The book claims “some actions” during the traumatic event helps you conclude and get out of the moment as soon as it is over.

Ie., when you’re in a frightening situation fighting, running, yelling, or whatever the response within the power of the person, would end up using whatever the chemicals that your body generated as a response to the situation, rather than inaction or being frozen - which might leave the loop in the mind open.

Personally, it makes sense, and kind of related to this quote from Jeff Bezos where he says “Stress doesn’t come from hard work.. Rather from inaction..”

People with traumatic experiences(childhood abuse, etc) interpret even happy looking photos that show a child helping his dad fixing his car, drawing horrible imagination out of the picture like “kid attacking the dad”, “car falling on the man”, etc.

Such negative emotions seem to be typical when a “flight-or-fight" mode is switched on in the brain and never fully switched off. Though the mode is needed in extreme situations, it has to be switched off once the job is done.

OTOH, I also couldn’t stop myself thinking that probably this is the kind of thinking that certain ideologies try to evoke in people. ie., to interpret even innocent and accidental actions in a frightening way and use it to evoke “us” vs “them” divides (and sadly succeed sometimes).

This seems to be a technique where the eye movement is induced by moving the objects before the patient and bringing some deep thoughts to the surface. And it claims to be effective compared to other techniques that came before it.

Though I’m no way near to understanding this technique, I couldn’t stop myself from seeing that this is somehow related to REM sleep, which is the phase of sleep where you dream and which seems to help in mental health.

Techniques like PBSP are orchestrated techniques (through role-play) that help create a different internal narrative and relieve the “stuck state” of the patients. I couldn’t stop myself relating to this tweet by SVS, that I read on changing the internal narratives for growing leaders.

For several years I used to think such things are just “lying to yourself”.

But you know what? Take it or not, “no one is objectively always correct”.
We all have narratives and mental models of things around us. Even for the things that we’re scared of, our internal narrative probably is, “it won’t work out for me” (and you are not clear on the context of it - which might evoke fear).

An intelligent mind is probably something that constantly updates the narrative in response to the observation that it does in a way that is mostly consistent with the observations.

Having said that, I no longer dismiss such techniques as just “lying to yourself” and probably it makes sense (even though I haven’t consciously tried/benefited from it).

Such as,

and few more…​