


BLAST® is the key
Trauma keeps you stuck, either reliving past wounds again and again or having them keep affecting you regularly.
You've tried to think your way through it.
You've tried everything.
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You maybe wouldn't normally have looked for therapy, but I promise that BLAST® can unlock years of hurt and pain.
Many people aren't aware that there is a clear trauma behind what they're feeling.
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Anxiety, anger, depression and more often have trauma at their root.
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Why do I even need trauma therapy?
Once we understand that any experience that caused a wound can be our trauma, we remember times when things felt unfair, wrong or were too scary to process.
Those things are never processed - our brains try. For months or years, they tried, but if they still can't process it, the memory 'triggers' us when we face a similar situation again.
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It's not even a choice. We often had an instant trauma response when we first experienced the event. That's our flight or fight response. The important point is that our brains have no consciousness of this. The body and mind act together almost instantly to protect us. It isn't a choice - it's a survival mechanism.
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When I was in medical school, we only knew about flight or fight responses.
Now we know much more, including freeze, fawn, and fold. I love that they are all short words starting with 'f'!
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There's another one, slightly confusingly - functional freeze. Psychologically, we are still in this frozen shut-down mode while outwardly still functioning well.
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We're smart people, and we expect to be able to think our way through situations. Unfortunately this doesn't work here. When we try and think our way through we are working with our conscious minds. We can relatively easily convince them that things are fine and we're safe.
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We can CON the CONcious mind.
There's no conning the UNCONscious mind.
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It's there to protect us and won't be convinced easily to let go.
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It's one of the reasons CBT struggles here.
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We can't directly access our unconscious, so we remain stuck.
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Our unconscious mind continues doing its job of protecting us.
The triggers are right there, up and front in our brains.
The very moment we experience a similar situation to the initial traumatic one, these triggers fire and trigger our emotional system to react as if it were happening again now.
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We've all experienced this at some point.
We've reacted emotionally to something so fast that we hadn't even consciously registered the trigger.
We're left thinking, 'What just happened?' as we weren't part of the decision-making process. The trigger sets off our protective innate responses.
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We can think of trauma as anything that leaves us with a wound. As Gabor Mate says, trauma is what happens inside us, not what happens to us. It's not a reflection of how strong or weak someone is, and it's not competition.
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Your trauma is as valid as mine, which is as valid as anyone else's. You deserve the tools and therapy to reach your unconscious mind and alert it to reprocess events to let you feel safe when you experience those triggers again.
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We describe the traumas as Big T or Little T traumas. That's not to measure how bad yours was against anyone else's. It's how obvious a trauma would be to bystanders. A car crash we'd all see. A cutting comment by a colleague in front of others, for example, may only be us that registers.
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I use the Angel of the North and Another Place by Anthony Gormley to illustrate these.
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What can I do? What should I do?

The approach to permanent resolution is to access the unconscious mind to actively reprocess the original traumatic memory.
How can we do that?
We call up the traumatic memory. We might instinctively know what it is, or we may need to use therapy to hone in on what exactly the traumatic part was (we can be quite wide of the mark in our instincts!).. We might need therapy to begin unearthing the trauma, as some traumatic memories are suppressed (pushed down a bit) or repressed (buried).
We had to suppress or repress some memories as this was the only way for the body to continue to function. This is seen often as the functional freeze.
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You may have heard of EMDR, which emerged as the best therapy for PTSD in veterans and has now spread widely. It uses a light moving across our visual field repeatedly from side to side. It's believed that this allows the two sides of the brain to temporarily lose connection so that we can reprocess the memory.
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BLAST® is a newer development. It is much faster and more efficient than EMDR.
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My own therapy took six minutes. EMDR is a minimum of 6 sessions.
I've heard it described by being able to see the original trauma through new eyes, with more knowledge and dispassionate almost 3rd person view. That is, seeing more like someone else would who hadn't experienced it.
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If you've been through a particularly difficult experience, sometimes you're not able to be present in the room to do the therapy.
We call this dysregulation, and it's a form of being overwhelmed. You don't feel like you're really in your body.
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What can you do then to be able to access therapy?
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Bodily movement or exercises can help enormously.
Breathing exercises like box breathing, physiological sighs, progressive muscle relaxation, dancing, or 'shaking it off' can all help us return to a more regulated state of being present in our bodies.
I know many people need these before they feel able to tackle therapy.
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Ultimately - book BLAST®!
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What happens in a session?
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It's understandable that you would be a little nervous.
You're going to share things you may have kept hidden or buried for years or even decades.
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When we first talk about our traumatic experiences, we tend to share our analysis and try to make sense of the situation with the therapist.
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This doesn't help, unfortunately.
The therapy is only interested in our emotional and bodily responses to the trauma event(s) and triggers.
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We don't need all of the details of the original event and can do the therapy 'content-free' in exceptional circumstances. I've had to do this once.
We do still need to discuss the emotional response and bodily reactions to the trauma.
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This can be important where the client can't share the incident - either because it's confidential or secret (medical staff or police or army personnel), or it's just too distressing or shaming. (for example, teenage boys who've been raped).
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When we say we can't talk about something, or we don't have words for something, in trauma this is genuinely true.
Broca's area in the brain (the area which controls expressive language (what we'll say) can be disconnected.
We actually can't find the words.
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Part of the reason for getting these emotions and any phrases you use is to be able to talk directly to your unconscious mind using your own words during the eye movements.
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In addition, we ask about where in your body you feel or sense these emotions and what sort of feelings they are.
Often, these will be in the head, throat, chest, or deep in the gut (solar plexus). Sometimes, it's a general heaviness in our limbs.
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We take all of that and get a sense of how intense recalling this is by giving it an overall score out of 10, where ten is the highest.
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Then, the side-to-side movements of the lightpen.
After calling up the memory and describing its effects, we let the memory sit right back and use all of our focus to follow the lightpen.
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The therapist will watch for signs of the reprocessing happening, and often, you won't notice them.
Eye blinking, saccades (side-to-side eye movements), eyes prickling with tears, flushing, gulping, deep breaths, or sighs. I felt suddenly sick during mine.
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The emotional and bodily response is strong as we start and reduces quickly. Often, it's not a linear fall.
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After the therapy, you'll feel instantly better and calmer.
It's a bit like a shaken snow globe where the trauma has been fragmented and thrown up in the air to fall into a calmer new pattern.
You'll know it's gone forever. There might still be a woolly sense of it, but that emotional response will have gone. There still is a memory, but now it can be filed away to be retrieved only when we want to access it, not when it chooses to trigger us.
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So whether it's anger, shame, anxiety, phobias, or clear responses to traumatic events, you can quickly unlock the route out to your new life. You can start living your authentic life that same day.
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Don't wait any longer in pain.
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