Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is a very common diagnosis. It is also one that people often keep private due to the nature of the violence that caused post-traumatic stress and the disturbing symptoms they suffer as a result.
I am sure that each of you intimately knows at least two people who have either been diagnosed with PTSD or meet the criteria for that disorder which include recurrent intrusive images and thoughts of the trauma, distressing dreams, flashbacks and efforts to avoid reminders of the trauma. They may be neighbors, family, friends of your children, colleagues, your own teachers and so many others. Whole communities experience PTSD with instances of school shooting or serial murders. Entire cultures are raised in poverty, neglect and abuse, never knowing anything better than living life with PTSD. The cycle of violence is thus passed from parent to child, from one race to another, from one nation to another in an unending cycle.
Thus the need for our services at Therapeutic Spiral International has never been greater.
Unfortunately, in the past, PTSD usually needed lengthy intervention to rebuild trust in broken relationships and to find new hope-affirming ways of living. Now, state of the art research in neurobiology shows that experiential methods of change are more effective for PTSD than talk therapy alone. The Therapeutic Spiral Model offers an experiential change process that achieves in a brief time what long-term talk therapy often takes years to accomplish.
The Therapeutic Spiral Model provides safe, effective and time-efficient intervention in acute and chronic PTSD symptoms. When used immediately after a crisis such as an earthquake, a school shooting, or in a shelter for battered women, the Therapeutic Spiral Model maximizes peoples' strengths to deal with the problems at hand and prevents the entrenchment of more destructive ways of coping. TSM has been researched tested and long acclaimed by clients and professionals alike for its safe structure and rapid change process.
The Organization Itself
Therapeutic Spiral International is the charitable organization that has been created to fund the training of mental health professionals to work with trauma survivors using the Therapeutic Spiral Model. Through this mission, TSI reaches hundreds of trauma survivors directly each year. There are always more requests coming for our services new countries, new teams, new projects.
We have already made a difference in the lives of more than 1,000 people who have been suffering PTSD due to childhood physical abuse, rape and sexual assault, imprisonment, political torture, refugee resettlement, clergy abuse and earthquakes, among other traumas. We have trained more than 100 service providers — relief workers, advocates, counselors, psychotherapists, psychologists, physicians, educators and clergy persons. Beyond that, each of the 100 service providers now in turn use the Therapeutic Spiral Model in his or her own practice and community, affecting many more thousands of people.
With the proper funding, we can train hundreds of practitioners, who each will affect the lives of another 100 clients. Some will build their own local Action Trauma Teams. Some will use the techniques they learned in Level I training to decrease treatment time or to improve education, advocacy, relief and other services for trauma survivors. Every one develops experiential tools to increase his or her effectiveness with people who have PTSD and other mental health problems in various settings.
Here are some of our success stories. All stories may be verified as composite stories of actual people treated and/or professionals trained in the Therapeutic Spiral Model. Due to confidentiality, we do not use exact names, and identifying characteristics have been modified.
see the Survivor's Sharing page for writings by trauma survivors
A Bosnian Refugee - Learning to Live again
Vladamir was a 28-year-ld refugee from Yugoslavia who resettled in Australia in 1995. He had helplessly witnessed soldiers drag away his mother and younger sister while he was held captive by five men. He escaped two days later when the soldiers left him alone because their truck would not start.
He could not return for his family, and the haunting images of their faces and screams are among his last memories of them. He strongly believed his mother and sister were raped and murdered, and he could not forgive himself for not saving them.
Vladamir was a successful psychologist in Kosovo. In many ways, he had successfully resettled in his new country, a year after the horror he speaks about with his family. He had work, housing, some new connections in the present with colleagues, also other Bosnian refugees. He was a valued counselor at a refugee center in Sydney. However, he was suffering from the long-term effects of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and the symptoms disrupted his life and work on a daily basis.
When he came to his first training workshop in the Therapeutic Spiral Model, he described himself "as a man who is a failure,"
"I used to be a good psychologist. I helped people. Now I am the one in need of help. I feel worthless. I am no good to anyone. I can not help others. I cannot even help myself."
During the workshop, he learned to value his strengths and how to begin to learn to trust others again.
At his second workshop, he was able to safely release his rage at his captors and find self-forgiveness, so he could go on with his life. He was able to experience a different ending than the memory that haunted him.
He stated:
"In my drama I was able to tell the soldiers (played by team members) what they meant to me. In my own language, I called them bastards, disgusting pigs, vile and sick. I looked them in the face, and I told them I hope they died a slow and horrible death themselves. I yelled until I was spent. It was better than punching walls, which I had been doing as time went on, and I still knew nothing about what happened to them."
"But the most important healing was when I was able to 'talk' with my mother (played by another group member). I told her how I had failed her, failed to rescue her and Jasmina. I was amazed to hear her say that I had succeeded because I had stayed alive. As my mother that is what she wanted for me to stay alive. All soldiers know that deep in their heart, I guess. I just needed to hear that.
