Bouncing Back from Trauma
by Donald Pelles, Ph.D., Certified Hypnotherapist
On September 11, 2001, five-year-old Noam Saul witnessed the first passenger plane slam into the World Trade Center from the windows of his first-grade classroom at PS 234, less than 1,500 feet away. He had his classmates ran with their teacher down the stairs to the lobby, where most of them were reunited with parents who had dropped them off at school just moments earlier
. . .
Ten days later I visited his family … and that evening his parents and I went for a walk in the eerie darkness through the still-smoking pit where Tower One had once stood. … When we returned home, Noam was still awake, and he showed me a picture that he had drawn at 9:00 a.m. on September 12. The drawing depicted what he had seen the day before: an airplane slamming into the tower, a ball of fire, firefighters, and people jumping from the tower’s windows. But at the bottom of the picture he had drawn something else: a black circle at the foot of the buildings. I had no idea what it was, so I asked him. “A trampoline,” he replied. What was a trampoline doing there? Noam explained, “So that the next time when people have to jump they will be safe.” I was stunned: This five-year-old boy, a witness to unspeakable mayhem and disaster just twenty-four hours before he made that drawing, had used his imagination to process what he had seen and begin to go on with his life.
. . .
But Noam’s experience allows us to see in outline two critical aspects of the adaptive response to threat that is basic to human survival. At the time the disaster occurred, he was able to take an active role by running away from it, thus becoming an agent in his own rescue. And once he had reached the safety of home, the alarm bells in his brain and body quieted. This freed his mind to make some sense of what had happened and even to imagine a creative alternative to what he had seen – a lifesaving trampoline.
In contrast to Noam, traumatized people become stuck, stopped in their growth because they can’t integrate new experiences into their lives. … Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma was still going on – unchanged and immutable – as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.
Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps the Score, Chapter 1, Penguin Books, 2014
*****
My client, in our initial session, told me about his lifetime feelings of social anxiety, especially in regard to girls and women, which were affecting him in both his personal and professional life. These included
· avoidance of people and tasks;
· passivity and learned helplessness;
· lack if trust in anyone, including himself;
· a fear of humiliation;
· defensiveness and extreme sensitivity to being rejected;
· feelings of persecution; and
· a deep dislike of “strong” women whom he perceived as attempting to control, manipulate; or sabotage him or who challenged or belittled him in public.
After several sessions together, he felt some improvement, but a lot of the feelings and reactions were still there.
I thought about “regression to cause”, which is not the way I usually work. Actually, without any formal regression, my client had told me about several relevant episodes in his past:
David (as I will call him) was 5 years old, in kindergarten, playing in with his friend, Thomas, in Thomas’s front yard, when the girl next door started making fun of him. The girl and Thomas were laughing at him. David ran back to his yard and hid. He felt paralyzed, unable to move. From that incident, David concluded that
· girls are mean;
· friends can’t be trusted;
· he is all by himself;
· no one will stick up for him; and
· he was trapped in this humiliating situation.
Many years later, in a meeting at work, David’s office manager, a woman, accused him of not doing his work properly, embarrassing him (“She humiliated me!”). David started crying. “She made me feel unsafe among professionals”, he told me; that “I might not be able to stay composed”.
We know that some people can somehow go through terrible experiences without serious negative effects going forward, while others suffer “post traumatic stress” (I don’t like the ‘D’ – “Disorder” – designation in “PTSD”) that may haunt them their entire lives. Why is perhaps an open question (see the quote at the beginning of this article) One idea is that something earlier in their life had “prepared” them to escape without being traumatized.
Something popped up in my mind, an NLP pattern that I had used a few times years ago. I looked it up, the “Decision Destroyer” pattern, due originally to Richard Bandler. (A good discussion of the “Decision Destroyer” is in Steve and Connirae Andreas’ wonderful book, Heart of the Mind”, Real People Press, 1989.) The basic idea is to create, with the client, a “false memory” (of course, the client is consciously aware that it is false) of an event that, had it actually happened, would have created a powerful imprint, so that, as the client later went through certain negative imprinting events, even years later, they would be able to experience that incident or those incidents without the debilitating effects that had resulted before. In particular some of the generalizations (“decisions”) they had previously made could be reassessed and the resulting feelings, thoughts, and behaviors changed permanently.
In the next session with my client, I asked him to tell me about an actual powerful “imprinting” experience he had had sometime in his life, one that had made a lasting impression on him from that point on. David vividly described being on the water, practicing with his college rowing team: “I was in the best shape I had ever been in; perfect form”; being in his own body, feeling the movement, the pull and push of his muscles. It was a video, in color, on a “50-foot screen”, feeling totally in-tune with the whole boat, in perfect synchronicity. He could hear the “clump” sound the oars made as the caught the water, and smell the water.
The next textbook step in “Decision Destroyer” is to describe an “ordinary event” – David picked flossing his teeth – and to compare the submodalities (sight, sound, feelings, smells, tastes) to those of the imprinting event. I did this with David (though I’m not sure this is so very important) The salient submodalities of the experience on the river stood out so vividly that there was really no need (in my opinion) to have that comparison.
Next, I had David make up an imprinting event, that, had it occurred, would have left a powerful enough impression to carry him through the traumas that were to come. After some thought, he made up an experience of being his 4-year-old self, sitting at the breakfast table with his grandfather (whom he loved deeply). “He calls me ‘boy’. He says to me, ‘Kids your age are often impolite and inconsiderate. They say and do mean and hurtful things. They don’t really know you, the real you. They’re just being kids. Don’t let it get to you.’”
I helped David create a vivid experience of this “memory”, adding in the relevant submodalities from the imprinting experience: a video, in bright colors, associated, and in synch with his grandfather, the smells of the food and the kitchen (not the river water, obviously!).
And then, holding this “memory” in the forefront of his mind, I had him move rapidly forward through the memory of that experience with his friend and the little girl, and then through other similar encounters he had had, and finally through the memory of that horrible meeting. We did it several more times, faster each time.
The results of that session unfolded over the next few days and weeks. David saw some big changes in his orientation toward women, found it easier to trust himself and others, and began to feel more confident and “present” in groups and social situations.
*****
As we hypnotherapists move through our careers, we may settle on certain techniques, ways of working, that we find very effective and, rightly, make these our go-to’s in working with our clients. Still, it can be useful to recall other things you did in the past, things you may have put aside or forgotten, but that worked, and pull these out when they may be helpful.
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