Below is an excerpt from Belleruth Naparstek’s 9/19/09 Huffington Post article, “Finally Figuring Out What Helps Troops with Posttraumatic Stress.”
For this nasty condition, we need tools that re-regulate the body and allow the owner of these symptoms to put his or her stress management on “manual” – tools that go straight to instinct, not thinking. No wonder immersive, right brain methods make such dramatic inroads on symptoms – guided imagery and hypnosis; certain kinds of body work, such as massage therapy, Reiki, Healing Touch; and new protocols combining imagery with acupoint tapping or pressing, with odd alphabet names, such as EMDR, EFT, SE, TIR, IRT, TAT and the exuberantly named WHEE.
Wonderful results have emerged from 3 different guided imagery studies with traumatized troops at Duke Medical Center/Durham V.A. hospital, showing that after 6-8 weeks of listening five times a week to a half hour’s worth of calming guided imagery downloads, symptoms drop dramatically. This is true for male or female warriors, middle aged or young adult, Vietnam or Iraq vets. It works for military sexual trauma or combat trauma or both; and with or without active substance abuse. Improvements appear to hold over time, too. The imagery is a simple, portable, user-friendly and non-threatening group of audio downloads – an intervention that stays the same each time it’s used and can even go back to Iraq with the user on his or her MP3 player. And it’s not only inexpensive – it’s bootleggable, for heaven’s sake.