"She told me I must forgive myself and let this be our last meeting. Saying goodbye with love and forgiveness. I have done this. I have forgiven myself and now let myself live the life I have created here. I cannot go back to the past. But the past has stopped haunting me. I can continue my work with others and help them find peace using the Therapeutic Spiral Model."
A Successful Career Disrupted by Childhood Sexual Abuse
At 33, Tricia was a highly successful attorney, a partner of a prestigious law firm in New York City. She was known for her skill as a defense expert and sought for international teaching and spotlighted media cases around the country. She had recently married her third husband and they had a young child together.
When she began to defend a well-known physician in Miami on charges of exhibitionism, she started to have violent nightmares and flashbacks of her childhood when she had been physically and sexually abused. She would be working on the case law and get so emotionally overwhelmed that she could not concentrate. Then she would feel panic and despair for being out of control.
She had been referred to individual therapy by a friend who told her that the Therapeutic Spiral Model would work quickly. That's what Tricia wanted and needed for her problems.
She couldn't make the body memories stop and she would try to hide the shaking of her body at work. She felt free-floating anger and lost her temper with other partners for no reason.
She knew she had been abused as a child, but she had rarely talked about her childhood; she felt she had "gotten over it" and had "never needed therapy." When the past did break through into the present, she was totally unprepared for the symptoms of acute Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. She was frightened and locked into old defensive patterns, which were no longer working to protect her from painful feelings. She needed to learn new coping skills quickly so the fallout from the past would not destroy her present life.
Given that she was a time-conscious and highly driven woman, she found that experiential methods fit her style. She did not want to spend time analyzing why she was having body memories of childhood violence now. What she wanted was to be able to change these behaviors quickly.
In three months of individual therapy, which included two weekend workshops, Tricia learned how to control her flashbacks and body memories so they did not disrupt her daily life. She first learned how to write the experiences in a notebook and bring them to therapy, rather than lashing out at people at work.
She says:
"I thought I was going crazy and so did my family and friends. I couldn't stop crying. I felt like a little girl again. It was awful. I knew I had to get it together quick, and I must say that action methods worked for me."
"In one psychodrama, I asked group members to help me build a safe boundary between me and the past. Each person was a brick in my wall of protection. Sue played self-knowledge for me. Jim was my best friend who always supports me. Gina was the energy of self-care and JoAnn played the role of my courage. Through this experience I learned to internalize these strengths and have been able to use them to stop the flashbacks and body memories from disrupting my life. It may sound silly, but you know it worked and it worked quickly. What a huge relief."
Sexual Assault, Violence and an Eating Disorder
Andrea was a freshman at a small woman's college. An intelligent student who excelled in high school, she had been so excited to leave home and be on her own. Her first year had been very successful: she had made the dean's list, she had a nice boyfriend and many good new friends. She had performed in a concert at the college and was complemented on her talent.
She was packed and ready to return home for the summer when she decided on the spur of the moment to attend a year-end fraternity party at a nearby school.
She went with a girlfriend who knew "someone," but she didn't see her much after they arrived at the fraternity house. Andrea remembers that she drank two beers and that the second beer was given to her by a man she hadn't met before. She is pretty sure now that the beer was laced with rophynol, commonly called the "date rape drug."
She passed out, and when she woke she was being raped in the grassy yard behind the fraternity house. She tried to scream and immediately another young man, who was kneeling at her head, held her mouth shut and showed her a knife. He told her if she made any noise he would kill her. As she looked around, she saw four young men, none of whom she knew. Three were waiting their turn to rape her and were drunkenly cheering each other on. She passed out again and woke alone, halfway hidden in the bushes in the early light of the morning.
Her parents brought her home and had her talk to a counselor at their church. She continued to get worse she had lost 40 pounds in six months and wouldn't eat; she did not return to school and was scared to go outside the house even with friends. She often said she wished she were dead. Her parents referred her for treatment with the Therapeutic Spiral Model since it specifically focused on trauma. They had seen me present on using experiential methods with traumatic experiences at a Rotary Club meeting a year and a half ago and had kept my card.
Andrea had reported the assault to the rape crisis center, and the police were called. Since she could not identify any of the young men, there were no arrests. She was examined by a physician, who told her that the physical damage of tears, abrasions and bruises would heal with time. She was diagnosed with PTSD. When she came to experiential therapy six months after the assault, she was anorexic, depressed and suicidal.
Andrea attended group therapy using the Therapeutic Spiral Model and participated in four workshops during the year. She said the turning event for her was when she could stage a judge and jury to punish the boys who had gang-raped her something that would never happen in real life since the case had been dropped.
She describes the session:
"I hated doing psychodrama at first. It broke through my defenses of not eating, not seeing and not feeling. We even used our bodies for movement and connection. I couldn't just sit there and talk about how little I ate or how much I hated my body or how much I wanted to die. I had to participate, and for me that turned out to be the best thing in my recovery. On my third workshop I was able to tell my story and put a different ending onto it.
