Vivienne Barrett

Hypnotherapy Panic Attacks & PTSD. Most people assume that post traumatic disorders are confined to combat experiences or dramatic events, but long term negative effects can result from surprisingly mundane or low level adversities, especially those experienced in early childhood. It does not take being beaten or abused to cause traumatic effects that can emerge later in life.

Most people have had some type of traumatic experience. Some of us have had many.

The most well known type of PTSD is where the survivor has been exposed to a frightening, shocking or threatening event and afterwards is tormented by vivid and highly emotional memories, often accompanied by visual flashbacks to the event. But what about trauma that may have happened so early in our lives that we have no conscious knowledge or memory of the event?

There is another, less well known, more problematic, and much more common type of PTSD from which a large percentage of the population is suffering without any understanding of the condition or the possible cause. This highly distressing and often profoundly and invisibly life-spoiling COMPLEX PTSD is usually poorly understood and often misdiagnosed, with prescribed long-term medication that does nothing to address the underlying cause.

This complex form differs from the better known syndrome by its most troublesome features: emotional flashbacks (difficult to recognise because they do not involve any visual flashback); social anxiety; shame; severe self-criticism; self-loathing; self abandonment and very low self-esteem.

Reactions can be as powerful as electric shocks, sending the sufferer spiralling down into their own personal sequence of extreme feelings and emotions such as anger, fear, frustration, abandonment, humiliation, embarrassment, bewilderment, hopelessness and despair.

These reactions are usually dismissed as ” simply panic attacks for which there is no obvious or reasonable cause.”

Any effective and realistic therapeutic approach must take all of these compounding factors into consideration.

Feelings of panic can be masked with medication but all the associated problems that cause these symptoms will remain untreated. Moreover most diagnoses are typically treated as character defects or mental illness, rather than unconsciously learned reactions. Similarly there are many one-dimensional approaches to trauma that claim to be cure-alls. However, singular approaches are unable to address all the levels of wounding that combine to cause Complex PTSD and such simplistic approaches can leave you feeling let down and re-traumatised when they do not succeed.

However, once the nature of these unconsciously learned reactions, how they are operating and how they are influencing everyday life are consciously understood, they can be re-programmed and their effects diminished, replacing distress with feelings of personal safety and renewed self-esteem, allowing the survivor to protect himself with more positive reactions and emotions, taking him from

“Merely Surviving” to “Actively Thriving”