TRAUMA THERAPY - MY STORY
Until his death, during a flashback in 1952, Frank Pasquill Sr. behaved the same way as present day veterans, avoiding treatment for his PTSD symptoms. As an eight year old, I learned just how deadly these effects of intense trauma can be, even ten years after the event. It took years of therapy for me to overcome the symptoms of what some might consider "Secondary PTSD."
After training to become a psychotherapist later in life, I found my greatest challenge was simply to get trauma survivors into my office. Then, most my time was spent demonstrating how the they could re-tune their own emotional systems. After learning the protocol, most needed very little further assistance, except for me to help them explore different aspects of their trauma.
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TRAUMA THERAPY - JAKE'S STORY
For example, a young war veteran, let's call him “Jake” was in a crowded Toronto mall in 2005, when he flashed back to the marketplace he used to patrol in Fallujah, Iraq. He met at the Leaside Therapy Centre asking for help with his PTSD. He had been medicating himself for insomnia, suffered from nightmares and was clearly hyper vigilant.
After I demonstrated the emotional tuning program, Jake tuned in to six scenarios of current concern and reduced his anxiety levels from about 8.5 on a ten point scale, to zero in each case, sometimes with just one round of the procedure.
He worked first on his memory of the mall flashback, and then recalled his Fallujah marketplace patrols. He then shifted from recalling actual events, to tuning into his nightmares of pursuit and capture. Finally, he dealt with a couple of current performance anxiety concerns, including being interviewed by the media about his post-military experiences.
There is no question that Jake was a quick study. During the week after our first session, he practiced on his own what he referred to as “the drill”, and tuned into other disturbing memories, dreams and situations. When Jake returned for our second session, he had nothing much left to work on.
He had gone back to the mall, walking about without any flashbacks. He had also used emotional tuning program to ground himself before making public presentations. He had applied it to a number of disturbing memories, and could now describe, in detail, horrific situations that he couldn't discuss before without getting anxious.
His wife had even told him that he seemed like “the old Jake” again.
I contacted Jake about four years later to find that he finds comfort working in quiet rural environments and uses the emotional tuning routine whenever he feels himself "starting to slide".
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TRAUMA THERAPY TOOLS
After the Indian Ocean earthquake of Dec 26, 2004, I created the Tsunami Therapy Network, comprised of about fifty therapists across Canada, who volunteered to do pro-bono work with survivors.
I found that the same protocol that worked clients with suffering from panic attacks also helped tsunami victims.
In 2006, while living in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico, I created two short videos for local victims of domestic violence.
After I had translated this Spanish version into English, a Vietnam veteran assisted me in creating a series of five emotional tuning programs, that have a higher level of self-help instruction.
Click here if you have not seen Video 0- "Introduction to Emotional Tuning"
If you have watched the videos, you might be interested in PTSD STATISTICS, or
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