Switch to Healing

Many people plagued by the symptoms of trauma may not even realize that they are trauma victims or sufferers! Often they think that a trauma is associated with war, terrorism, and general large scale violence alone, therefore dismissing the lesser traumas that are literally “closer to home” and can be just as, if not more, impactful on them. We are not taught to recognize events that are linked to trauma or the symptoms that accompany trauma. Therefore, it is important to research the symptoms and their link to recent or past trauma, and then to seek out the latest therapy to bring fast relief from the symptoms.

For so many people, upsetting events during life tend to live with them for years after. They resurface at the seemingly strangest times when they least expect it. Certain past events trigger feelings of sadness, anger and hurt. They trigger body sensations of cramps, nausea, chest tightness, throat constriction, light-headedness and tears. Some people try to manage the pain through talking, thinking, drinking, engaging in promiscuous sex, substantially withdrawing from their usual activities in life, or even dissociating from their feelings.

People who experience traumatic events can become stuck at the point of the trauma and can spend the rest of their lives trying to make sense of it, often without forward movement or clearing. This is because the trauma is stored in the brain in fragments, much like a jigsaw puzzle that has not been assembled. The brain is unable to assemble all the parts so it becomes a challenge to make sense of it all. Dreams and nightmares are probably the brain’s attempt to reassemble the pieces to make sense out of it and put it to rest. Until the brain processes the entire trauma, the flashbacks and nightmares are likely continue.

Traumatic events can shake a person’s existence, shattering their assumptions and dramatically influencing the quality of their life by causing enormous suffering and severely hindering their ability to feel fulfilled and happy. Nevertheless, while coping with traumatic events, some people discover their ability to grow in ways they hadn't conceived of before. This phenomenon is sometimes called “Post Traumatic Growth”. The right kind of trauma therapy can significantly promote this growth.

Trauma Symptoms

Traumatic incidents can be defined as events or situations that have sufficient emotional power to overcome the usual coping abilities of a person. Traumatic stress derives from such a severe incident that has wounded or damaged the psychological apparatus and therefore impaired the capacity for unaided recovery.

People who experience a traumatic event may be left feeling upset and shaken. Some common reactions to a highly stressful event are:

 • Feeling jumpy, anxious, moody, or irritable
 • Having difficulty concentrating, making decisions, thinking clearly or focusing
 • Having trouble going near an accident scene or to places that trigger memories of the accident or incidents
 • Having trouble being around people
 • Having difficulty being alone

People may experience some or all of these reactions. These reactions are normal responses to stressful or abnormal events.
However, more severe symptoms may occur in a long-lasting way. In some cases, people may feel overwhelmed and unable to cope with day-today demands. They may feel numb, shocked, abandoned, and helpless. Some people may have trouble sleeping. Some may stay away from work. Peoples’ home lives and personal relationships may suffer — trauma victims may take their feelings of guilt, powerlessness, or anger out on their families. Some may withdraw, or turn to drugs and alcohol. In other cases, victims may suffer from nightmares or have flashbacks to the event — often fearing the event will happen again. After a traumatic incident, victims’ feelings about their lives and their environment can be seriously affected.

People may become disillusioned with their future if they believe that their problems are not being taken seriously, or that they are not being given adequate support. The whole system of people around the victim suffers after a traumatic incident: at work effects may include poor morale, decreased productivity, increased accidents and sick time, higher disability claims, and greater staff turnover; at home communication, connectedness, sexuality, relationship quality may be impacted negatively.

Some indications for early identification of traumatic stress reactions are:

Physical

 Dazed, weak, persisting over-aroused and hyper-alert, exaggerated startle reflex throughout the first 24 hours
 Excessive fatigue or collapse
 Physical reactions to reminders of the event(s)

Behavioural

 Automatic involuntary responses or habitual activity
 Keeping track of everything around you
 Abnormal reaction to sudden stimulation
 Disorganization of normal routines
 Inability to continue working or other duties, nightmares, sleeplessness
 Avoiding reminders, thinking or acting as though it’s happening again
 Loss of interest in significant activities

Mental

 Acute confusion, disorientation, difficulty concentrating
 Re-experiencing the trauma
 Constantly thinking about it, intrusive memories
 Stopping thoughts about it
 Inability to think about ordinary things
 Mental disorganization
 Inability to remember what happened
 Inability to remember normally
 Flashbacks

Emotional

 Fear, guilt, lack of normal feelings, extreme distress when reminded, irritability, or outbursts of anger

