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Reply to "Misdiagnosis of somatized sexual abuse as psychosis resulted in psych ward"

Hi Emma-Lee, thank you for this.  In Bessel van der Kolk's work, he shows an old black and white film of WWI combat veterans with uncontrollable shaking and tremors similar to what you're describing. 

Obviously, this intense level of PTSD/trauma embedded in the brain and body is not going to yield to any kind of conventional CBT or other talk therapy and with the dissociation, anything involving exposure like EMDR will only cause more dissociative abreactions and probably drive the trauma deeper. Symptom-suppressing drugs can make survivors worse and cause suicidal ideation.

From the article: "Doctors have scanned Mejo's brain and found no signs of epilepsy. She has been prescribed medication and is going to therapy, but nothing has helped."

The root problem here is that the torture/overwhelm caused dissociation and now the complete body/mind trauma imprint-- sights, sounds, smells, touch, taste, as well as the emotional overwhelm-- are encapsulated in a dissociative state.  

Conventional cognitive approaches to treat dissociation, ("parts work") will not work on these people. What will work is a very slow and gentle unraveling of the traumatic aspects with EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques or TFT, Thought-Field Therapy. There are various EFT techniques that minimize or prevent retraumatization, then the dissociation has to be treated. 

Dissociation is,  (having literally seen evidence of this clairvoyantly in my practice,) when ages of us, detached segments of our consciousness, are trapped, still suffering, one dimension away.  Those ages/parts need to be rescued and recovered back into present time, which can be done quickly using a specific guided imagery script. There have to be some outcome-based adaptations to the conventional model paradigm in order for severely traumatized people to heal. 

The closest thing to TFT research on torture survivors is a study and accompanying video that a team of my colleagues did in Rwanda. They worked with genocide survivors, most of whom became symptom-free or measurably better with a one-hour session of evidence-based TFT, Thought-Field therapy, (another version of EFT tapping) guided by an interpreter. The study is attached. Here is a short video done a month ago as a 4-year follow-up on the original RCT study featuring Dr. Suzanne Connolly, one of the researchers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=358ubhtPvC0

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