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
- It’s just a mental disorder – it’s NOT – it affects your entire body
- Talk therapy is the only way to manage PTSD
- 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