trauma
"When people suffer psychological trauma, they painfully experience things that they previously thought were impossible in their world. They lose ground under their feet, trust in the world and in themselves and sometimes even language." (Ottomeyer/Peltzer 2002:7)
Have you experienced something terrible and threatening and since then you feel insecure, anxious, have difficulty concentrating, can hardly sleep and images of this terrible experience keep popping up?
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a reaction to a traumatic experience. Traumatic events are extremely threatening or horrific situations that threaten the life and/or safety of oneself or others and cause deep despair in almost everyone. PTSD can cause symptoms immediately after a trauma or delayed (after weeks, months or years), such as problems concentrating, nervousness, fear, jumpiness, flashbacks, nightmares, irritability, and much more. cause.
Many relatively mentally healthy people have had experiences over the course of their lives that their brains have not processed optimally. For example, you may have been humiliated by a teacher and not been able to process it properly. 20 years later, you may have a supervisor in your job who is somehow reminiscent of the teacher from back then. It can therefore happen that you unconsciously feel like the helpless student and therefore react less competently than usual.
EMDR is also an excellent way to 'after-treat' emotional wounds, which can lead to a reduction in general stress levels in everyday life and an increase in well-being.
In addition to EMDR, I also worked intensively with the ImTT method. This has proven to be even more effective in trauma treatment and particularly gentle on the patient, as I can see every day in my practice for several years now.
How I can help
Treatment with EMDR can be extremely helpful here by making it clear to the brain that the bad situation is now over. The stressful events can be integrated into your own life story. After just a few sessions there is often a significant improvement, even the complete disappearance of the symptoms.
ImTT, on the other hand, relies on an imagination exercise that involves the entire body. This method enables the patient to process what they have experienced on a physical level.
In many cases, depending on the individual symptoms, I combine the two methods and achieve impressive success.
Case study of PTSD from my practice
Ms. C.: "When I was almost 27 years old, I had panic attacks for the first time and, as a result, long-lasting anxiety states. It was only during therapy that I learned that these panic attacks were due to a terrible experience in my early childhood, which I can only remember fragments of. By treating this event using EMDR, the panic attacks and anxiety states disappeared."
