Gradual or significant exposure can rapidly accelerate recovery from trauma and or problematic behaviours if effected in the right way. Exposure takes the format of building certain tolerance to "triggering" events and being more mindful of their existence and power to influence your behaviours. Exposure highlights the emotional connection to potentially problematic behaviours and provides a natural and progressive path to understanding and dealing with our responses to emotionally charged events. Happy days pop psychology! Go forth and do great things human.

Using Exposure To Enable Your Recovery

Quick rant about talk therapy and re-regulating emotional responses to common everyday emotions understanding the core mechanisms of flight, fight and freeze.

Reprogram Your Emotional Algorithms

Learn Recovery 10x Faster

Mindfulness, behaviour therapy and general stuff spiked in from the personal growth and the hallowed halls of life coaching stuff the magical technique of letting it go. The power of letting go involves controlling the meaning you attach to events in your life. once understanding them we process and then let the event go and carry on restored to a state of calm. This can be applied to anything from intense cravings to the way your spouse leaves the toilet seat up. How it works for you is up to you.

The Awesome Power Of Letting Things Go

PTSD misunderstood by the general public that often pigeonholes it into stress.

Re-experiencing, Arousal and Avoidance.

The avoidance prevents the minds ability to process and settle the event and buries it again. Typically some trigger would initiate the process causing the repeated re-experience arousal and avoidance cycle to perpetuate.

Mundane things get dropped from memory easily and quickly as they don’t carry an emotional charge.

Of course, trauma keeps us in a high alert state. We gear ourselves subconsciously to be reacting or ready to react creating an unnecessary and disturbing constant stress that filters into our conscious life as we react and over-react to situations that are not a direct threat.

Your body needs to process these emotional events and thus automatically keeps you in a loop. If your mind cannot settle and emotionally charged events it replays and replays until it can almost file the memory into a box that your mind uses to form aspects of your personality or behaviour.

Avoidance behaviour prevents natural recovery in the mind to deal with traumatic events. This process is perfectly normal and part of our human behaviour response cycles.

The fact that people avoid circumstances based on minor complex iterations of either dulling present events.

Using substances is frequently likened to the “escape” or “crutch” but here we see it as the new target for “avoidance” of processing emotionally charged events that are re-processing in our minds.

In order to start resolving these pending emotional memories, we need to stop avoiding them and start confronting them in a safe open and sheltered environment.

By reminding yourself of negatively aroused and charged events you can begin to logically process these memories and feelings that have been bubbling in the background and causing distress.

Prolonged exposure therapy
Prolonged exposure therapy (PE) is a form of behaviour therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy designed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. It is characterized by two main treatment procedures – imaginal and in vivo exposures. Imaginal exposure is repeated ‘on-purpose’ retelling of the trauma memory. In vivo exposure is gradually confronting situations, places, and things that are reminders of the trauma or feel dangerous (despite being objectively safe). Additional procedures include processing of the trauma memory and breathing retraining.

Avoidance The PTSD Conundrum

Renowned addiction expert, speaker author Dr. Gabor Maté is sought after for his expertise on trauma, addiction, stress and childhood development.

Gabor Maté (born January 6, 1944) is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician. He has a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma and in their potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health, including on autoimmune disease, cancer, ADHD, addictions and a wide range of other conditions.

Addiction based behaviours are prevalent throughout society and the human condition. While 1 in 7 odd people may struggle with a substance use disorder, when we open up the bar on behaviours we find that "addiction" exists across the spectrum. Screen addictions, shopping addictions, sex, love, travel, lifestyle, wealth and can all play into cycles that may become detrimental to your wellbeing.

GaborMate does not see or think that addiction is the problem he sees addiction as your attempt to solve your problem. So the real question isn't so much what the addiction is, more than where your your pain start and how did it get to where it is now?

Dr. Gabor Maté

Discover how we are all susceptible to “addiction” and what results in common compulsive needs to seek substances, persue self-destructive paths or get stuck and discover the best way to turn the tables back in your favour.

Relapse Prevention

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