Rapid Network

The following, although unfortunate and scary, is based on something that happens to people all too often.  It's not about the scary part, however.  It's about how to keep the fear from continuing beyond the time that it's necessary or useful. 

A really frightening thing happened to Lydia.  She was robbed at gunpoint in her home on day at 11:00am.  Her kids had gone off to school, her husband was at work, and she was home doing the laundry and cleaning the house.  It was a typical Tuesday morning.   She was expecting a package delivery from UPS, so when the doorbell rang, she did not hesitate to open it.  A man wearing a ski mask, carrying a gun, barged in and yelled at her to give him her money, her jewelry and her drugs.  She said she didn't have any drugs, but the man insisted she did, and demanded them from her.  He then hit her hard in the head and she fell to the ground, bleeding, and said "Go, take whatever you want, just leave me alone.  I have three kids who need me."

Two months after this event she came to me, shaking as she talked about what happened.  The event had passed, but she was still having nightmares about it, she was still scared to be home alone, and she was scared every time she saw red Converse hi-top sneakers.  All she remembered from what the man was wearing were his red Converse hi-top sneakers.  The event had so embedded itself into the deeper part of her mind that, although logically and consciously she knew that it was no longer happening, she still felt like it was.

Pictures, smells, sounds--  they all can seem like triggers, but in reality they're just pictures, smells and sounds. It's "getting" this, that things just are what they are, without the emotional meanings attached to them, that is the key to no longer being haunted by the memories of the traumatic event(s).

In Lydia's case, remembering the traumatic event caused her to shake, to break out in a cold sweat, and her heart to palpitate quickly.  It was her physiological response to something that had been a threat to her.  At the time that it happened, she felt terrified.  That made sense.  Two months later, though, it was no longer happening.  It was therefore no longer a threat to her.  Feeling scared, then, no longer made any sense.  We worked on this, using Rapid Resolution Therapy, and she "got it."  She "got" that there was nothing to be scared of any longer.  As she put it, "it already happened, so I don't have to worry about it anymore."

Four months after we met, Lydia told me that she had begun speaking to victims' groups about her experience, and she never once felt worried or scared or anything.  "I talk about it in the same way that I talk about the weather-- it was what it was, you know?"  She said she no longer felt anything disturbing when thinking about the event.  In fact, she said that when her 9-year-old boy asked to get red Converse hi-top sneakers, she gladly bought them for him.  It too no longer carried any meaning for her.