Remembrance

Have you noticed how Remembrance is assuming ever more importance in our lives over the past 5 or 10 years?

It has always been part of my life, my father was in the RAF and then I became an Army Officer in 1992. There was never a year that I did not attend a service or a parade. It does feel that there is a great deal more interest now though. Is it more part of the collective conscious now? We are 2 Gulf wars down and have suffered an appalling loss of life in a short time in Afghanistan. There is now far more publicity for the Armed Forces since they have come out of the shadows imposed by the prolonged deployment in Northern Ireland and the security issues it demanded.

When I was a young officer we had to check our cars for bombs every time we got into them; we never wore uniform in public; we never told anyone we met what we did, we made up stories about our backgrounds. And Remembrance was something for other people. Now it seems, we are VERY interested in it, people are falling over themselves to pay their respects.

I think the fact that the last of our servicemen from the First World War are dead, makes up want to hang on that bit more. A sense of spoken history is almost gone. If we haven't written down or otherwise recorded these people's stories by now then we never will and it's lost forever.

Deployments in war zones can leave mental scars. It is estimated that as many as 10% of servicemen suffer from long term effects of operational tours. It's easy to be empathetic to someone who has lost a limb or an eye but very many injuries are invisible. There are so many interventions that can help with mental trauma and PTSD. We have fantastic treatments like hypnotherapy and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprogramming) that can make a massive difference to people's lives if only they knew how to access them. At this year's Remembrance service I will be specifically thinking of those who need mental help.

One last thought... We know all about the Gulf wars; we respect those servicemen remaining from the two World Wars; the Afghanistan deployment is constantly in the public eye; no one over the age of 15 can be ignorant of the struggle in Northern Ireland. Who has remembered those who suffered in a very grim war in the Falklands?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

If you have read the blurb on the side about who I am then you'll know that I was an Army Officer for many years. It's not something that you ever quite lose either, it stays with you and last night I dreamt about military service.

We were on an operational tour in Afghanistan and were moving from one location to another, always making camp in buildings. On the last move we had arrived somewhere where the buildings were quite broken down and we were busy trying to fix one corner where there was a hole in the wall. Leaving a couple of the soldiers doing that, I settled down to start to scribble out a plan or some orders of some sort while I waited for my commander to turn up. It was then that I realised it was already morning as I heard the sound of birdsong...

... and realised it was the birdsong of my alarm clock waking me up gently.

If you don't get easy, benign dreams like that; if you are woken up by nightmares; if your dreams intrude on your waking thoughts; if a memory of a traumatic event or time in your life plagues you, then you could be suffering from post-traumatic stress. It's not just soldiers, any stressful time in our life can have repercussions later in our lives and have the power to disturb.

If you are suffering from disturbing thoughts and memories that you can't seem to get away from, do give me a call. I am skilled in many techniques for helping you through it gently and with compassion.

Phone me on 07771 822602 or click here to go to my website for more information.

Changing Memories - Part 2

I want to add some more to the earlier post about changing memories. If you remember that I said the unconscious mind cannot distinguish between fact and fiction.

This helps us with the client who has a disturbing or traumatic memory that is having an effect on them today. What we do is to recall the memory while the client is in a hypnotic trance. We then play with it subtly. We change the details and gradually we make it a "better" memory for them.

In this way, the client's sub-conscious has a different memory to use to direct current behaviour. So the need to act or behave in negative ways has been removed.

I have simplified the process greatly in this explanation but I hope it is enough to give you the sense of how we can use memories to create better futures. We cannot change them completely but by changing them subtly, the mind learns how to cope with them and suddenly what was once uppermost in the mind recedes and becomes less important.

We have lots of methods to help with past trauma. This is just one of them and it can be surprisingly and quickly effective.