Treating PTSD & Flashbacks: Take It Slow

Flashbacks are a common occurrence in traumatized people. During a flashback, emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the traumatic event are experienced not as “memories” but as actual real-life events happening in the present. Clinical studies have shown that during a flashback the right side of the brain “lights up,” while at the same time the left side “goes dark.” The right side of the brain is the creative emotional side. The left side is the rational side. This means flashbacks cause traumatized people to be overwhelmed with emotional “fight or flight” messages from the right side of the brain, while the left or “rational” side no longer works. Because the left side has shut down, traumatized people may not be aware they are reexperiencing or reenacting the past. They become angry, terrified, ashamed or even “frozen”—they can’t move or talk.

Flashbacks cause traumatized people to be pushed outside of their “window of tolerance”—their range of normal everyday behavior. They become enraged, reactive, disorganized, hyper-aroused or hyper-vigilant. They may panic or fly into rages. Or, sometimes, they may swing to the other side of the scale, becoming silent and aloof, numb in mind and body, shutting down their reactions to the outside world. In sum, during a flashback the “rational brain” no longer has the ability to talk the “emotional brain” out of its own reality. Traumatized persons continue to live “there” in the past, and don’t know how to live “here” in the present.

Hypnotherapy works, in part, by helping people to relive their traumatic events in a safe and secure environment. This helps the traumatized client to fully process their memories as a first step toward regaining control over their minds and bodies. However traumatized people can only benefit from reliving their trauma if they are not overwhelmed by it. This means care must be taken to avoid triggering a flashback in the early stages of therapy. To do this, I always “go slow” with traumatized clients—showing them in the first few sessions how to remain in the present and reconnect with their minds and bodies. Self-hypnosis, relaxation and Eye Movement Therapy (EMT) are excellent for this. Once traumatized patients have learned how to control their minds, bodies and emotions, then we can use classic hypnotherapy techniques, such as Parts Therapy and Regressions, to help them revisit their traumatic memories and, through that process, to heal them.