Depression: Is PTSD the Missing Link? – Psychedelic Assisted Therapy

Is PTSD sometimes the missing link behind Depression?

PTSD is becoming increasingly recognised as being much more frequent a problem than it has in the past. It is also beginning to be recognised as a precursor to, or often a cause of, depression and anxiety. This is especially when mainstream therapy focuses on treating the depression and anxiety without recognising the potential links to PTSD. Particularly those from old, and unresolved early childhood traumatic events.

Healing PTSD & trauma is a very real possibility…

With the right understanding and tools, PTSD doesn’t need to be a life long sentence. It could also resolve the depression and/or anxiety from holding trauma in for so long…

Healing is understanding & accepting that potentially a childhood experience that you have accepted may be the beginning of your PTSD & depression. Something that happened that you can remember, but have accepted with out recognising that your unexpressed emotion from that particular incident, or series of incidents is still body held as trauma. This may “trigger” responses that are not how you want to react or respond, giving in to those feelings of being out of control, frightening or simply frustrating.

PTSD, or Post traumatic Stress Disorder, is a condition that occurs in people who may have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event, or series of events.

These events, if left unresolved, remain as a body held painful emotion that is retained physically in the body and the nervous system. Trauma is not just in the mind.

These unresolved painful emotions can be unconsciously triggered by current events. Creating confusion, fear, panic and and a very distressing feeling of being out of control.

A triggered individual will then quite often respond negatively to his unconscious reaction. By getting angry, hyper anxious, retreating, self or other blaming, closing down or simply feeling overwhelmed.

Over time this can develop into depression or long standing anxiety.

Treating depression on its own often will miss the real contributor.

PTSD & Trauma and its long lasting effects are something that many of us are dealing with.

Today, there is an increasing awareness of trauma, PTSD and other forms of stress making them more relevant today than ever before. Trauma affects us in many and profound ways.

The “Problem” is mainstream therapy is slow in not recognising the individuality of emotional links between unresolved traumatic events, depression and anxiety.

Original traumatic events may have lasted only a few moments, or extended repeatedly over a period of time, even years. yet its impacts can be equally long standing. Unresolved PTSD & trauma hijacks your life, leaving you feeling helpless, out of control, burnt out or hyper alert, or so brain fogged and flat that getting out bed seems like climbing a mountain.

Anti depressants simply numb down the emotional intensity allowing an individual to function.

This sometimes can give an emotional break but rarely are recipients of these common medications advised to look at the cause, but simply left to “kick the emotional can down the road..”.

All too often, these anti depressant medications are prescribed without any “off ramps”. Some people who have been prescribed these medications and have years later, found that their body won’t let them get off them. This can bring back their original feelings of self-loathing, nightmares, flashbacks keeping them from engaging fully in life.

Our trauma response is unique

PTSD & trauma for each individual is their own unique experience of overwhelm, varying considerably according to age, personality, community, occupation and many other variable factors. How we make meaning from our trauma is different for each of us.
All PTSD is stressful, but not all stress is traumatic and one persons’ trauma may even be someone else’s pleasure.
Dealing with trauma is an individual and personal experience, because every single person is different and unique in this space and one size of therapy definitely doesn’t fit all.

Working with our team requires developing your own unique & individual process & practice…

What doesn’t change, is that PTSD & trauma affects almost all of us at some stage and to some extent. Either directly or in being around someone affected by trauma.

Working with our team, who are professionally qualified, but more importantly, have first hand real life Trauma Informed experience in dealing with PTSD, CPTSD, Depression & Anxiety.

For each session, you have the convenience of support online, phone or face to face…

Trauma Informed therapists, who not only understand the effects, causes & impacts of Trauma, but have also experienced firsthand, their own healing from PTSD, CPTSD, Depression & Anxiety with the true meaning & application of Psychedelics.

Once you start with us, you benefit from our extensive and professional trauma informed life experience in dealing with PTSD, trauma, depression and anxiety in relationships and sexuality…Imagine having each session with two highly skilled “trauma informed” professionals, as well as unlimited phone support between sessions…

PTSD is simply long held, invalidated trauma. Invalidated by negative self talk or by external invalidation like gaslighting…

Trauma, particularly PTSD can be described as having attributes similar to velcro, that if left unresolved, attract & accumulate further effects from traumatic events. For more on how trauma impacts us see here

Healing PTSD & trauma is a very real possibility…

With the right understanding and tools trauma doesn’t need to be a lifelong sentence…

And working with our team will change your life, because in each session you also get the benefit of our extensive and professional life experience in dealing with trauma, relationships and sexuality.

