Rewinding Trauma

This article, originally published in Therapy Today magazine, features HG practitioner Denise Winn describing a simple but effective approach to help a client process the ongoing impact of her child’s serious accident.

Elena* had experienced every parent’s worst nightmare – a call to say that her daughter, 20-year-old Cheryl, was on life support in hospital, having been hit by a speeding car while riding her bike and hurled headlong into a wall. The next few weeks were a tidal wave of emotions, as Elena and her family were told first that Cheryl was unlikely to come out of her coma, then unlikely to survive long if she did, and then that she was likely to be severely brain damaged for life.

Elena refused to give up hope. She brought in the girl-band T-shirt and shorts Cheryl wore as pyjamas and, from Cheryl’s bedroom, a big, colourful poster of the same band. She pinned it up where Cheryl would see it immediately she regained consciousness, alongside photos of family and friends, to help reconnect her to her former life. Despite all the gloomy prognoses Elena remained convinced that Cheryl would fully recover from her injuries, and her strong faith supported her in this. Incredibly Cheryl did recover fully and, after months of intensive and challenging rehabilitation, was able to go back to her work as a receptionist. She had no memory of the accident and seemed fine.

It was then, however, that Elena started to feel that she couldn’t cope. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ she said on the phone, when she contacted me for help. ‘I should feel euphoric. I used to be full of fun and keen on new challenges, but now I’m not interested in anything. Something weird is happening in my body – I suddenly can’t breathe and I’m covered in sweat. Why aren’t I just grateful to have my beloved daughter back?’ She was highly relieved when I explained to her that, because of the prolonged trauma she had suffered, a part of her brain called the amygdala, whose concern is with survival, had got stuck in a state of alert. Anything that reminded her of the trauma, consciously or not, caused the amygdala to trigger the fight-or-flight alarm, causing the symptoms she was experiencing. Because, in its prolonged state of high emotional arousal, her brain had been unable to process the horrific event as being in the past (thus enabling it to become a normal memory, albeit a highly unpleasant one), each time there was a ‘pattern match’ it was as if Elena was responding to the traumatic injury all over again.

The good news, I told her, was that when she was guided to re-experience the trauma in a state of calm, her brain would finally be able to put the event in context and code it in narrative form as something that was truly over.

Rewind technique

Enabling the coding of a traumatic memory in this way, using our version of the rewind technique, is something that all human givens (HG) practitioners learn to do in training. The results can be quite spectacular, but it is always made clear that the method is not magic; it does not suit everyone, must be approached judiciously in terms of timing and execution, and be coupled with other therapeutic techniques as appropriate – for instance, building confidence or assertiveness skills when bullying has eroded these, or addressing emotional needs that are no longer being well met, such as for connection or sense of meaning after the traumatic death of a loved one.

The rewind technique originated in the work of Richard Bandler, one of the founders of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), who created it as a phobia cure and called it the visual-kinaesthetic dissociation protocol.¹ The name ‘rewind’ comes from Dr David Muss, after the version he developed and published about back in 1991.² Recently the findings of the first randomised controlled trial based on his method were published and showed ‘a large effect size in treating symptoms of PTSD’ in one-to-three sessions.³ The HG version, which most commonly works in one session, has been modified in line with latest understandings from neuroscience about how trauma is processed in the brain, to make it as safe and reliably effective as possible. It requires clients to be put into a state of deep relaxation before it is carried out, preventing any risk of embedding the trauma pattern deeper, and also essential is ensuring that the trauma template is activated, ie that the trauma memory is being re-experienced at an emotional level. This is crucial because sometimes people are so traumatised that they are emotionally cut off from their experience, dissociating from it completely, in which case they are not yet ready for the rewind technique and the priority will be to enable them to feel safe enough to access the related feelings.

We also usually expect to test out clients’ response to relaxation and guided imagery before employing the rewind technique. Some clients who are literal minded do not take to it; for others it may take practice to relax. When carrying out relaxation and guided imagery in my first session with Elena, I was surprised by how quickly she engaged – tell-tale signs are the rapid eye movements, revealing that she could go into trance very speedily, despite her disabling anxiety.

Non-invasive process

In our next session, Elena and I embarked on the rewind. The process itself is fairly straightforward, although it takes practice to become confident with it. In brief, once the template had been activated I guided Elena to imagine herself in a relaxing place and, when the relaxation was sufficiently deep, to see or sense the traumatic event flashing by from before it began to after it had ended, and then running back through it. This is achieved in a specific and gradual way, to keep the client calm, and we continued this process until no emotional arousal was experienced. Throughout I was monitoring Elena closely, guiding and steering in whatever way necessary.

I was again surprised by how very quickly Elena engaged, cycling at speed through the fast-forwards and rewinds of her ‘film’. She was so fast that I initially wondered if she was fully processing what she needed to process. When she nodded to signal that she had repeated the process enough times and we had disposed of the film paraphernalia, I invited her to enjoy her special place again and, with the aid of vivid metaphors, reminded her of her powerful innate resource of positive expectation, which she had applied throughout the ordeal, her instincts as a mother and the support of her strong faith, all of which could once again stand her in good stead as she moved on with her life.

