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PTSD

Successfully Addressing Emotional Trauma

brain

People come to psychotherapy and counseling because they need help. Primarily, help is requested for an array of disruptive symptoms in their life that continue to persist in spite of their best efforts. Common symptoms that draw people into therapy include insomnia, the inability to stop worrying which leads to ongoing anxiety, the feeling of pervasive unhappiness or depression, as well as other physical and psychological symptoms that are very hard to pin down as directly related to earlier traumatic events. Let me provide you with some background and then some examples.

When people suffer a traumatic event, there are all kinds of possible consequences that may ensue. Frequently it is the case that these various traumatic consequences take care of themselves and fade away over time. But there are situations that because of the depth or duration of the particular trauma that these symptoms tend to actually get worse over time. A significant problem is that most practitioners are not sufficiently trained to recognize that these various symptoms are a direct consequence of early traumatic experiences. Let me give you some examples.Read More »Successfully Addressing Emotional Trauma

Deepak Chopra on the Effects of Stress

The Conscious Lifestyle: Facing Your Stress

I don’t want to open the vast discussion of stress that now exists, except to make two limited points. 1. Stress isn’t good for you. 2. The vast majority of people do not deal with their stress effectively. Coming to grips with these two things is important for anyone who wants to create a conscious lifestyle. To be aware is to be open, alert, ready to meet unknown challenges, and capable of fresh responses. When you are under stress, these qualities are compromised. Raise the stress high enough and they are reversed. The mind closes down as an act of self-defense. In that state it is very difficult to be alert and open.

But stress is bad for you in far more basic ways. The hormones that are released in the body’s stress response, such as cortisol and adrenaline, are meant to be temporary. Their effect is to galvanize the fight-or-flight response, which is triggered in a primitive area of the brain, because fight-or-flight is an inheritance from our pre-human past. In the stress response, a privileged pathway is opened for dealing with emergencies, while at the same time the brain’s higher responses are temporarily suppressed.

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There Are Many Sources of Healing

Part of my job as a psychotherapist is to access healing resources that are frequently unavailable to clients. Today, a client of mine was feeling a strong disconnection from his higher power or God. He had recently experienced a traumatic situation that resulted in a week of stomach flu and general physical weakness. Our goal was to first identify and then release any traumatic residue that he was carrying as information in his body and in other areas, such as his subconscious mind, his energy field or any of his chakras.
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October 2009 Annual Toronto Energy Psychology Conference

I just returned from the 11th Annual Canadian Energy Psychology Conference in Toronto, Canada. If you have never visited Toronto, I recommend you do so sometime in your life. The city is expansive as it is beautiful and diverse in its population. It has excellent public transportation and a wonderful array of internationally diverse restaurants, reminiscent of other large cities I have been to such as New York and London. I recommend it as a getaway destination should you have the time off to travel. My hotel was just a 5-minute walk from the famous and enormous St. Lawrence Market.
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