 Emotional reactions to reminders of the event(s)
 Numbness and dissociation from the incident

Social

 Withdrawal, feeling that others don’t understand, feeling different, resenting others, feeling detached or estranged from others
 Needing others to be available
 Fearing being alone
 Avoidance of people, places, or events

Existential

 Loss of meaning (I’m not the same person as before)
 Loss of connection to past and future
 Inability to accept what has happened
 Changing philosophy of life
 Feeling different about life and family
 No sense of the future

Types of Trauma

Single event

Single event trauma could be a car accident, tornado, hurricane, surgery, or rape, for example. Some of these single event traumas are referred to as “small t” traumas by clinical counsellors, and yet others are more properly categorized as “large T” traumas. "Big T" trauma includes sexual and physical abuse, natural disasters, combat, surgery, terrorist attacks, and having a life-threatening or terminal illness. "Little T" trauma may include insults to self-image such as teasing from peers and low self-esteem, going to the dentist, and daily stress. "Everything in between" includes divorce, loss and grief, having a mental illness, life changes (including terminal and chronic illness), and work-related stress.

Complex

This is exposure to multiple or prolonged traumatic events and the impact of this exposure on a person’s development. These traumatic events could begin in childhood and continue over a person’s lifetime in various forms. It is as though the first traumatic incident precipitates the onset of others over time. Typically, complex trauma exposure in childhood involves the simultaneous or sequential occurrence of child maltreatment—including psychological maltreatment, neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and domestic violence—that is chronic, begins in early childhood, and occurs within the primary care-giving system. Exposure to these initial traumatic experiences—and the resulting emotional dysregulation and the loss of safety, direction, and the ability to detect or respond to danger cues—often sets off a chain of events leading to subsequent or repeated trauma exposure in adolescence and adulthood.

Vicarious

Vicarious trauma is caused by extended exposure to someone who has experienced trauma through their thoughts, feelings and actions. Spouses, significant others, and clinical counsellors who deal with traumatized clients can develop symptoms of PTSD.

Trauma Triggers

Traumatic events result in "memories" that are imprinted into the person under circumstances that occurred prior in their life. Current circumstances, unrelated to the original trauma, can bring about physical reactions in a person when elements similar to the original traumatic circumstances are present. When these circumstances present themselves and the person reacts, they are experiencing trigger events.

Triggers can come in all kinds of shapes and varieties:
 smells
 places
 sounds
 certain foods
 anniversary events
 animals
 people
 voice tone
 physical resemblance
 seemingly almost anything!

“Night School” and Brain Magic

When events occur during the day, we process them at night during our sleep. During our sleep we slip into a phase of sleep called REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. This is the stage in which we dream and process the day’s events. It is believed that at this stage our bodies integrate the events stored separately in the two hemispheres of our brain. You may have experienced going to sleep with a concern on your mind or perhaps a problem to solve. When you awake, you are sometimes amazed that the previous day’s concern seems less troublesome, or that problem now has the solution that was evading you the day before. This is the beneficial result of brain hemisphere integration. The left hemisphere’s recollections of the prior events are integrated with the right hemisphere’s recollection. This tends to even out our mental perspective of these events, and so any emotional or cognitive intensity around events is lowered.

However, our brains are designed to protect us. When our brain, in REM sleep, comes across traumatic events of the day, it is believed to skip over these. This probably results in traumatic events, along with their memories of sights, sounds, smells, being frozen in time and therefore easily triggered by new events. This process “trick us” into re-experiencing the trauma. Modern therapy designed to target these frozen trauma memories is needed to rapidly lower the intensity of the symptoms.

Trauma Treatment

For persons who have had fairly normal childhoods and who have experienced a single-event trauma as an adult of the “t” kind, treatment is usually fairly straightforward. The most researched and empirically validated treatments for single-incident traumas are Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or Eye Movement Desensitization and Re-processing now closely followed by One Eye Integration. When there are no pre-existing or co-existing difficulties to the single traumatic event, treatment tends to proceed quickly with excellent results.

When persons have experienced traumas during formative development (e.g., childhood and adolescence), or who have been repeatedly or chronically traumatized at any age and have experienced trauma of the “T” kind, treatment becomes much more complex. This is because the traumas compound each other as they occur without the benefit of intervening treatment. These persons are virtually re-traumatized by the prior trauma when the next one occurs, and their coping mechanisms are increasingly incapable at allowing them to function effectively. These persons need to be treated by highly trained clinical counsellors to work with them and the symptom picture that they often present (e.g., posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety, substance-related disorders, dissociative disorders, relationship problems, problems with identity, sexual problems, anger issues, and so forth). These individuals may get worse when not receiving expert treatment, or if they become re-traumatized by prolonged talking therapy. Specialized non-talking therapies such as EMDR and OEI are designed to minimize the risk of re-traumatization.