"I had team members play the four faceless boys who had raped me. We had a judge and a jury and they sentenced those boys to "hear my truth." With the support of my strengths surrounding me group members playing the roles of my good parents, my own courage and determination I was able to spew out all the terror and disgust and despair at what they had done to me. I screamed and screamed at them how much I hated them and wished they were dead. I said all the hateful things I rehearsed over and over in my head from the time it happened. I purged all the ugliness they had put in my body.
"After that, I collapsed into the arms of the woman playing my good mom and she held me while I sobbed and sobbed. I cried for my lost innocence, my lost dreams and my lost trust. She stroked my head and told me I would regain all of these things, just in a different form.
"The group sat nearby, and someone started to sing a lullaby. I have never felt safer held in the love of the group, the group who witnessed my story and my shame and ugliness. I was safe again. The next day I started to eat again not a lot, mind you, but I did get back to my normal weight within the next six months. Most importantly, I felt like I could begin to like my body and my mind again."
Random Violence and Significant Family Loss
Liana, a social worker, brought her two daughters with her to "do some grief work" at one of our five-day TSM workshops.
She was referred to the workshop following the random murder of her youngest daughter because her counselor found the family stuck in disbelief and horror. They couldn't get to their feelings six months after the event. There were walking around like "zoomatrons," robots, barely getting through each day.
Liana and her husband Paul had raised their daughters in that they considered a safe place, choosing to stay in a small town despite several job offers in larger cities that would have progressed their careers. The family had struggled with a bout of breast cancer with Liana three years ago, but in other respects theirs had been a good life. The two oldest daughters were making lives on their own: Gina was married with a young child and working as a teacher; the other, Paula, was a second-year university student.
The youngest daughter, Ellen, had always been the star of the family. She was 14 when she went to her first concert in a town about two hours away with friends and two adult chaperones.
That night, Liana got the telephone call that all parents dread the police asking if she was the mother of Ellen. She and her husband learned that Ellen had been struck in the parking lot of the concert hall by a random shot, someone shooting a gun in anger at a drug deal gone bad. The bullet hit Ellen in her back, and she died from organ damage and loss of blood en route to the hospital's emergency room.
This family sought comfort in the arms of their extended family, friends and church. People brought food, sent cards, prayed and asked if there was anything they could do. But no one wanted to mention the actual horror, the fact that their daughter had been randomly killed. Talking about the tragedy made it too real for people—made them realize violence can happen to them too.
The family went to grief counseling and talked about what had happened, how wonderful Ellen had been, how much they missed her. But none could shed a tear after the funeral. It was as though a wall had come down, and they were all walking around in bubbles unable to connect with each other.
Liana had read about the TSM workshop during an interview with me in the newspaper and asked her therapist for a recommendation. She and her daughters decided to attend the workshop in the hopes of getting past their "stuckness."
At one of the final sessions of the workshop, they were asked to create a healing scene to share with the group. All three women had found their tears and rage at God during the week. They had held each other and had been supported by the team, the group and nature at work. They had shared meals together, taken morning walks and even struggled through yoga.
Liana, Gina, and Paula led the group in "preparing for letting go." They asked each person to take an empty glass jar and go outdoors to find twigs, stones, flowers and other things from nature that gave them the message that it is time to let go.
People shared what they found—some had spiky sticks, others had mushy moss. Each seemed to have meaning for the person sharing. Some came to let go of rage. Some came to let go of resentments. Others marched in to claim their power and grieve their losses. Some just came to be in the company of others healing.
Then, with the help of the group members playing supportive roles, each of the three said "goodbye" to Ellen. Witnessed by a group of men and women, all drawn together in the belief of letting go of pain and keeping love, the mother and her two daughters told Ellen what they could never say in life. The final scene came when they carried the blanket with the natural objects out of the theater and released them into the woods, to Mother Nature. There was a moment of silence, and then someone in the group started to spontaneously sing "Amazing Grace," and everyone joined in.
You can help bring healing to others
You can help fund important healing work by contributing to any of our scholarship funds for trauma survivors and their families. See our Funding Opportunities on the Web site.
In the past few months we have had several scholarships donated by generous TSI supporters:
All contributions are deeply appreciated by Therapeutic Spiral International as an organization. Each participant blesses you all the more, I am sure. - Kate Hudgins
The vision is that The Therapeutic Spiral Model will become so available to people through education, theater, media, research and practice that it can help end the cycle of violence that is currently spiraling out of control both in the United States and abroad. We can train 20 professionals in a community; after two years each will have his or her own local Action Against Trauma team built and running to continue providing the services without our help.
This is a team model. It cannot be sustained through private pay even in western countries and areas such as Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Thank each and everyone of you who find ways to donate to TSI over the past few months. You are great! As you can see, donations do not need to be only money. Time and effort, creativity, personal effort…there are many ways you can contribute to our TSI community.
Please donate to TSI today so we can continue these efforts.