A Sense-Ability Case Study - Julie’s Story

With honesty and clarity, Julie describes the unexpected and powerful impact of Rewind Trauma Therapy on long held traumas: misophonia (selective sound sensitivity which triggers the fight or flight response) linked to verbal abuse, aquaphobia (fear of water) and trauma related to neglect and abandonment.

Jane Pendry from Sense-Ability Hypnotherapy & Coaching delivers Rewind Trauma Therapy and hypnotherapy for trauma online across the UK, Europe & USA.

What is Rewind Trauma Therapy?

Rewind Trauma Therapy is a somatic healing approach that heals the body and mind together. It is a simple, practical approach. Surprisingly, there is no need to discuss the details of your trauma at all, and you can resolve your trauma without re-traumatisation, painlessly and quickly.

Neuroscientists hypothethise that Rewind Trauma moves the traumatic memories from the fight, flight, fright part of the mind to the part that stores narrative memory in the same way that Rapid Eye Moving (REM) dreaming processes every day stresses.

My Depression/Complex Trauma Story

By Julie, Sense-Ability Hypnotherapy & Coaching client

I first decided to try Rewind Trauma therapy because I was desperate.  

To be honest, I was pretty sceptical about it, but when you’re desperate you will try anything.

I have suffered from recurring suicidal depression since I was about 13. I didn’t know why; neither did anybody else. By the time I was in my early twenties, I was taking SSRIs. At that time these were a new and life-changing group of medications for depression.

I was lucky; anti-depressents worked very well for me. I was also unlucky; they gave me side effects of weekly migraines for the next 25 years. I was forced to take powerful migraine medication as well. 

I hated being on any medication. Every so often I would try and slowly withdraw from the antidepressants; I would manage without them for about six weeks before suffering so much that I’d give up and take them again.

Much as I hated the depression medication, it did enable me to live a fairly functioning life. I travelled the world solo for years; I trained as a speech and language therapist (a good career for me). I also married.

Trying therapies

I wished I could get to the bottom of the depression, once and for all. Even on the medication, it still struck me hard from time to time. I did CBT, Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy, acupuncture, Rolfing Therapy, homeopathy, and experimented with every holistic and natural medicine and approach I came across. Nearly all of these things helped to a lesser or greater degree.

None gave me the profound or lasting relief I longed for.

The impact of long term medication

Today my hyper or hypo ‘episodes’ occur weeks apart rather than every few days. They are significantly more mild. I emerge from them much more rapidly and recover from them much faster. Several of the major triggers that would set them off, no longer do so.

The doctors said, ‘There is something else going on here but we don’t know what it is.’

Hyperarousal and shutdown

In addition to the depression at that time, every few days I was experiencing either episodes of hyperarousal or extreme states of shutdown that slowed my heartrate and breathing, and dropped my temperature, virtually paralysing me for hours on end. Alongside I experienced social anxiety, chronic insomnia that triggered further migraines, and numerous random physical symptoms (all this continued for over a year after my discharge from a psychiatric hospital). 

Therapists identified complex PTSD and depression from a childhood of emotional neglect and poor attachment, especially to my mother.  So, now I had my ‘why’ but I was still no closer to dealing with it.

Rewind Trauma Therapy for Misophobia

I stumbled across Rewind Trauma therapy when I met Jane, while searching for a hypnotherapist who could help me heal my unresolved issues that were causing such chaos in my system.

Jane ‘got me’. I felt safe enough with her, even at the beginning, to try and see if Rewind Trauma therapy might help me. I was skeptical because I had such poor memory of my childhood I wasn’t even sure if I could identify specific traumas to work on. On the other hand, I was desperate to try anything that had the faintest shot at relieving me of being constantly hijacked by my autonomous nervous system and rendering me regularly completely unable to function.

Choosing a small trauma

I chose a ‘small’ trauma for our initial sessions, as a ‘safe’ test. I had a clear memory of when my misophonia began. It was entangled with my mother when I was seven years old, and gave rise to feelings of powerlessness, murderous rage, and impotence.

Misophonia is an oversensitivity to sounds, and in my case to the specific sounds of people eating. Over the years the misophonia had become gradually worse, to the point where I had to ask my team at work not to eat during meetings. If they did, I couldn’t focus on anything else. I even had to leave the room when my husband ate dinner next to me. If I forced myself to stay in the room, I felt like I wanted to kill the person who was eating.

My First Rewind

The Rewind session required me to focus on the time when I first remembered noticing the problem arise. This early memory was sandwiched between images of a time when I felt safe, okay or normal.

Jane’s comment: For many people, it’s hard to find a memory of a safe place. Just a normal, okay memory before the trauma begin works well.

If I felt overwhelmed at any time, Jane told me I could zoom out from the memory, changing my ‘camera angle’ to create extra distance. It was interesting to me that dissociation could be used as a helpful tool, instead of viewed as a problematic defense by the nervous system.

