Car Accidents
At a health fair I was telling someone about Sue's story (see the PTSD case history) when I noticed another lady in the vicinity becoming rather emotional as she listened. I stopped talking and with permission tapped this lady to calm her down thinking to myself that this might be a similar traffic accident PTSD case. Right, but not quite as I had imagined.
She decided to have some treatment there and then, but because she felt some anxiety about treatment in a public place I tapped her first for that and eased her into telling her story. Her life, it seems, was a chapter of one motor accident after another, beginning at the age of 4 when she had witnessed a pile-up just by her house.
Taking her into the scene gradually I tapped her for the sounds she heard first from in the house, opening the door to go out, absence of mother (who was in a different room and didn't know she had gone out), walking down her path and seeing the crumpled cars. The colour of the cars was also significant for her as future accidents involved cars of similar colours. As we proceeded I tapped her for two more accidents by the time she was 13, dealing with the shock of the slow motion inevitability of impact and the feeling that her father could have done something to avoid the collisions.
Each incident was fairly quickly resolved but she just kept revealing more as the veils and blocks slipped. We dealt with the tragedy in her mid teens of the death of her best friend in a traffic accident and her ensuing loneliness, then with the shock of the suicide of a neighbour in her car.