If the problematic circumstance had been one which needed or was likely to be encountered again, such as travelling in a car after a car crash or seeing a spider after a spider phobia has been treated, I would have guided her to rehearse experiencing this while remaining calm. When I counted Elena back out of trance, her eyes were sparkling and she couldn’t stop saying that a huge weight had been lifted from her.

Techniques such as eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) and emotional freedom technique (EFT) deal with detraumatisation too, of course. However, in HG therapy we favour the rewind technique because it is noninvasive (the client doesn’t even have to give details of the incident, an element which appeals to many rape victims) and because our version harnesses the almost limitless power of the imagination. It can thus even be used to rewind years of trauma (such as patterns of domestic abuse extending from childhood through adulthood), very commonly in one session. And it could be used creatively to help Cheryl when she, in turn, started to struggle.

For while Elena didn’t need to see me again, several months later she got back in touch to say that Cheryl had started having a strange experience. At times in pubs and parties, when she couldn’t hear what people were saying to her over the noise, she went into full-blown panic. Elena wondered whether fragments of memory about her hospital care were coming to consciousness, such as lying helplessly in intensive care with the burble of others talking all around her. She asked me if I could help.

Break-through memories

On arrival Cheryl mentioned a recurring dream she had also started having, of waking up in her bed in a panic. She could clearly see the girl band on the large poster at the end of her bed and the girl-band ‘pyjamas’ she was wearing, yet,in reality, her bedroom had black-out blinds, preventing her from seeing any such details. Each time, she also became aware of voices she couldn’t understand. It was so frightening that she had stopped wearing the top and shorts, took down the poster, and couldn’t listen to her favourite band’s music.

It certainly seemed that memories were starting to break through to consciousness, so again I employed the rewind technique, but with a difference, as there was a lot that she still didn’t remember, yet might later. Our film began before the accident and ran through related traumatic memories up to the present time, including the recent events that had bothered her. I made a point of suggesting that her unconscious mind could include in the process anything else which might surface in relation to her traumatic time in intensive care, and which her amygdala could now safely ignore. Like her mother, Cheryl relaxed extremely deeply very quickly and went through the rewind process just as fast. Afterwards I invited her to visualise herself putting the poster back up and enjoying listening to her favourite band again. She was actually giggling at this point, and told me after that she had already put the poster back up before I even suggested it. She had no further recurrence of break-through memories.

As might be imagined, successful execution of this technique is very commonly life-changing. And circumstances always alter cases. I remember a chartered surveyor called Adam, who had a powerful enduring resentment of his parents because of what he had experienced as total disregard for his feelings as a child. Unfortunately he and his wife now depended on his parents for childcare because of a lack of facilities close to them, and the result was that his blood pressure had rocketed dangerously high, and his rage felt so out of control that he was even shouting at his wife and two young children.

He believed that his rage against his parents sat deep inside him. I explained that, in fact, it was merely reignited by the ‘protective’ amygdala, every time he saw or thought of them (which was now very often), and that we could neutralise the emotion and put it in the past if he wanted, which he didn’t. He said he wanted payback – although he also insisted he didn’t want to hurt his parents. We did a lot of other therapeutic work to help him with his mood swings and anxiety, but I had to tell him that until he decided that he was ready to let his anger go we couldn’t move forward on that.

After several weeks he got back in touch, saying he had recognised that, for the sake of his own family, he did need to let his anger go. So we rewound the relevant incidents from his youth and adulthood that related to his parents, then rehearsed his being able to enjoy his family life again, tolerating his parents and appreciating their kind caregiving to his children, even if he had not felt such good effects himself. We had one more session and he was a different man – more at ease, positive about the future and with normal blood pressure levels.

Training

The initial HG rewind training takes place in person over two full days (preceded by our training in guided visualisation, if not already a practised skill) because it is important to absorb the steps thoroughly and have plenty of time to experience and practise the technique under proper guidance.

There is a lot to learn. Practitioners must decide when the technique is appropriate to use; be ready to troubleshoot, as our unconscious minds process things in different ways; vary its execution as needed – for instance, in accordance with whether the trauma happened to the client, someone close to them or is entirely imaginary; and adapt speedily to the unexpected – the ‘simple’ needle phobia that turns out to mask unexpressed grief for the trauma of a stillbirth, or the real cause of enduring pain, if not readily apparent. HG practitioners never consider the rewind technique an end in itself but one highly valuable component within effective therapy. ●

*Based on composite examples. Names and identifiable details changed.

Human Givens College runs its accredited two-day CPD workshop, ‘The rewind technique: effective treatment for trauma (PTSD) and phobias’, in London and Bristol throughout the year (humangivens.com/college/ rewind-technique-training-workshop).