In between sessions, ALL phone contact is included, encouraged and not limited

There is increasing awareness of PTSD, Trauma & Depression and other forms of stressful impacts than ever before. PTSD, Trauma & Depression with their long lasting effects are something that many of us are dealing with, often without realisation…

What actually causes PTSD?

PTSD can be caused by experiencing, or even witnessing violence, verbal & emotional abuse, rape, neglect, betrayal, emotional abandonment, car accidents, falls, injuries, invasive medical procedures, war and natural disasters to name a few…

Each individual will experience trauma differently, and can be caused by experiencing or witnessing a wide variety of circumstances.

Trauma can even be experienced from the way we interpret a situation, particularly as a child. Whether it is real or not, it becomes real to us.

Trauma can take years to show up, to the extent that the person is not even be aware of what may be happening to them. They just have an underlying sense of overwhelm, fear, numbness, emotional intensity, depression or even physical disease unresponsive to treatment.

In short, trauma is about losing connection with one’s self, being disconnected from our body, from those around us and our world in general.

PTSD occurs when body held unexpressed emotions are ignored, or invalidated.

These unexpressed emotions accumulate and will influence future interactions, often in unpredictable ways.

The long term impacts of trauma become very difficult to recognise when they’re happening to us.

From here they’re often released in many different ways that are both unpredictable & unacceptable both to the person themselves and those around them.

These behaviours can even appear quite normal on the outside

Behaviours such as over working, spending long hours in front of the tv or computer, over eating, drinking too much and smoking, drug use etc, as well as the more hard core behaviours like depression, passive aggression, unfocussed rage, drug abuse, domestic and emotional abuse.

Somewhere inside us we might know that that behaviours are coping mechanisms for the fear, rage, shame and isolation that we live with but we feel helpless to change, and this is where we come in, to support and guide you in self discovery and self empowerment in finding your unique pathway forward

Healing trauma offers surprising benefits, way beyond your imagining.

You can’t change it but…

Nobody can treat past trauma as what happened can’t be undone. Trauma is not an incurable disease and you can do better than merely learning to live with it. You can be supported in discovering how you can use it as a springboard of empowerment into the rest of your life.

We’re born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma, as it’s part of our survival skillset, and our desperation to be free of our suffering is part of what gives us the courage to go there.

Here we intimately understand the healing process involves not only your mind, but your body, emotions, soul and spirit, for trauma impacts us on all these levels, and is often a catalyst for profound awakening and spiritual transformation.

This especially applies if you have suffered sexual trauma in any form.

From our own personal experience, as well as with countless others over more than a decade of working in this field, triumphing over trauma creates a whole new world of deeper awareness, self and other connection, meaning and happiness.

How trauma works

Understand that trauma actually rewires your brain, affecting your ability to interpret otherwise harmless situations, such as a closed door, the smell of grease or a touch on the shoulder, as scary, even terrifying or life threatening .

This is because the part of your brain that is activated or triggered has you believing you’re reliving your moment of unresolved trauma right now, even though it may have occurred many years ago.

It requires a range of gentle but safe approaches to rewire your nervous system and re-train your brain to ‘see’ what is really there.

Healing Trauma takes a full system rewire

Modern mainstream therapy has chosen to view trauma and its long term effects as an incurable disease, which can, at best be ‘treated’ with drugs and behavioural management.

There are times where medications are important, but the underlying issues, unless treated more directly, will still remain.

Traditional talk therapy, or CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) involving only your mind, and medication therapy that blunts what you feel are limited in what they do.

This process can also give the power to the the therapist and the drug. When what you’re looking for is to take your own power, which is taken away by trauma, back.

So sadly, modern western therapies are lagging behind in making significant and workable inroads into supporting trauma sufferers and their families.

Treating trauma as a ‘normal’ human response to an abnormal stress, means that the impact of trauma can be cured, reversed or removed.

