Caution: Some images and description may be triggering. This article is designed to inform you about trauma and how the RTM Protocol is effective in helping you overcome fear, terror, and helplessness.
The Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories (RTM) Protocol
Written by Roshini Rampersaud
The majority of the clients whom I see for therapeutic services have experienced some type of trauma in their lives. For my Military Veterans and Active Duty Servicemembers, that trauma oftentimes comes in the package of engaging in a fire fight, witnessing or experiencing an explosion, being injured or witnessing/learning that a comrade was injured, or even witnessing/learning of the death of a comrade (overseas or stateside). For my victims/survivors of Domestic Violence, trauma very often comes in other forms outside of physical violence, such as: sexual abuse, emotional abuse and intimidation (including gaslighting), isolation, verbal abuse (coercion, threats, and blame), economic/financial abuse, reproductive coercion, digital abuse, and stalking. When I have clients who struggle or have a history of struggling with addiction, we many times uncover underlying trauma(s) that the client has tried to avoid/stuff by abusing substances or overly engaging in negative behavioral patterns. Of course, trauma is not solely limited to these three populations, and however a trauma may be packaged, it does not make it any less difficult or taxing on the body, mind, and spirit.
What does trauma look and feel like?
Are you ever stopped in the middle of an everyday activity by the thought of a traumatic event from your past? As hard as you try, you just can’t shake the image, or perhaps it even haunts your dreams at night? Do you experience intense emotional or physical reactions to these thoughts or dreams; like your heart races, you start sweating, and you feel a sense of fear, terror, or helplessness come over you? You are not alone. Trauma does not discriminate. It can affect anyone, and it can come in many forms.
A traumatic event can include, but is not limited to:
Natural disasters
Accidents
Sexual assaults
Physical assaults
Combat
Childhood sexual abuse
Torture
Life threatening illness
To be negatively affected by trauma, you don’t even have to have experienced the traumatic event directly. You could have witnessed the event. You could have learned that the event happened to a close family member or friend. You could have even experienced repeated or intense exposure to the distressing details of the event. Regardless of how you were exposed to the traumatic event, the end result is oftentimes the same—you feel a sense of fear, terror, and/or helplessness when you think about/dream about the event.
How does RTM treat trauma?
All day, every day, we receive information. Our brain processes that information and stores it accordingly in many different “filing cabinets” (if you will) for later use or recall. However, when a person experiences a trauma, the body goes into “fight or flight” mode, and the information of that trauma does not get stored as other, non-traumatizing, information would have been. Rather, the traumatic memory engages in a continuous loop on the emotional side of the brain, never finishing the process of communicating with the part of the brain that conducts the cognitive processing and reasoning. Thus, the emotions of fear, terror, and helplessness are attached to that memory in a perpetual loop, rather than that information being stored as any other memory.
The Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories (RTM) Protocol is a totally safe, non-intrusive, non-traumatizing process that allows for you to break that “loop,” and finally allow your brain to effectively process and store the memory of the event like any other information you receive on a daily basis. That’s not to say that you won’t feel appropriate, warranted emotions such as sadness, anger, guilt, shame, etc. surrounding the event, but that’s why RTM is a protocol—it does not replace therapy. It clears the fear, terror, and helplessness surrounding the event and that are occurring present-day, so that you can effectively work on the appropriate, warranted emotions that your brain never had the chance to fully process at the time of the event. The best part is, the RTM Protocol only takes three to five 90-minute sessions to complete!