else may have completely different symptoms, and another person may have a whole other set of symptoms entirely. The symptoms depend on what happened to the person to create the autonomic response in the body. The most important thing to know about PTSD is that symptoms are generally unexplained. If you lose somebody that you love, and you feel enormous grief, then that wouldn't be termed PTSD. You are aware of where that feeling is coming from, and it's generally a rational response. However, when people have PTSD, they have emotions, feelings, or thoughts, which seem to come out of nowhere, with absolutely no reason, which makes it even more disabling because there's no context by which to understand it. It’s also very difficult for the people around that sufferer to understand it, because they are suddenly angry, or crying, or grief-stricken, or bedridden, but the day before they were fine. These symptoms do not make sense to the sufferer, or to the people who live with them. But they are a clue, a flag, trying to make the person realise that something happened in the past, something that has been forgotten or the person did not realise what kind of impact it had. Those feelings, those sensations, those thoughts, are rushing up inside a PTSD sufferer, almost hijacking them. Sometimes the symptoms are not severe. It might be irritation rather than anger. It might be sadness rather than depression. It might be nervousness rather than anxiety. Equally, it might be rage, black cloud depression, or a panic attack where the heart is pumping so fast the person fears they are having a heart attack. This brings us to the question, is PTSD physical or psychological. It is both. Sometimes it is both together, sometimes separately, but it is possible for a chronic pain, or disability, to be PTSD. I give you an example from World War II, where a soldier was in a trench, advancing towards the German lines, and his friend was the scout ahead. The friend was kidnapped by the Nazis. The soldier was in the ditch with three or four other soldiers. He took a grenade, intending to throw it towards the Germans, but was afraid he might kill his friend. He was also afraid he would reveal their position, which might mean that everybody would die rather than just his friend. So, he didn't throw the grenade and his friend was killed. Over the next few months, his hand closed into a painfully tight closed fist. It was impossible to open his hand, and he had absolutely no idea why. He visited a trail of doctors and nobody understood. Eventually he tried clinical hypnotherapy, and in a deeply relaxed state, he was taken straight back to that ditch and shown that he felt enormous guilt about letting his friend be killed to save himself, and others. His body showed him he had never processed the guilt, and so it had closed his hand up painfully tight, until he paid attention, until he understood. By going back to that ditch, in that deeply-relaxed state, he was able to understand that it was Hobson's choice. There was nothing he could do. He may well have thrown the grenade and killed his own friend, but equally, that may have meant that the people who were with him would also die. The closed fist was PTSD guilt. Just being able to rationalise it, being able to understand that he had had to make a split-second decision, was enough for him to release the guilt of the dilemma. All paralysis in his hand disappeared. This is a case history from a book called ‘Hypnotherapy of War Neuroses’ by Jack Watkins. I, myself, have had similar cases. In one, a lady who was in a cult as a child, developed a tremor in her hand. She was a dental assistant so she could no longer work. Her body was disabling her, saying there's something here that you need to process first. Sometimes a PTSD sufferer may have severe pain in the ears, or constant migraines. Sometimes it might be something that person endured as a child, in a particular part of the body, and the same symptom is being recreated as a flag, a clue. Through the use of clinical hypnotherapy, where one can be taken back to whichever moment caused that symptom, or symptoms, whether it's psychological or physical, one can be shown what it means, and why one has felt a certain way for so long. Just by bringing the reason, the feeling, the sensation, the pain, into the conscious state, it is moving from the subconscious to the conscious, and everything in the conscious can be rationalised and understood. As soon as it is understood, it no longer plays this game of charades with the PTSD sufferer. Hypnotherapy is really ‘psychological archaeology’. PTSD sufferers are searching for the root cause of their symptoms.

You might not know what an Ego Part is, but if you are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you have probably been living with one, or many, for quite some time. When something happens to you in life which is overwhelming, at an age when you have few resources, a part of you will absorb the pain, upset, or anger that you feel. It is similar to an imaginary friend saying, “Okay, give me all that pain. Give me all that upset. I'll look after that, and you can move forward.” As other things happen, that part may get bigger as it takes on more trauma on your behalf, or you may have multiple parts which become more and more entrenched in your body. Imagine taking a Polaroid image of yourself at a moment of trauma, capturing the expression on your face, and then putting that Polaroid image inside a cupboard with an emotion attached to the bottom of it. You will be fine while you are able to shut that cupboard, and keep it shut. But if many traumatic things have happened to you, that cupboard starts to get crowded.When something happens to trigger a memory in your body, a rush of emotion can force open that cupboard and you will experience an unexplained feeling. As we get older, the volume of emotions, and the number of Polaroid images in that cupboard, expands exponentially. It will come to a point where the cupboard can't hold them in anymore, and it just bursts open. That is when PTSD symptoms take hold; when all those emotions, all those feelings, everything you've ever experienced, comes over you all at once, and suddenly you are experiencing not just a touch of anxiety, or a touch of depression that you can get past, but rather you are experiencing a lifetime's worth of depression, anxiety, anger, and everything feels completely out of control. This is called executive control. You may be walking along the street and see something that triggers one of those parts, and the part shoots up inside of you, behaving in a certain way, saying certain things, or feeling certain things that are not useful to you. This might go on for an hour, a day, or a week. Sigmund Freud recognised ego parts as a significant aspect of mental instability, and said we are not the “masters in our own house.” A sufferer