images are disturbing,” he
says, “they should not be
watched repeatedly.”
In the days following
September 11, Patricia fell
asleep to the TV’s apocalyptic
mutter and woke up to its
hysteria. Then she engulfed
herself in the stories of friends- and even strangers – directly
exposed to the attacks, in
an effort to puncture the
blankness she felt and come
to grips with what had
happened. “The deeper I got,
the worse it got,” she says.
Eventually, at the insistence
of her fiance, she unplugged
the TV. But it was too late.
Patricia had changed. Her first
panic attack struck within
a month of September 11, on
the subway. “I thought I was
going to pass out,” she says.
“My heart was pounding and
I felt nauseous. I had tunnel
vision.” Every few days it
would happen again. It didn’t
occur to her she was having
a reaction to trauma.
Past imperfect
Patricia’s inability to
acknowledge her own
symptoms revealed a deeper
problem. “A lot of times
when people develop PTS
symptoms, it’s because the
traumatic event is linking
to earlier memories that have
not been processed,” says
Dr Francine Shapiro, a PTSD
expert. Memories, she says,
often of vulnerability and
powerlessness. This may
explain why women were
more than twice as likely as
men to report PTS symptoms
in the wake of September 11.
It wasn’t until five years
after September 11 that
Patricia – her panic attacks
persisting and postnatal
depression now afflicting her- consulted a therapist and
saw this connection in her
own life. She’d been molested
and the therapist helped her
understand how September 11
had brought those traumas to
the surface. “The turning point
for me was saying, ‘I do need
help’,” she says.Damage control
The most accepted treatment
for PTSD is exposure therapy,
in which the patient confronts
their memories until they’re
drained of their malevolent
power. “It’s not about trying
to wipe away the memory of
the trauma; it’s really more
about habituating to it,” says
Watson. “If a person had a car
accident, for instance, all of
a sudden she might say to
herself, ‘It’s unsafe to drive at
any time’.” The same applies
regardless of whether the
person was directly involved
in the crash or merely
witnessed it. A good therapist
will examine the patient’s
interpretation of the traumatic
memory and then help her
identify what sets it off.
“Everyone has triggers
when they’ve been
traumatised,” says Watson. “It
might be something they see
in a movie or a sound. It might
even be the way they feel
inside, like how their heart
beats when excited – this might
trigger a memory of their heart
beating in fear, and then all of
a sudden they shut down.”
For Sarah Bunting, recovery
took time. In the month that
followed, she cried every day.
She gained weight, and she
self-medicated by drinking
too much. A year later she
went to therapy and let herself
re-experience her memories
by writing about them every
year on the September 11
anniversary. She started yoga,
tapered off the drinking and
lost the weight she’d gained.A CREATIVE CURE
Therapists have a new method for
healing old wounds
A treatment involving moving your eyes back
and forth – ‘eye movement desensitisation
reprocessing’ (EMDR) – could help you wipe
the disturbing effects of a traumatic event.
A study by the Emory School of Medicine found
90 per cent of rape survivors were cured of
PTSD after just three 90-minute sessions of
EMDR. Dr Francine Shapiro, who developed
the integrative treatment, discovered that
moving the eyes laterally can reduce arousal,
therefore stress, when confronting a traumatic
memory. While no one’s sure why the therapy
works, a Harvard researcher suggests it
mimics how the brain naturally digests
memories during REM sleep. After trauma,
the brain often gets stuck and can’t process
information normally. EMDR appears to help
the brain resume normal functioning, so the
images, sounds, smells and feelings you
associate with an event no longer trigger fear
or angst. You still remember what happened,
but you’re able to leave it behind and move on.Sometimes even the direst
traumas can lead to positive
outcomes. In the case of
September 11, studies found
many had an increased
appreciation of life, altered
priorities and a new
understanding of personal
strength afterwards. Some of
these effects faded after six
months. Others, however, did
not – like increased kindness,
spirituality and teamwork. WH108 womenshealth.com.au FEBRUARY 2017
special report
ADDITIONAL WORDS: ALICE ELLIS; KELSEY STOCKER. PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILLIP TOLEDANO.
MODELS USED FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES ONLY. *NOT HER REAL NAME.