I became an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) in the summer of 2001. After completing my certification, I started working with my town’s ambulance service. I lived in a small town in rural Vermont, and the ambulance calls were rarely anything like you see on TV or hear about from larger cities, but we certainly kept busy.
Most of our calls were to the local ski area, and the nursing homes, and the occasional car accident. Most of them were pretty non-eventful and I don’t remember them. But some of them were really bad and those did have a lasting negative effect.
I started “dealing” with the emotional toll like a lot of my peers, I went out after the call was over and drank. In other words, I didn’t deal with it at all. The stress and trauma was doing damage to me physically and emotionally, and if I didn’t change, I was going to get a whole lot worse.
I wanted to keep being a good EMT, a great Nurse, and a patient and kind partner and mother. I learned ways to process those traumatic memories without having to talk about them, relive them, or feel vulnerable. I used tools that didn’t involve talk therapy, opening up, or losing control. And now I don’t struggle with those traumatic memories any more. They don’t “haunt” me or affect me negatively.
Now I’m able to look back now with a new perspective on how this “tough-guy-stuff-your-feelings” mindset gets going, is reinforced, and can be broken without anyone looking “soft.”
How it Starts
(This section mentions a car accident and some people may be sensitive to it.)
There are many ambulance calls that I remember vividly, but one that always stands out. A group of college-aged kids had driven all night to spend the weekend skiing. The driver fell asleep just as they were coming into town and they crashed the car into a tree. They were scared, and hurt, and trapped in a car.
I can remember pulling up to the scene, seeing the car, and checking on each of the occupants. I can remember most of the details as we worked to get the boys out of the car and into the waiting ambulances. And I remember the ambulance ride to the hospital with them.
And what I remember the most is the ride back from the hospital. I was sitting in the back of the ambulance, processing everything that had happened and all the emotions that I had stifled during the emergency, because that’s what we do to get the work done.
Seeing me working to come to grips with all that had happened in that short amount of time, an older, more seasoned EMT looked at me real serious and said “That was a tough one. That was a bad accident. You did good.” I just looked at him with big eyes and a blank stare. Apparently it was a look he had seen before, and probably had had himself. He said, “Those bad accidents, those are the ones that stay with you. You’ll hang on to that for the rest of your life.”
What I Know Now - The Power of Suggestion
Here is what I know now. The moments of processing the emotions I had turned off in order to be able to do my job is physically and psychologically a lot like being in shock. That state of shock is a lot like the state of trance we use in hypnosis, when we are much more suggestible then at other times when we are more consciously involved in our surroundings.
So, in that hypnotic state, the well-meant words of that authority figure “Those are the ones that stay with you.” became a suggestion. His words became an instruction that my subconscious mind followed. The whole traumatic event became imprinted in my mind and I can play back it like an on-demand video.
No, it’s not his fault. He was just telling me something he believed to be true and had probably been told himself when he was in a similar state. He was commiserating with me, like an initiation into the “Bad Stuff Happens” Club. And I believed him.
“You Just Get Through It.”
It was my experience, and it continues to be the same now for many First Responders, Nurses, and others, that if you ask anyone how they deal with the emotional part of their jobs, the ugly part, they’ll tell you “You just get through it.”
At the time that we hear this advice, it seems sage, and even a little bad-ass. It makes you feel tough, and it reinforces that this is what is expected of you in order to do the job successfully.
Throughout my ten or so years as an EMT I saw lots of bad stuff, and used my new automatic habit of hanging onto the really bad ones, like keeping a file of all the memories that I really didn’t want to remember. In 2006 I became a registered nurse and I worked in the emergency room, where I saw more bad stuff, and found myself following the same rule.
Pretty soon you are using so much energy and brain power keeping track of all that bad stuff you don’t want to remember, that you start to slip on the other things, like memory, stress management, relationships, and communication skills. Many first responders will tell you that they have a few drinks, talk with their colleagues, and move on. “You just get through it.”
Many of those same first responders know that this isn’t the healthiest way to manage traumatic events, but it does seem effective in the short term, and they have to get back to work. Many don’t want to go to therapy and relive those traumatic events. Many still struggle with the stigma of being someone that “needs help.” And many burn out, self-medicate to a destructive degree, and an alarming number of first responders commit suicide.
It’s Not Just About PTSD
PTSD is one way that people can be affected by experiencing a traumatic event - even if that traumatic event is just witnessed. Stress is another, and sometimes the one that can cause the most damage.
Chronic stress, as we already know, has some pretty serious physical effects, including heart disease, digestive problems, chronic fatigue, concentration issues, sexual dysfunction, sleep problems, and more. Living in a state of chronic stress makes us more susceptible to disease and infection, decreases our ability to perform under pressure, and has a negative effect on our personal relationships.
Stress is not the event. Stress is how we react to the event. And traumatic experiences, like the ones that first responders see everyday, trigger the body’s stress response. This is your “fight or flight” reaction. The body allocates its limited resources to maintain this specialized state, and when the situation resolves, the mind and body resume normal function.
Chronic stress tends to happen when the situation doesn’t resolve, like when you hang on to traumatic memories, stifle emotional states for a long period of time, and neglect to process events with the aim of letting them go. See, a lot of the limited resources of your mind and body are used to maintain that internal database of bad stuff, and that means that your body doesn’t go back to ‘normal function.’
The bigger that database gets, the more bad stuff you have to keep track of. It’s like watching a spider on your ceiling. You need to keep your eyes on it so that you know where it is all the time. If you look away, it might end up somewhere more threatening. So you become trapped in vigilance, constantly paying attention to the thing you want most to ignore.
The Role of Hypnosis
We work with these issues a lot - with first responders, people who were (or are) in abusive relationships, accident survivors, nurses, physicians, therapists, and even people who have just seen some stuff. The process is complex, and which of the advanced methods and techniques used are chosen to be specific to the individual, but there are some things we’d like you to know about using hypnosis.
Some things are maybe obvious, like there are no medications, interactions, or side effects (unless you count better sleep and a quieter mind as side effects.) Other things you may not already know.
Hypnosis allows you to take what you know now and apply it to an event in the past. One of the most useful features of the subconscious mind is that it has no concept of time. It experiences everything, even memories, as if they are happening right now. So you can imagine a moment from your past with a completely different outcome. You can have conversations with yourself and others that change the emotional impact of a memory. And you can do all of this without reliving the trauma itself.
We sit down with each of our clients at the beginning of treatment and teach you about how your mind works and how it is trying to protect you. And we teach you how you can take back control of the things that you thought were out of control. Then we use hypnosis to process that bad stuff and empty out that database, to break the habit of hanging on to the bad stuff in the first place, and to teach new methods of managing stress and traumatic events so that they are less likely to have a lasting effect.
This means that your mind and body can get out of the chronic stress cycle and resume ‘normal’ function again, and that you can be more effective at your job, in your relationships, and in yourself.
If you would like more information on how effective hypnosis is in helping people better manage trauma and stress, please contact us by phone or email. You aren’t alone. You don’t have to self-medicate or “just get through it,” and it doesn’t have to “stay with you.”∎