“ 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.