may fight to push the part back down, and may achieve it, but for how long? This is when you need clinical hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy is often called a submarine therapy, which can reach parts deep inside of you; so deep that you don't even know half of them are there. While in deep relaxation, those parts become obvious to you. They talk to you. They may show you something, like in a dream. They may show you a memory that you haven't had up to this point and the information will suddenly make sense. For instance, you may realise why you have always got angry in certain circumstances. During clinical hypnotherapy, all the hidden stressors become obvious, and symptoms are revealed as clues, flags, neon signs, intended to make you understand. The dichotomy of ego parts is that while there is a desire to be understood, ego parts are extremely concerned the repressed emotion may destabilise you once known. The part has to be convinced that making everything known is essential. With deeply-relaxed hypnotherapy, the ego part can be convinced, and troublesome emotions can drain away, just like opening the valve on a swimming pool. If any of this description resonates with you, do explore www.CatchPTSD.com and see if there is a therapist who is a good fit for you. Every therapist on CatchPTSD.com has been thoroughly vetted for their expertise in treating PTSD. You will never be told you are too broken to treat. We are here to help. Sarah Yuen Gilliat www.CatchPTSD.com

CATCH stands for Crisis and Trauma Clinical Hypnotherapy. Clinical hypnotherapy is one of the only ways that you can eliminate the gamut of symptoms that make up Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is because PTSD is a subconscious injury, and hypnotherapy is a subconscious therapy. PTSD is caused by everything that has happened to you, that has been pushed down inside your mind, right down into your subconscious, to the point that you perhaps don't even remember it anymore, at least not clearly. It isn't the things that you remember that cause the problems of PTSD, it's the things you don't remember that cause the body to react in a certain way, leaving a sufferer with no frame of reference, no context. It feels like it comes out of nowhere; it feels like you say things, do things, feel things that you have no control over. CatchPTSD.com therapists do not believe that PTSD symptoms constitute a ‘disorder’. CatchPTSD.com therapists believe all symptoms are a reaction to things that you've experienced over your lifetime, and that by taking you into a really deep state of relaxation, which is what CatchPTSD.com therapists do, you will be able to communicate with your body, and find out what has been repressed inside of you. Generally, the body hides memories to protect you, because it doesn't want you remembering things that were traumatic, uncomfortable, or unpleasant. But, unfortunately the body remembers everything, even if the mind doesn’t, and you get that triggering feeling inside of you. Clinical hypnotherapy has been used over the last century to heal people coming back from the fighting fronts in World War I and World War II, to huge effect. So much so, people who returned with chronic physical conditions as a result of psychological stress, could be healed in just a few hours. And that's what CatchPTSD.com hypnotherapists are trained to do. Over the course of just a few hours, in weekly sessions, CatchPTSD.com therapists can help you access the root cause of your problems, and as you gain insight, as you understand where it started, all symptoms dissipate away. Not all hypnotherapists work the same way. There are many different forms of hypnosis, even up to stage hypnosis, which this certainly isn't. CatchPTSD.com therapists believe that you need to go down as deep as you possibly can in your body, down to a state which is termed somnambulism, which is very similar to sleepwalking, to a point where your body and your mind can communicate with you, and explain things to you. Guided by your CatchPTSD.com therapist, you are led into a deep, deep state of relaxation. You might say, “Well, that's not going to work for me. I can't relax. I've got hypervigilance, insomnia, anxiety. I'm lucky if I get half an hour's sleep, let alone be able to relax for the course of a session.” But that doesn't matter, because hypnotherapists, using the cadence of their voice, can get around all those defense mechanisms, and can lead you, just by talking to you, down past all those concerns, so that you are able to benefit. After a session or two of hypnosis, insomnia just disappears because your body becomes trained to relax when hearing the sound of your hypnotherapist’s voice. All hypervigilance and anxiety also melts away. If you are suffering from PTSD, you may think right now, I want some of that. Well, CatchPTSD.com hypnotherapists can help you to reach that state, and help you to get your life back, and not only you, but all the people around you who are being impacted at the same time as you. One very good thing about hypnotherapy is it doesn't require endless talking. I know a lot of you will have been talking about your problems for so long, to loads of different people, and while it can help to talk, it doesn't go away. Hypnotherapy is different. Hypnotherapy is aimed at allowing you to talk to yourself, to your own body, and it only takes around six weekly sessions for those symptoms to dissipate away. It certainly isn't something that is going to take years. People may have told you it's not curable. But it is. CatchPTSD.com hypnotherapists will show you how. You may say, “Well, I've got complex PTSD, so I know that's not curable.” That's not true. For CatchPTSD.com therapists, CPTSD is not Complex PTSD, but Cumulative PTSD. If you have been unlucky enough to have many, many traumatic things happen in your life, you will have been triggered more often, but it is still the same root causing the issues. There may have been a time when you were very scared, very upset, perhaps neglected or abandoned, and if something happens to trigger that first ever feeling, you will experience all these symptoms. People say, “Well, I can't have PTSD because I wasn't in the military, fire service, or I wasn't a police officer”. However, generally what is happening, even in people who've been in those walks of life, is a triggering of the first time they ever felt out of their depth or worried for their survival. The reason PTSD is more prevalent in people who are in the forces, or in the services, is because they get triggered more often, because every day can bring a trigger, whereas in civilian life maybe we're triggered slightly less often. But it's exactly the same thing, and it requires exactly the same treatment. So, if you would like to see how you can diminish all your PTSD symptoms, just take a look at CatchPTSD.com. We are here to help!