This approach involve learning to take back control of your own body, mind, emotions, heart and soul.

Unfortunately, and all to often, many sufferers are refusing to seek further assistance purely because of the poor quality and inability of “modern” methods to reliably and accurately support these clients and families.

Some careers have an increased risk of PTSD and depression

Learning to feel safe in your body

An important part of this task is re-learning how to feel, to feel safe in your body and know that you can have control over what it is that you feel. This an area that we are particularly vigilant with, in being freely available to clients during this time, as their support people.

Believe it or not, learning to listen to your body, rather than just your mind, in a safe way without re-experiencing your trauma, helps you integrate the experience(s) you’re probably spending an inordinate amount of energy trying to avoid.

It is important to be able to know what you know, and feel what you feel, without making it wrong or becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed or collapsed.

To feel calm and able to focus, especially in response to the images, thoughts, sounds or physical sensations that remind you of the past.

It is being honest with, and accepting of yourself, including about the ways you behaved in order to survive your experience, particularly if your incident happened to you as a child…

You will also benefit from re-learning how to feel fully, sensually alive in your everyday world, not just focussing on healing your trauma. The benefits of this process for you are beyond words, life changing and self empowering.

Tools for healing trauma include:

Understanding how trauma impacts you- that it is largely body/emotional based, even spiritual, not logical.
Mindful body awareness to help you inhabit your body and experience yourself more fully
Breath practices to regulate your arousal states
Mind/body practices to teach you that you have control over what you feel
Learning movement, sound and music practices to reconnect you with your joy
Learning touch practices to help you feel safe in your body, to know its boundaries and receive safe in touch from another
Learning to see your aggression, depression, arrogance, passivity etc as behaviours you took on as coping mechanisms rather than permanent disabilities
Learning to trust and re-open your heart, to yourself and others
Taking the actions that remain incomplete from your trauma eg. saying no, fighting back, running away
Finding a way to speak the unspeakable- through words, feelings, actions, writing, images
Integrating your traumatic memories as an important part, but not the whole of who you are
Giving your traumatized child a voice in a place of honouring and respect
Finding creative ways to rescript your life and fill in the holes born from the things you missed out on- love, acknowledgment, nurturing, respect, connection
Finding more of your authentic self- giving yourself permission to be sometimes scared, sometimes angry or hateful yet equally capable of being loving, caring, compassionate and fun.
Seeing the Self who is in charge of all these different parts of you, the Self that exists underneath your coping mechanisms, that the essence of who you are.

Healing Trauma: If you want to go there we’re here to go with you

True healing of trauma takes time, but with each step you have a sense that you’re getting somewhere.

We are available in supporting you when you’re home, chipping away at the coal face.

All phone calls are included

Because, a few minutes on the phone will make all the difference in integrating your empowering change, especially knowing that our support is ongoing and not limited.

You have a sense of your own empowerment coming through.

You start to reach out to life rather than protect yourself from it.

“Having had our own experiences of trauma, some of it from early childhood, we know intimately the territory of which we speak and we have a passion for assisting others to find their way through the maze into a happier, more comfortable and successful life.”

In short, PTSD is about losing connection with one’s self, being disconnected from our body, from those around us and our world in general.

The long term impacts of trauma can very difficult to recognise when they’re happening to us.

Some of which can even appear quite normal on the outside, such as over working, spending long hours in front of the tv or computer, over eating, drinking too much and smoking etc, as well as the more hard core behaviours like depression; passive aggression; unfocussed rage; drug abuse; domestic and emotional abuse; sexual acting out.

Somewhere inside us we might know that that behaviours are coping mechanisms for the fear, rage, shame and isolation that we live with but we feel helpless to change. This is where we come in, to support and guide you in self discovery and self empowerment in finding your unique pathway forward

Healing PTSD offers surprising benefits, way beyond your imagining.

You can’t change it but…

Each of us are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma, as it’s part of our survival skillset, and our desperation to be free of our suffering is part of what gives us the courage to go there. Our team intimately understand that your unique healing process involves not only your mind, but your body, emotions, soul and spirit, for trauma impacts us on all these levels, and is often a catalyst for profound awakening and spiritual transformation.

This especially applies if you have suffered sexual trauma in any form.