Dr. David Spiegel

Nothing can happen that will harm your body.

but on on the left side of the screen i want you to picture this guy and his approaching and what's happening and she said i really the light was it was getting dark i really can't see much of his facial features but i do recognize something i hadn't allowed myself to remember if he gets me upstairs he doesn't just want to rape me he's going to kill me and so in some ways what she was seeing was even worse so you know you're thinking good spiegel you made her even more frightened than she was before

But as you had pointed out in your PTSD stress lecture, you've got to confront the trauma to restructure your understanding of it.

So on the other side of the screen, I had her picture, what are you doing to protect yourself?

And everybody in a trauma situation engages in some strategy of self-protection.

You know, that's the salience network kicking in.

And she said, you know what?

He's surprised that I'm fighting that hard.

He didn't think I would.

And so she realized on the one hand that it was even worse than she thought it was.

But on the other hand, that she actually probably saved her life.

And so it was a way of helping her restructure her experience of the trauma and make it more tolerable.

So that helped with her.

She couldn't identify the guy, but it helped her restructure and understand her experience.

And that's something that you can do in just talking straight out psychotherapy, but sometimes you can do it a hell of a lot faster and more efficiently.

using hypnosis and there is one randomized trial out of israel that shows that adding hypnosis to ptsd treatment actually improves outcome so it's it's a way of accomplishing things that we understand in the broader psychotherapy world but much more quickly and and sometimes effectively

There's one thing I might add, Andrew, and that is, you know, there's a notion of the late Gordon Bower, brilliant cognitive psychologist, one of the founders of cognitive psychology at Stanford.

Gordon helped establish the concept of state dependent memory, that when you're in a certain mental state,

you enhance your ability to remember things about it.

And the bad example of that is the drunk who hides the bottle and can't remember where he put it until he gets drunk again.