I didn’t get the Rewind technique quite right the first time, or the second. Each attempt lasted less than 2 minutes.

Jane’s comment: It could take a couple of Rewind’s to construct the story, and to relax in to the process when using Dr Muss’ Appendix D for more complex multi-event traumas. I’m reality that’s quite unusual and two sessions are sufficient.

The Third Rewind for Misophonia

The third time the Rewind seemed right, but I felt no different during, or after the session. It was strange to feel my eyes moving behind my eyelids as I did the ‘rewind’, as if I was in REM sleep.

Jane’s comment: The experience of the Rewind can be ‘underwhelming’. A clinical psychotherapist told me she was very successful treating trauma. It was painful but people made progress. Rewind is not painful. It is a little tiring as a practical exercise. Clients often look at me as if to say, “Is that it?”. It’s so deceptively simple.

The Surprising Result

During the subsequent two week break, I soon noticed I wasn’t experiencing any triggers around people eating. It was odd, but I was still skeptical.

How could such a brief intervention cure me of a 44 year old problem?

I was not triggered

I asked my husband to sit next to me and crunch on something really loudly. He obliged. I was stunned to find I had no visceral reaction at all. Nothing. It had completely gone. I couldn’t believe it. I then deliberately put myself in all kinds of situations which would normally have triggered me, but there was still no reaction.

A year later

It is now nearly a year later, and the misophonia has never returned.

Sometimes I don’t like listening to my husband eat. To be honest, it’s not always a pretty sight either! But there are no feelings of rage, or powerlessness: those old triggers have completely vanished.

I don’t have to leave the room; I can focus on other things.

I am so grateful to Jane for introducing me to this extraordinary therapy, and I am still incredulous that it took only two sessions to resolve such a longstanding issue.

Further Rewind for Complex Trauma

After such success, I was keen to try more complex traumas with the same technique.

Abandonment and neglect

Initially, we focused on an issue that recurred daily throughout my childhood – the experience of feeling profoundly ignored, unseen and unheard, which led to the sense that I didn’t exist at all. The effects of this have been lifelong and have interfered with my life in every conceivable way.

We suspected this had a great deal to do with my chronic depression and my frequent desire to disappear from life.

This time, during the first Rewind session, I did feel something. Deep distress rose up and quickly overwhelmed me - perhaps from strong emotions that I hadn’t accessed before, lying underneath the memories.  Jane made sure to repeat the session the following day to ensure I was left feeling intact and safe. This time round I felt nothing at all.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t carry out the follow-up review because I had to make an emergency trip to the other side of the world to be with my dying father. And shortly afterwards, lockdowns began.

Jane’s comment: It’s very rare for clients to have an abreaction - an intense emotional response to therapy - particularly hypnotherapy or Rewind. However it is possible. In this case, Julie’s husband was on hand to support with the emotional reaction. I always take an emergency contact number in case there is a strong emotional response when a trauma is released. Strong emotional reactions are not a bad thing. We bury emotions behind trauma and releasing them can be cathartic, but at the time that can feel overwhelming so the support of a family member of friend is important. In this case, I always follow up and ensure the client is stabilised. Hypnotherapy is ideal for helping return people to a state of calm.

An uncertain outcome

So it was some months later before we were able to meet again. At that point I couldn’t say whether the previous session had worked or not – too much had happened in my life and in the world in the interim for me to even think about anything other than my immediate needs.

Overcoming my fear of water

Instead, we turned our focus to another, more minor issue: my fear of water.

This was probably related to two near-drownings when I was very young, which resulted in a lifelong aversion to swimming, deep rivers, and anything at all connected with the ocean.

It had also resulted in frequent dreams in which I was crossing threatening mountain rivers, or seeing loved ones drown in tsunamis, or even re-experiencing the feeling of drowning myself. Interestingly, the image of being overwhelmed by water also seemed to me to relate to my fear of being overwhelmed by intense emotions, perhaps another legacy of childhood trauma. We did the Rewind, selecting several ‘key’ memories which I watched in sequence, as if they were several films linked together. Once again, I felt ‘nothing’ during the session or afterwards.

The pandemic subsequently took over life again after these sessions and I didn’t think much about the results for several more months.

Jane’s comment: Some traumas are connected and complex, like beads on a necklace. We recognise that they are connected. The emotional response has the same intensity, even though events are separated by time. This is true of phobias and complex traumas. It’s possible to pick out events on the timeline, from the first to the last, and including the most intense … or typical event… and create a film sequence. We know, when we watch films that just three or four sequences can tell the whole story: domestic abuse, coercive control, bullying. We don’t need to see all the events to understand the story or its emotional impact.

Fear of Water Rewind Outcome

During a brief period between lockdowns, I did something uncharacteristic. I agreed to spend the day with friends on the beach.