Treatment Hazards

The wrong or misguided treatment for trauma can be worse than no treatment at all. A popular offering to trauma sufferers is traditional talking therapy alone. This carries the risk of re-traumatizing the sufferer, because they literally sit in the right brain pain while talking and listening through the left brain. The sufferer may be left feeling good for a while, whereas they still need to work on other parts of the trauma and the brain.

A more desirable approach is to employ a modern power therapy such as OEI or, its predecessor, EMDR, to access the hemisphere of the brain where the most intense symptoms of trauma are triggered rather than using talk therapy alone to slowly work through left hemisphere language processing.

Story of “One Eye Integration”

Roots of “One Eye Integration”

In the past 12 years, a series of psychotherapy treatment techniques have been developed by two innovative clinicians in Vancouver, B.C., under the title, One Eye Integration (OEI). Since those first developments, hundreds of clinical counsellors, psychologists and physicians all over the world have been using OEI techniques with great success. One of the techniques is called “switching” which lends us the title of this report.

You may have heard about EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) as an effective treatment for trauma. EMDR is an excellent treatment modality for trauma that most people respond to when they think of an upsetting event and process the feelings and sensations with both eyes open. As with OEI, EMDR is well researched and is a proven effective treatment for trauma and trauma-like symptoms.

Overwhelming symptoms

Not all trauma sufferers can bring up the sensations, feelings, thoughts and images associated with the trauma with both eyes open, and still function in therapy well enough to experience forward movement and healing. For them it is more effective to work with one eye at a time. In all experiences that impact our brains, each hemisphere is impacted to a greater or lesser extent. In most cases of trauma, the right hemisphere is impacted more severely, and with OEI the trauma sufferer can work with the left, or less intense, eye first, to lower the intensity to a level where the right eye can be open for processing.

Unable to talk or use language

OEI is also effective where a person cannot even bear or is unable to put into language the thoughts, feelings and sensations they are experiencing when they float back to the traumatic incident(s). With OEI they can merely bring up the memories without speaking and the healing can take place.

Becoming unstuck at any age

OEI is an amazing trauma therapy that uses our visual pathways from the eyes to the brain and which works for all ages. I have used it successfully with clients from 9-86. It helps us deal with being stuck, where we are doing something we don’t really want to do or not doing something we would really like to do. It also helps us deal with emotions that are stirred up such as fear, anxiety, sadness, guilt, shame, anger or conflict. OEI will help you change memories from present upset to past perspective.

Scientific research for evidence-based treatment

As with EMDR, OEI is evidence-based in that it is backed by recent properly conducted scientific research. In a 2002-2003 study, the participants who received OEI treatment for 3 1-hour sessions experienced a significant reduction of their trauma symptoms. In a 2004-2007 study, which included a 3-month follow-up, participants who received 2-3 OEI treatments demonstrated significant reduction in trauma symptoms compared to 2 other interventions.

Simple techniques of OEI

OEI uses a variety of techniques from “switching” to “massaging glitches” to “sweeping”. These terms may sound “weird” to the reader, yet they exemplify the simplicity of the processes that will help you find fast relief, and research supports that a “weird” therapy works.

As an advanced certified OEI therapist, the author is able to help you process the present upsetting symptoms of past trauma safely and quickly.

Use OEI soonest for easy relief

OEI (and EMDR) work best when delivered as soon as possible after a disturbing event. There are less layers of complexity for you to work through so therapy will be easier and quicker than if left for a long time. The best approach is to act soon.

Use of OEI at home

Once you have experienced the fast positive relief that OEI brings by working with an advanced certified OEI therapist, you will be able to “take-out’ these techniques to use at home for immediate relief when you are triggered and not in session. Your advanced certified OEI therapist should advise when a procedure is safe for you to use outside of a trauma therapy session.

Conclusion

So, if your life is impaired by the continued presence of upsetting physical, emotional and body symptoms, or if any of the parts of this report resonate with you or your life, I encourage you to explore the fast healing that OEI can bring you.

Now is the time to connect these symptoms to memories of past traumas, and help your brain integrate the memories to allow you to function more freely.

Contact an OEI therapist today!