How to Heal From trauma:-

;>We have observed observed that 75 percent of severely wounded soldiers on the Italian front did not request morphine, a surgeon by the name of Henry K. Beecher speculated that “strong emotions can block pain.”6 Were Beecher’s observations relevant to people with PTSD?

:>Mark Greenberg, Roger Pitman, Scott Orr, and I decided to ask eight Vietnam combat veterans if they would be willing to take a standard pain test while they watched scenes from a number of movies. The first clip we showed was from Oliver Stone’s graphically violent Platoon (1986), and while it ran we measured how long the veterans could keep their right hands in a bucket of icewater.

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:>We then repeated this process with a peaceful (and long-forgotten)
movie clip. Seven of the eight veterans kept their hands in the painfully cold water 30 percent longer during Platoon. We then calculated that the amount of analgesia produced by watching fifteen minutes of a combat movie was equivalent to that produced by being injected with eight milligrams of morphine, about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room for crushing chest pain.

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:>We concluded that Beecher’s speculation that
“strong emotions can block pain” was the result of the release of morphinelike substances manufactured in the brain.

:>This suggested that for many traumatized people, reexposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety. It was an interesting experiment, but it did not fully explain why Julia kept going back.

To be continued _ _ _