Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Has anyone ever

Sang to you “Let it go” from the movie Frozen? I had a lover once do this – he did it jokingly but I got his point. The problem was that I couldn’t “let it go”. I couldn’t get over my trauma – I needed professional help.

According to Peter Levine, the world famous Psychiatrist and Master Somatic Therapist, PTSD is a “disorder of not being able to be in the here and now”.

I run a really cool workshop

That will help you understand:

  • What Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) actually is
  • The Neurophysiology
  • The Facts
  • The Stats
  • The Causes
  • The Symptoms – spot the signs
  • Grounding & Embodiment tips teaching you Self regulating
  • Trauma therapies
  • How to mitigate the symptoms
  • 1 in 10 women will suffer with PTSD in her lifetime (I believe this stat is more likely to be 1 in 4)
  • Women who suffer with PTSD have double the risk of developing ovarian cancer
  • Women who have PTSD are 8 times more likely to suffer with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder or Premenstrual Tension
  • Black women who experience racism, are more likely to develop adult-onset Asthma
  • People with PTSD have more than double the risk of developing Type 2 Diabetes
  • A 2019 study published in the journal of Rheumatology showed that in a sample of 67,000 women, those with the highest incidence of childhood abuse, were 3 times more likely to develop lupus than those who had not experienced abuse
  • Boys who are subject to abuse in their childhood are 50% more likely to die of a heart attack, even if they do not drink alcohol or smoke in their later lives
  • Men who were subjected to trauma, as a child are more likely to back capital punishment, to favour foreign wars and be violently anti-abortion.  Interestingly, men who have therapy became softer in their points of view – healing is softening

When someone has PTSD, their nervous system becomes dysregulated.  The body expresses trauma in heart disease, back pain, stomach disease leading to a variety of symptoms: 

  • Addiction due to self medicating
  • Burnout
  • Unregulated mood swings including anger, anxiety, depression
  • Being hyperalert
  • Flashbacks
  • Fertility and menstrual cycle problems
  • Lower levels of Testosterone; Oestrogen & Progesterone
  • Irritable Bowel Syndrome
  • Nightmares
  • Insomnia
  • Impaired short term memory
  • Suicidal thoughts or attempts
  • Weakened immune system
  • Muscle & joint ache
  • Headaches
  • Irregular heartbeats
  • Nerve and back pain including Sciatica & L3 disc issues
  • Compassion
  1. It’s just a mental disorder – it’s NOT – it affects your entire body
  2. Talk therapy is the only way to manage PTSD
  3. You have to have been to war, or had a catastrophic 1 off event to get PTSD. You can get PTSD from a number of different ways
    • Small T Trauma: pushed beyond your ability to cope – divorce, work 
    • Birth: I have treated people as adults who were born under sever circumstances who have suffered with persistent symptoms
    • It is fairly common for a woman to suffer PTSD after experiencing a traumatic labor 
    • Collective: Covid-19 is a good example of this
    • C-PTSD: develops in response to prolonged, repeated experience of interpersonal trauma in a context in which the individual has little or no chance of escape
    • Cultural: for example the Holocaust
    • Developmental: Child abuse
    • Intergenerational trauma: Epigenetics (what we experience in our lifetime can be passed on directly to our baby in Utero altering female babies egg development via our eggs and sperm), genetics (long-term patterns of adapting inherited) and unresolved trauma which leads to disorganized attachment; abuse or neglect
    • Isolation: solitary confinement can be a form of torture
    • Medical: Having an operation as a child or a failure in the anesthesia working during an operation, where the patient hears the surgeons talking during the procedure or feels the slices of the surgeon’s knife
    • Soft: Could be you were never good enough in your mum or dad’s eyes or you were bullied at school
    • Attachment – when a child’s main parent or caregiver leaves, dies or does not comfort them the way a loving present parent would
    • Stress
    • Being bullied
  • Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises by David Berceli help you release sometimes stuck stories from your body
  • Studies have shown that TRE can really help alleviate some of the active symptoms of PTSD
  • The benefits of TRE include:
    • Improved sleep
    • Feeling more connectedness
    • Feeling more joy
    • Decreased Anger, Sadness & Anxiety
    • Improved short term memory
    • Reduced Headaches & migraines
    • Reduced backpain & sciatica
    • Taking your body from contraction to expansion
    • Stronger immune system
    • Better digestion
    • Improved sex drive
    • Regular menstrual cycle
    • Increased fertility
    • Lower Cortisol levels
  • Body & Talk therapy can and do have a very positive impact on your physiology, often reversing damage to cells done