“ Do you remember that , although I first called you for help with nightmares , a nightmare feeling lasting long into the day or all day , “ day mares ”, uncon- trolled tearfulness , which all seemed connected with my wife ’ s suicide , visions of her last horrible months , her face at the morgue , my mistakes surrounding her
fatal depression etc . And then when you asked me at the beginning of our first session , what painful image first came to mind , it was my terror of being ‘ lost ’ during evacuation from London at age five during the Second World War .
So which memories set off the nightmares ? Maybe my wife ’ s suicide , the worst thing that ever happened to me , and her , conjured up the nightmare I was living in , or maybe my childhood terror made it unbearable , or maybe the two traumas just ran into one ? I don ’ t know .
About 20 years ago , when I was suffering from a ‘ bleeding gut ’ I heard a BBC program about people suffering from similar pathologies , who , it turned out , had all , like me , suffered trauma 50 years earlier through the War ! My colon is no longer bleeding , mainly through psychotherapies and meditation ( although the gastroenterologists don ’ t much like to ‘ let go ’!) but it shows how long those wartime traumas can last .
At the time my wife was in the hospital , and , I thought , ‘ safe ’, and they phoned me to tell me she had ‘ attempted ’ suicide , and refused to tell me if she was dead . But after only one hour of the horrific threehour journey to the hospital , I knew she was dead .”
As you can tell there are many traumatic events layered here : The wife ’ s sui- cide , the feeling that he may have been able to prevent it , the horrific three-hour journey to the hospital not knowing if she was dead or not – plus the child- hood trauma of war 50 years earlier that may have set the conditions for this later trauma to evolve into posttraumatic stress in the form of nightmares and daycares .
These are his emails after two sessions . They show how memories stayed while emotional reactions gradually detached during the three days following the TTT intervention .