I want to talk to you about Traumatic Stress because we hear so much about it these days.
While we know how to stop most of the symptoms immediately. A lot of times people get confused and wonder why they aren’t I totally better now. Part of that is understanding what PTSD is and that it comes in a lot of forms.
I’ve been doing this work for over 30 years and worked with TS in a lot of fields. Traumatic Stress can be just one event and you just need some help getting those images out of your head and Thought Field Therapy is great for that. It may be a series of images that you have to work on. TFT is great for that.
The problem comes when people don’t understand that if you have been living in a violent situation, if you’ve been living with this for a lifetime, that your lifestyle is pointed towards living in fear and that is something that has to be addressed.
I want to help you understand the way I look at it. I use the concept of NOW which stands for No Open Wounds. Simply put, that means that if you have open Traumatic Stress wounds you’re going to be taking care of them, focusing on them and they take control of your life because you can’t react. It’s just like if you have an open cut, you’re aware of it at all times and you do things to protect that cut, you do things so that it doesn’t get hurt again.
On an emotional level the same thing happens. The beauty of Thought Field Therapy is that it helps you close those open wounds almost immediately and you are no longer in a situation where you have to react or think about how you protect that or how you protect yourself in that same way.
The difficulty comes in that for some people, once the healing begins, there are other things that need to take place and in Traumatic Stress that means you have to understand that wounds are sometimes more than just on the surface. Even though you can close one, there may be more.
Traumatic Stress is cumulative and that simply means that the more of it you have, the more suseptible you are to it and at some point it can become overwhelming. TFT helps you close the open wounds, helps you address some of the underlying blocks to healing but you need to understand that there are a number of steps.
Once you navigate past those open wounds and you can get through the hazards, the standard symptoms of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), then the next step is you have to be able to look back at the event to oberve it and make sense out of it. That’s who we are as human beings. You have to take the time to review what went on and you also have to add some information about what’s a normal process, what’s the difference between a reaction and a response. What’s the difference between acting in a life and death way without thought and consciously choosing something.
Then after you have come to some understanding of that and you are more comfortable when that’s happened, you can begin to incorporate it into your life, which simply means you can now start working on making your life better with some integrity. Integrity simply means that you are in a state of wholeness, that you’re not fragmented and that you can make sense out of your life.
Integrity also means that you are operating within a set of principles or values in a way that is congruent with who you are. Many times people have traumatic stress and they have long term violence or they have severe prolonged exposures; they find themselves often acting in ways that aren’t congruent with their values and beliefs. Thought Field Therapy closes the wounds. Once you do that, you can navigate through all the other symptoms of post traumatic stress. Then you can begin to observe what’s going on and make some sense out of what has happened to you which is an important human activity. Then you can begin working on making conscious choices about what you want to do with your life and what’s important to you.
And what are the lessons you want to take from this experience and what are the lessons you want or don’t want to share with other people? It’s your experience and you are in control of it. That’s what it’s about, bringing people back to a state of control.
The concept of NOW is really key to understanding what I do with people with traumatic stress. NOW means No Open Wounds and NOW means being able to
Navigate and to
Obverse and understand and
Work yourlife with integrity and live in a state of integrity.
So that’s just an overview of some of things we need to pay attention to when working with traumatic stress.
For more about how tapping can help and how to tap instructions please check out my book, Heal Traumatic Stress NOW – No Open Wounds.
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