How Hypnosis Can Prevent and Cure PTSD (An Army Story)

I'll never forget the day I met Sammie.  I was in my second floor condo, overlooking the entrance to the building when I saw this cute girl in shorts and a cute little blue T-shirt.  

She looked lost and a little bit confused.

At the time, I was filling in a Lavalife profile (a dating website site) all the ideal characteristics of my ideal woman, but I couldn't help but looking out at this cute girl standing outside my building.

Mustering up the courage, I opened my window and said to her: "Are you looking for someone?"

"I'm just waiting for my movers.  I'm moving in," she said.

"Really?" I said, thinking to myself: "I wonder if she has a boyfriend?"

"I'm Nick and I live in unit 201, do you need any help?" I offered, feeling excited to know this cute girl would be living in the same building as me.

"I'm moving into unit 303.  My name is Samantha, but my friends call me Sam."  She replied.

Being a nerdy engineer, I replied: "Oh, that will be easy to remember.  I'm a software engineer, working on a project called the "SAM" project!"

Lame.  But effective.

We've been together coming up 15 years now, married with children.

While I was always interested in hypnosis (more like obsessed), I never thought to try to bring it up with Sammie until 2 years ago when Sammie experienced severe depression and our marriage was on the brink of collapse. 

Sammie knew I would fetishize erotic hypnosis content while gaming and that really turned her off to the idea, but when a friend of hers offered her a complimentary hypnotherapy session, we both realized how powerful hypnosis could be from a therapeutic perspective.

We started with me first listening to guided meditation audio files on YouTube and SoundCloud.

From there, I started listening to hypnosis audio files by Ultrahypnosis.  Over a period of 6 months, I would spend 30 minutes - 2 hours practicing being induced into hypnotic trance myself just by listening to hypnosis audio files.

I had a very high stress software engineering consulting job and during my lunch and coffee breaks, I would listen to a 5-20 minutes hypnosis file for practice.

When I first met Sammie, I served in the Canadian Forces Reserves as an Army Radio Operator.  The most important part of my military job was to spend hours monitoring a radio network, pay very close attention to the voice traffic, and remember and record everything I heard.

I found that listening to hypnosis files, I was able to apply that skill I acquired in the military to learning hypnosis.

In essence, while I was myself being induced into hypnotic trance, I was also committing to memory hypnotic techniques from the hypnotists I was listening to.

Hypnosis inductions are actually very similar to military radio voice procedure.  There is structured language formats, emphasizing clarity and repeatability of what is spoken, done in such a way that the subject being induced can clearly hear and understand what is being said.

What is interesting is the sensation of being hypnotized is very similar to the sensation I used to feel when I would go on military support or training exercises and be sleep-deprived over the course of 2 days - 3 weeks.

In essence, you're body goes on auto-pilot as your subconscious mind takes over and your conscious mind looses it's ability to function properly.  In that state of mind, your subconscious mind recalls all your training (in my case, 2 months basic training, 2 months journeyman training, 2 months apprentice training, and several years worth of on the job training in part time garrison and field operations as a Radio Operator).

I remember during Basic Training reading a famous book called, "Starship Troopers" by Robert Heinlein.  In that book, focusing on a futuristic war between the human "Terran Federation" and an insectoid race of aliens known as "The Bugs"  (or Arachnids), one training technique used by the Terran Federation "Mobile Infantry (MI)" was "Hypnotic Preparation For Combat."

During on point of the book, there was a brief section where, in the midst of a pitched battle, the MI commanders were able to issue a post-hypnotic command to their Troopers to immediately go to sleep during a lull in the battle.

I never served in combat, but can immediately see the value as a former soldier in having the ability instantly "go to ground" and fall asleep.

There was a mantra we would often repeat during field operations that every soldier understood: "When in doubt, rack out."

That being, when you were not issued orders, go to sleep immediately.  Often times in high intensity operations, circumstances would always arise where you might pull double-triple shifts and might be lucky to get 2-3 hours sleep over a 2 day period.

I remember on my journeyman's training course, I did a 7-day field exercise sleeping 20 minutes a day.  By the end of it, I was experiencing insane and terrifying hallucinations (kind of like a bad, multi-day acid trip).

Later, I would interact with many veterans from the war on terror and my heart would break for them, hearing their stories of crippling PTSD over the horrors they experienced in overseas combat operations.

As I got to know a lot of those veterans, I noticed some consistencies in their experience.  Namely, a state of hyper-vigilance, a tendency to hyper-fixate on things, and the triggering of flashbacks when something reminded them of their past traumas.

Hearing second hand accounts of what overseas deployments are like, I came to understand why so many soldiers would come back with PTSD.  Because they would experience moments of unimaginable stress, followed by long periods of boredom, where their conscious mind would hyper-fixate on the triggering traumatic events, thought looping them endlessly.

After their deployments, the long periods of conscious focus on their trauma's would hardwire their brains to continue to thought loop those traumas so that it became a subconscious habit they couldn't consciously change (or were even necessarily consciously aware of).

I realized if, over the course of their deployments, they had the skillset to be able to immediately go into a hypnotic trance and be guided by a skilled hypnotic operator, their conscious minds could be given a reprieve from the trauma's they experienced.

Instead of forming neuronal networks that were easy for their subconscious mind to travel down, remembering horrifying moments of their combat deployments, they could form neuronal networks to remind them that they were safe, they made it out, and they were with friends and allies who cared for them and who they cared for.

Done over long periods of time, that exercise could be the building block of a mental framework enabling soldiers to reconcile with their traumatic experiences and move on from them, instead of being haunted by them by their subconscious mind.

I made this connection when Sammie went through hypnotherapy, and the therapist guided Sammie through a timeline induction, visualizing and replaying her past emotional traumas from a disassociated perspective.  

The hypnotherapist had Sammie imagine she was replaying those events, but instead of experiencing them, she was observing her past self from a position of detachment.  Doing so, she was better able to gain insights as to why she was feeling what she felt and why those traumas continued to haunt her in the present.

After, she was able to make realizations about lifestyle changes she needed to make to avoid those triggers as well as thought processes she needed to consciously develop to not fall into a pattern of unresolved, destructive thought loops when she couldn't avoid them.

It is really the "thought loops" that cause problems such as anxiety, depression, insomnia, and in extreme cases, PTSD.

The inability to stop the subconscious mind from endlessly replaying sensations that trigger negative or destructive thought processes.

This is also why Sammie and I practice hypnosis regularly.  Even recreational or erotic hypnosis.

Being induced into a hypnotic trance puts a hard stop on those thought loops.

It does not necessarily prevent them from coming back, but it offers a temporary reprieve from them and gives an opportunity to form a new perspective on what experiences, memories, and sensations are triggering them in the first place.

Practiced with frequency, simply stopping to reboot the mind through a hypnotic induction can make the difference between life and death.

It most certainly did for Sammie and I.

To those of you who served honorably, I thank you for your service.