Casebook: Clear Trauma and Depression can melt away

Depression melted away – the experience of Padma and Roberta

Padma had been born in the UK, her parents having emigrated from India. She had three growing up children and worked part time to supplement the family budget.  Roberta was a single Mum with a teenage son, in a new relationship and needing to work full time in a demanding job in the hotel industry.

Both were in their forties and very capable.  And against all that they could ever have expected, were lost in a classic depression. Both were over dreaming and consequently waking up exhausted. The result was a downward spiral fuelled by unproductive worrying and introspection and excessive and exhausting REM dreaming sleep.

Moreover it was continuing to unravel for them as their family responsibilities and duties were harder and harder to discharge.  They had no idea what was going on and neither had their GP (of course) – who could only offer anti-depressants and/or an appointment (months into the future) for CBT.

But they could not wait for the latter (though of course not knowing just how unsatisfactory CBT would probably be) and were reluctant to embark on the former (and for good reason).

Their recovery

For both Padma and Roberta, it did not take long to discover that each was still traumatised by the death of their mother respectively, some three and ten years previously. For them to go back to the experience reignited high arousal and emotional memories and when they thought about it, they both said that they “had not been right” since.

I burned my overcoming depression Mp3 for both to listen to (so they could understand why the depression was taking hold) and in the second session, I used the Rewind technique to clear the emotion around these memories.  Rewind is an effective non-voyeuristic trance method for clearing trauma – of strong past memories from the limbic system.

Both were very resourceful women and with the trauma cleared and then the over dreaming, worrying and depression lifting, they found they could deal with their other life difficulties.

Within next to no time, a virtuous cycle of control, hope and lowering arousal replaced the previous vicious cycle.  For both, the depression was gone in less than a month and that it would stay gone, I had little doubt.