This month, Fabulous Florida Writers is pleased to welcome guest blogger, Dr. Christopher Cortman. Dr, Cortman, a licensed psychologist and a much-sought-after speaker, has facilitated more than 60,000 hours of psychotherapy, and has provided psychological consultation at five hospitals in the Sarasota/Venice area.He is the co-creator of a youth prevention and wellness program called "The Social Black Belt" and the co-author of Your Mind - An Owner's Manual for a Better Life and Take Control of Your Anxiety. Dr. Cortman was one of our featured writers on January 17, 2012.
What if you thought you had stumbled upon something that professionals in your field didn’t understand, appreciate or implement? What if you had been applying your discovery in quiet obscurity for decades, while people in your profession fumbled with lesser strategies and techniques, with disappointing results? What if you honestly and humbly believed that your insights could substantially reduce suffering in the world? And when you studied your own results, you knew you were not being grandiose or ridiculous, and that your strategies seemed to work consistently. What would you do?
I decided that writing a book would be the best strategy. My book, Keep Pain in the Past, is not for my fellow psychologists, but for the layperson, especially people still suffering from the ravages of the Vietnam War fifty years ago, grandpa’s drunken groping, or the car accident that left someone dead in the middle of the road.
I have treated these cases and many more like them. In fact, I have treated hundreds of such cases over more than three decades, totaling over 70,000 hours of psychotherapy. And I can tell you from experience that people are capable of recovering from significant trauma and loss by following a simple (to understand) formula, when combined with the courage to face and say goodbye to the trauma. This is so without the need to apply some of today’s more popular treatment strategies, including eye-movement desensitization, tapping, or repeated and prolonged exposure to the trauma. Traumas and horrors that have endured decades are often put to rest in only one session of treatment.
There are two reasons that people stay stuck in their traumas. First, society tell us that that “time heals all wounds.” Even misinformed mental health professionals perpetuate this inaccurate and destructive adage. As a result, people expect to "get better over time," and sometimes do, but never completely heal. Second, people avoid the pain of their experiences. As a hospitalized Vietnam veteran recently told me when asked about his military service, "I was in Nam and we don’t talk about that." Unfortunately, this self-protective avoidance keeps the trauma-sufferer hopelessly mired in the quicksand of life’s very worst moments. And isn’t his avoidance understandable? Why would anyone meditate on their own personal horror show, if they could avoid it? Do we really need to relive the anguish again and again?
The purpose of my book, Keep Pain in the Past, is to change all of this, forever. Psychology is getting closer. Experts understand that healing requires exposure to the traumatic material, but something is still missing: The trauma / grief sufferer must not only face the ugly experience head-on but also must actively release or say goodbye to the trauma, as if they no longer need it. Without experiencing the emotions that accompany the trauma, and the willingness to accept the reality of the incident (including the changes that have been brought about as a result of the trauma) there will be no healing. If they have the willingness to remember (face) the horror, feel the accompanying emotions, express and release the pain and accept the reality, they can reframe and say goodbye to it.
Allow me one example: Sarah was about to fall into slumber in her apartment one night when she was awakened by a knife-wielding, masked man. The intruder cut Sarah 14 times and left her for dead. She miraculously survived and learned weeks later that the masked man was someone she dated. Her reactions featured the typical symptoms of PTSD, including revisiting specific aspects of the scene in her thoughts and nightmares, avoiding reminders of the event, not sleeping alone, not sleeping in the dark, not trusting men (especially romantically), and believing that life could ever be normal again.
Sarah invested in weekly therapy in an effort to process all aspects of the trauma. But the most powerful contribution to her healing was a guided imagery session I conducted with her one day, where she could watch the entire attack (as if on a movie screen) and enter the episode at the end to provide comfort and rescue to herself. We promptly took the DVD of that horror movie and broke it into pieces, assuring her that she was finished with this episode and never needed to see it again. This allowed her to finish her trauma so as to no longer feel it’s intrusions into her life.
Today, Sarah is now happily married and speaks of the incident in schools to empower girls in regard to recovery, self-protection, and resilience.
Sarah’s nightmare is likely worse than anything most of us will ever go through. The bottom line is this: There was hope and healing for Sarah. And there is hope and healing for you.
Imagine you stumbled upon that.
For more information, visit Dr. Cortman's website at www.SRQshrink.com
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