Post traumatic stress – Lifting Trauma With the Rewind Technique or Fast Phobia Cure

This is the forth in a series of video’s helping you understand PTSD. Watch this video to see how you can lift PTSD with the rewind.

Here is a written summary.

You have learnt about the broad range of anxiety based symptoms that PTSD creates. Those symptoms are generated by the memory of a difficult time getting locked into the amygdale and never make it through to the neo cortex and long term memory where the mind can think about the event and feel calm.

To get the memory passed the amygdale and into the neo cortex we use the rewind technique, sometimes called the fast phobia cure. It is a safe and proven technique of lifting trauma. The effectiveness of the rewind is due to it help a sufferer’s brain do what it has been trying to do, that is to get the memory away from the amygdale into long term storage where it does not create anxiety and panic.

The steps to the rewind are in the next blog post and when you read the blog you will see that there are a series of steps that we take the client through. Within these steps are the two keys for the success of the technique. The first is asking the person with PTSD to imagine watching themselves watching themselves on a TV screen. this known as double dissociation. For the first time that person will have recalled the event as an observer and that event will loose some of those anxiety tags.

The second and key to its success is that the person recalls the memory whilst feeling very calm, and we achieve this by a relaxing visualization or hypnosis before we do the actual steps to the rewind.

When you enable someone with PTSD to think about the event in this dissociated way –and whilst feeling calm this teaches the amygdale that this thought is safe enough to release the anxiety tags the event has been given. What follows is the hippocampus recognises the thought has no chemical stress tags attached to it and lets it go into long-term storage to the neo cortex where it will not activate the fight and flight when recalled. This is the reason for the often ‘miraculous’ change in the way a person can feel, the trauma can be formed over a few seconds and for many those symptoms can be lifted in just one session as the memory finds a different place to reside.

In the case of multiple traumas the rewind may have to be done several times over a few sessions but usually if the traumas were of a similar nature, once is enough to help the person feel so much better.

If you would like to train in the rewind technique there are two main options
Face to face with Within Sight’s trainers: we hold a one-day course Check it out here

If you want to find a therapist who has been professionally trained to use the rewind in a client session, email us on info@within-sight.com let us know where you live and we will do our best to help you find someone to help you.

Not read the other posts in the series? Find the First one here.