And here’s the remarkable thing.

The day unfolded without any of the usual ‘hangover’ feelings of sorrow or grief or uneasiness that had always been strongly present in every encounter with the sea.

We simply had a ‘nice day’ from beginning to end. This was something I had never before experienced at the seaside. I was relaxed and actually enjoyed myself, an experience I never had imagined would be possible.

Looking back on Rewinds

That got me thinking about the earlier, interrupted Rewind sessions on the sense of being ‘invisible’ and ‘not existing’, which I believe to be the source of my depression.

The lifelong effects included one trigger in particular – being ignored, especially when I am distressed.

My earliest memory was from when I was about two years old. I was crying hard and loudly for my mother: I watched her legs walk past me and out the front door, slamming it behind her, leaving me alone in the house. As far as I was concerned, I was alone forever. I remember the crying stopped instantly; and there the memory ended. There were several key memories over the years that followed that one, all in a similar vein, and these are what I had identified in the earlier Rewind session.

The trigger of neglect

Since those initial experiences, whenever I spoke to someone and wasn’t heard, or said something and was constantly talked over, or made a statement into silence but got no response at all, and most of all when I was distressed and my distress was not recognised or taken seriously, I was retriggered.

This experience of being triggered when unheard had recurred so regularly in my life that I was perplexed by it. I couldn’t figure out why it kept happening. I had tried speaking faster, and then more slowly; then louder; then waiting for complete silence before I even tried to speak; then saying nothing for as long as possible to see whether anybody noticed my silence; then verbally articulating my distress as accurately as possible. Nothing had ever worked.

Every time I was triggered, I experienced the feeling of being stepped upon, flattened underfoot, walked through, as if I didn’t actually exist at all or as if there was a pane of soundproof glass between me and the rest of the world. It was always extraordinarily painful, and at its worse even made me want to withdraw from life permanently.

As I reflected on Rewind

And it dawned on me, as I reflected on the Rewind session where we had attempted to address this - before my visit overseas and lockdown - I realised I couldn’t remember this particular trigger actually occurring since that time. Not even once! Before then, I had experienced it at least once or twice a week. Other triggers still trouble me – such as when I’m distressed and don’t feel heard - but not this one. I am still unsure whether other people’s responses to me have changed (as a result of something in me being different) or whether the responses are just the same but they no longer trigger me. I simply can’t remember a single example of the non-responsiveness happening again.

A Year Later

So today my hyper or hypo ‘episodes’ now occur weeks apart rather than every few days. They are significantly more mild. I emerge from them much more rapidly and recover from them much faster. Several of the major triggers that would set them off, no longer do so.

I’m beginning to return to some semblance of working life and most importantly, I’m starting to experience what ‘normality’ must be like.

I can’t say I fully understand this Rewind process, although the neurology behind it has been explained to me, and I’m not sure why some triggers have completely resolved, yet not others. But what I can say is that Rewind therapy has already given me whole pieces of my life back, and I’m so thankful for that.

I also find myself wondering what else it might make possible for me?

Julie’s Progress To Date

I’m beginning to return to some semblance of working life now, and most importantly, I’m starting to experience what ‘normality’ must be like.

Five months ago I started Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) which is now slowly unravelling my childhood trauma at its roots. I don't believe that I would have been in a stable enough state a year ago to actually do this, or to engage in any of the work necessary for most therapies out there.

I can't say for sure, but I believe that Rewind helped stabilise my system enough to make this further therapy possible.

Jane’s Response

It’s important not to claim that Rewind Trauma Therapy is the panacea for deep and complex trauma. The journey to recovery for sufferers of CPTSD can be long and protracted. There are steps forward and back.

Above all the client needs to retain their sense of personal agency - control over their lives. There are many somatic approaches that help people to gently re-connect with their bodies and integrate they mind and body. Rewind Trauma Therapy falls under the somatic umbrella.

If you are under the care of a psychiatrist

For clients under the care of psychiatrists, medication may be life-saving. Rewind Trauma therapy can be undertaken along side other therapies. Please always take the advice of your health care professional or psychiatrist before undertaking any complementary therapy.

Resolving Trauma with Hypnotherapy and Rewind

For more information see: Sense-Ability Therapies for Trauma

If you have any further questions do get in touch.

Jane Pendry
www.sense-ability.co.uk
jane@sense-ability.co.uk
07843 813 883

Please Note

* Please note Jane Pendry does not diagnose or claim to cure. Sense-Ability therapies are complementary approaches that promote and support self healing. Jane does not explore how or why traumas were created and does not offer counselling, or traditional talking psychotherapy which require different specialised training and supervision. For more on these services see The British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy.

Jane has the right to refuse treatment where she believes there is a risk of harm or where she believes Sense-Ability therapies conflict with your current treatment programme with a medically trained professional or a clinical psychotherapist.