Anxiety Toolbox: The Complete Fear-Free Plan. Gloria Thomas
for anxiety (see chapter five), and self-hypnosis and visualization to enable her to become more balanced physically, mentally and emotionally.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Whilst phobias and panic attacks are usually based on distorted or irrational fears, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is caused by exposure to a real-life event that has a traumatic effect on the psyche. When traumatic situations deal your nervous system a real shock, the effects can last for years following the event. PTSD has been described as a normal human response to an abnormal condition. It is estimated that it affects approximately 1 per cent of the UK population and 5.2 million Americans. Women are more likely to develop it than men and it can occur at any age, including during childhood.
The original event that is at the root of the disorder can either be witnessed or experienced. Any reminder of this event triggers flashbacks and severe worry and anxiety. Such experiences can be very traumatic indeed and can be related to everything from witnessing the death of a loved one, to being involved in a car crash or a mugging, or seeing a natural disaster such as an earthquake or an avalanche. It is now accepted that people who suffer from bullying can also have PTSD.
People suffer from PTSD at different levels. If the trauma is mild some people can quickly recover. However, more disturbing recollections and persistent flashbacks and nightmares can take some time to recover from. Any ordinary everyday experiences can remind the individual of the original event, causing them to relive the trauma all over again. It has been suggested that genetics can play a role in PTSD and this could go some way to explaining why it is that some individuals exposed to trauma will suffer only a mild reaction while others develop full-blown PTSD.
Symptoms of PTSD
Self-Assessment
– Do you experience any of the above symptoms and, if so, how often do you experience them?
– Not at all/a little/sometimes/a lot of the time/all of the time
– If you have experienced a frightening or traumatic event in your life, on a scale of one to 10, how much anxiety do you suffer every time something reminds you of that event?
0–1 = not at all, 2–3 = very slightly, 4–6 = moderately, 7–8 = markedly, 9–10 = severely
CASE STUDY for PTSD
Sunni, a lovely 23-year-old Muslim girl, came to see me in a very distressed state. She had witnessed her mother dying before her very eyes of a heart attack. There was nothing that anybody could do to help her. She felt traumatized by the whole event and was having recurring dreams about what happened. I performed the TFT trauma algorithm (see chapter five) on her. The effect was incredible – one week later, she came to see me and said she felt completely different and much more able to cope. I then worked on helping her to manage her grief and cope with life in general.
The purpose of the self-assessment sections in this chapter is to help you identify where your anxieties lie and at how intense they are today. Irrespective of whether your anxiety is mild or more intense, it can be helped if you carefully follow the instructions in this book. However, this book is not intended to take the place of your doctor – if you are suffering severely, please visit a doctor.
So where does anxiety come from and why is it so inherent in everyone to varying degrees? It is clear that we all have a biological disposition to feel anxious, nervous or stressed in response to perceived or actual threats. I have already touched on this subject but by examining it in greater detail, this chapter will help you gain a better understanding of why and how you become anxious.
Your Biology
The Central Nervous System
Each of us is a human processing system made up of neural networks that reach every part of our body. These networks are all part of the central nervous system, which consists of the brain and the spinal cord. The brain contains 1,000,000,000,000 individual neurones and can be likened to a computer that controls the workings of the body. The spinal cord, which is made up of nerve tissue and runs from the base of the brain down the spinal column, is like a tunnel running down the backbone. It is not separate from the brain but acts as a highway on which messages travel between the brain and body.
The Limbic System – Your Emotional Generator
The fear response originates in the limbic system, which is towards the back of the brain. This centre, amongst other functions, generates basic emotional responses. These responses are unconscious – in other words they operate out of your awareness. The limbic system is the part of the brain that initially decides whether we should be fearful, angry or loving. It passes this information to the frontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that consciously registers emotion and floods it into our consciousness.
The limbic brain is responsible for the feeling of fear and out of fear comes anxiety. Other primary emotions are love, anger and disgust, sadness, joy, shame, grief and surprise. These emotions are, at their most basic, survival mechanisms that have evolved to help us to run from danger, stand and fight, or move towards more pleasurable states. Although there are a number of primary emotional states, a number of others has developed – for example, frustration, resentment, excitement and so on.
Our emotional states can change from moment to moment depending on what we are thinking at the time. This means we are constantly creating some kind of emotion, whether it is a negative or a positive one. Emotions just seem to happen and it appears impossible to stop them or catch them in the act. Try to control them at a conscious level and you are likely to find it difficult. Emotions are powerful things and at times your emotions can override reason.
The limbic system is made up of a number of structures that work in conjunction to make sense of, and respond to, the incoming information from the world around you: the thalamus organizes the data and information that comes in from the senses; the amygdala, brain’s main alarm system, signals and generates emotion; the hippocampus is responsible for storing your memories; the neo cortex is the conscious, thinking part of the mind, whose job it is to make sense of information; and the hypothalamus is the master gland that regulates and controls involuntary functions.
Your Sensory Receiver
Your thalamus is primarily responsible for receiving sensory information and then relaying it to other areas of the limbic system. At any one moment we are bombarded with vast amounts of information. We filter that information through deletion. Can you imagine what would happen if we didn’t have a filtering system to erase information? We would suffer sensory overload and very likely go nuts. The information is filtered according to our experience to date. My recent experience of buying of car illustrates how this works.