Trauma – if your brain believes it is in danger – it is and it will form patterns of behavior to keep itself (and you) alive and safe. This response is healthy and necessary, at that moment. The difficulty comes when our brains continue to react in the same way, long after the threat is gone. These responses are hard-wired in our brains and lay dormant until something triggers them – they WOW. You have a reaction that is usually totally unrelated to the trigger.

We don’t know all the effects of trauma – however, suffering from it isn’t a sign of weakness nor a badge of courage. It is life altering. Anger, anxiety, addictions, depression, hypervigilence, nightmares, problems sleeping, these are but a few of the devastations of PTSD. Would you consider a safe, simple, proven effective method to greatly lessen or eliminate the effects of PTSD? Call Sue for a sample session of neurofeedback.

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Excerpts from Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma by Peter Levine:

“At age four: I struggled with masked giants who were strapping me to a high, white table. Silhouetted in the cold, harsh light that glared in my eyes was the figure of someone coming towards me with a black mask. The mask had a vile smell that caused me to choke and I continued to struggle as it was forced down onto my face. Trying desperately to scream and turn away, I spun into a dizzying, black tunnel of horrific hallucinations. I awoke in a gray-green room, devastated. Except for a very bad sore throat, it appeared that I was perfectly okay. I was not.

I felt utterly and completely abandoned and betrayed. All that I had been told was that I could have my favorite ice cream and that my parents would be with me. After the operation I lost the sense of a safe, comprehensible world where
I had the ability to respond. I became consumed with a helpless sense of
shame and a feeling that I was bad (the rational brain assumes that he must
be bad to deserve this kind of punishment). For years after this annihilating experience, I feared bedtime and would sometimes wake up in the middle of
the night. Gasping for breath and too scared and ashamed to cry out, I law alone, terrified of suffocating to death.

By the age of six or sever, family stress and the pressure of school intensified my symptoms. I was sent to see a child psychiatrist. Her main concern was a shaggy, dirty, white, stuffed dog that I needed to have beside me to fall asleep. The reason for my anxiety and excessive shyness went undiscovered. The doctor’s approach was to further frighten me by telling me about the problems needing a stuffed friend would cause me as an adult. I must say that the
therapy “worked” in that regard (I threw my dog away.) However, my symptoms continued and I developed chronic anxiety attacks, frequent stomachaches,
and other “psychosomatic” problems that lasted from junior high into graduate school.

Common occurrences can produce traumatic after-effects that are just as debilitating as those experienced by veterans of combat or survivors of childhood abuse. Traumatic effects are not always apparent immediately following the incidents that caused them. Symptoms can remain dormant, accumulating over years or even decades. Then, during a stressful period, or as the result of another incident, they can show up without warning. There may be no indication of the original cause. Thus, a seemingly minor event can give rise to a sudden breakdown, similar to one that might be caused by a single catastrophic event.”

Click here to read Prologue from Waking the Tiger

Click here to read Chapter 1 from Waking the Tiger

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Quote from “The Trauma Spectrum - Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency” by Robert Scaer, M.D.

“Over the past 150 years, we have vastly changed our definition of what trauma means and correspondingly revised our understanding of how it is experienced. We have moved from conceiving of trauma as a purely physical phenomenon to seeing trauma as a complex set of physiological and psychological experiences. Despite the broadened concept of trauma, society has not fully accepted the wide range of “normal” experiences that also have traumatic impacts. Our lives are full of “little traumas”, such as car accidents, risky medical interventions, childhood abuse and neglect and social discrimination and poverty. These less dramatic but very real traumas remain overlooked because we continue to define the traumatic in terms of the horrors of war and disastrous airplane crashes. The effectiveness of trauma treatment and the quality of life of millions of people suffer as a result.”

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