Case Study: John’s* Story

John came in for treatment following an auto-accident involving him and his partner and another vehicle. John was experiencing symptoms consistent with PTSD: intrusive thoughts, avoidance of driving, nightmares, unexplained sweating and shortness of breath. The hardest thing for him was that he was scared to drive. Not only did it feel like he had lost his freedom, but he felt shame around the fact that his partner was seemingly just fine after the incident.

Therapy began by helping John understand how common his experience actually is. This helped him to feel a little less shame around his healing and to accept his experience as part of his body’s instinctual response to save his life. I didn’t ask John to recount any of the details of the event for the first few sessions, that only leads to more nervous system activation and can be re-traumatizing if you’re not ready for it. Instead John began by connecting to something called internal-resources: states of nervous-system regulation in his body, mind and environment where his body was able to naturally begin the process of discharging excess survival energy and returning to a state of integration.

After a couple of sessions, John was able to access states of comfort in session and began to process the actual event. We didn’t go through it chronologically, but started in reverse, beginning with the first moments of safety John experienced after the event and helping John’s body to more deeply access and process the understanding that “I survived.”

John was beginning to gather confidence in his ability to utilize the tools and to regulate his own nervous system. We began to work with other phases of the incident, utilizing memory-reconsolidating techniques and somatic therapy techniques to help John re-pattern his experience and meaning of the event. John was beginning to drive at this point with fewer symptoms of distress, and was experiencing greater relief and ease during his every-day life.

In addition to the work in session, John began utilizing some tools outside of session in order to better help manage the stress of his everyday life and busy work-schedule. This helped John to be in a more regulated state more of the time, allowing him to be in a better place to heal and recover.

In the seventh session John came in excited. He was happy to announce that he had driven further than he had driven since the incident without any fear or second-guessing himself. This was a big step in John’s recovery, and we celebrated it together and built off of the momentum.

The last few sessions focussed on creating new meanings, and cleaning up some of the unprocessed dimensions of the event. Over the course of 10 sessions of therapy. John had gone from being unable to speak about the incident without becoming anxious and emotional to confidently driving again. More significantly, John felt like he had reclaimed his freedom: freedom to drive and to travel, and freedom from his fears.

*Name has been changed to maintain confidentiality