Every person is motivated to get more of “what they like” and “less of what they don’t like” but what a person likes is unique to the individual and based upon their historical personal experiences. As we mature, “what we like” is constantly moderated to allow for the increased volume of experiences we have on our experience resume. Everything and anything we don’t like is called stress which is enjoyed as a spectrum ranging from the very minor to the most extreme. Of course, those stress-invoking experiences are more impactful the higher they are on the spectrum, and those deemed minor are less impactful.
Those experiences that we perceive to be minor are usually simply uncomfortable or inconvenient and usually can be easily dismissed at the time of the experience. Those experiences that are high on the stress spectrum can be disruptive to all aspects of our lives and our ability to function efficaciously. A few of those experiences that rank highest on the stress spectrum are called traumatic and are so stressful that we have great difficulty or are unable to reconcile them of our own accord. Because we are unable to reconcile them, they remain as a gap in our lifetime string of experiences and they become a distortion that affects all aspects of our “beingness”, mind, body, and spirit.
When a traumatic experience occurs and goes unreconciled, the mind will often distort itself to accommodate the unreconciled event by modifying behavior to protect itself and compensate for decreased functionality. The behavior modifications inevitably become self-destructive very similar to the effects of an auto-immune disease. The mind’s modifications will, also inevitably, begin to manifest into body anomalies or dysfunction. The mental, emotional, and physical distortions have collectively been named Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. It’s estimated that approximately 12 million people in the United States and many millions more globally are currently suffering from PTSD and more are being added to the roster daily.
The common behavioral characteristics that struggle with PTSD are generally grouped into four clusters: 1. Intrusion (re-experiencing), 2. Persistent avoidance of stimuli, 3. Negative alterations in cognition and mood, and 4. Marked alterations in arousal and reactivity. These four clusters are not mutually exclusive and may manifest individually or cumulatively or be confused with characteristics of other diagnoses such as depression, bipolar disorder, or even schizophrenia. The behaviors often manifest with increasing intensity over days, months, or years or may appear suddenly decades after the initial trauma experience. Some characteristics may appear and disappear almost magically as the person cycles through these categories. In other words, they are uncontrollable and take on a life of their own which makes it very difficult to accurately diagnose and treat.
Humans perceive an experience to last some period defined by a beginning and an ending when the nature of our stream of perceived experiences changes because of a change in environment, a change in stimulus, or a change in our condition of being. Even though we perceive an experience to be a singular event, in reality, it is comprised of dozens of thoughts and every individual thought is a complete experience. By design, humans can only process one thought at a time and it is a mandatory requirement that before they can move to the next thought, they are obligated to make a decision about the prevailing thought.
With every individual thought (experience), humans are required to decide whether the thought feels good and they like it or it doesn’t feel good and they don’t like it. This required decision is a complete emotion. There are no emotions other than their decision, based purely on how the thought feels, of whether or not they like it because this isn’t a rational or logical decision. We don’t make a checklist of the pros and cons of the thought and decide rationally whether it should feel good or shouldn’t. The decision is purely based on how it feels which, of course, is most strongly influenced by the condition of the experiencer at the time of the experience.
The determination of whether a thought feels good or doesn’t is made according to the experiencer’s prevailing hierophant or perception of self. If the thought supports the prevailing hierophant, it is usually deemed to feel good and the decision is made that it is a “liked” experience. However, if it challenges the authenticity of the experiencer’s hierophant, it will be determined that the thought doesn’t feel good and they don’t like it. Every thought that challenges the hierophant is stress. Stress is enjoyed as a spectrum and some challenges are minor and easily dismissed but others are more significant and may not be so easily dismissed without some required alteration to the hierophant.
It is because every thought requires an adjudication before the next thought can be attracted that every individual thought is a complete experience. The individual thoughts are strung together to allow us the perception that an experience lasts a perceived time based upon the similarities of the thought content or our predisposition to be unaware of the status of our condition of being. In other words, we get lost in the steam of thoughts comprising the perceived experience, unable to be aware of the effects of the individual thought processing.
Those thoughts that challenge the authenticity of the hierophant to the extreme are often so intense that the experiencer is unable to apply an emotion at all. In these few experiences, the experiencer’s awareness is said to vacate the body and they enter into a condition of shock until they can regain their composure, attract the next thought, and resume interpreting individual thoughts with emotion as they are designed to do. However, the one thought that was so challenging to the hierophant that it created a gap in their stream of experience will remain a gap until it is adjudicated.
The one or more thoughts (a trauma experience usually only contains one or two unreconciled thoughts) in a perceived experience that an experiencer is unable to adjudicate at the time of the encounter are the trauma seeds and they will remain a significant hindrance to the person’s ability to function until they are resolved. PTSD is nothing more than the person’s attempt to compensate or protect himself from the outstanding thoughts in their stream of experiences that they have been unable to resolve by performing the obligated task of emotional interpretation. Once the traumatic thoughts are resolved the need for the compensation or protection behaviors they have created will dissipate either of their own accord or with the assistance of a therapist to aid them in behavior adaptations through inwardly directed awareness.
Efforts to heal traumas have historically been addressed with various desensitization techniques which have been marginally effective because they don’t directly focus the person’s awareness on the specific thought(s) that remain unresolved. The marginal success achieved through desensitization techniques is possible because they may (or may not) incrementally allow the individual to accidentally emotionally interpret the thought by their repeated application of awareness to gaps in thought processes. These techniques are only marginally successful because they do not isolate the thought and refocus the person’s awareness on the precise thoughts that have been unadjudicated.
What is important to understand is that all of the PTSD behavioral characteristics (distortions) are predicated upon the initial interpretation or lack thereof by the individual of one or more experiences that seriously challenged the upper reaches of the stress spectrum. If the initial traumatic experience hadn’t been beyond the person’s ability to reconcile at the time of the experience, it’s highly improbable that any of these behavioral characteristics would have developed. The key to healing is the reconciliation of the initial traumatic event which removes the gap in the person’s life experiences. Once this is accomplished, the person is usually able to again modify their behavioral characteristics to remove the aberrant behavior and find or return their “condition of being” to a more stable state.
After the initial traumatic experience (one or multiple experiences) is reconciled, it’s often the case that the person can find their more stable self through the self-application of self-analysis and introspection by using their awareness. It may be necessary to work with a therapist to find or expedite their healing. However, whether the guidance of a therapist is required or not, complete healing becomes possible. It doesn’t matter how long ago the traumatic experience occurred. The curative effect is the same whether the traumatic experience occurred last month or 50 years ago.
The most effective mechanism that I have found available in the mental health marketplace is a simple process created by the Serbian psychologist Dr. Zivorad Slavinski. With minor modifications to Dr. Slavinski’s initial creation, the process has proven to be effective in 97% of cases and takes less than 30 minutes to perform. Within the 30-minute, or less, process the patient is guided to focus their attention on one or more individual peak emotional moments of their traumatic experience, and in doing so, they can completely resolve their heretofore unresolvable experience interpretation and find immediate relief that has proven to a permanent healing. Invariably, they feel lighter and the anxiety of recalling the stress-provoking experience dissipates to be immediately replaced with a much happier or joyful disposition.
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