I write this as I approach the 12 month point since I was introduced (for a second time) to Trauma Tapping Technique.

By this point, I had accumulated 28 years of trauma, from being sleep trained as a child, to being an undiagnosed autistic person struggling to navigate the school environment, friendships and relationships, as well as experiencing horrific incidents working as a paramedic in the ambulance service and being ambushed and attacked by an angry mob while doing humanitarian work abroad. I finally broke down after I escaped this attack by being smuggled through hostile roadblocks in the back of a van by friendly locals but landing back almost straight into a national lockdown and being sent on ambulances to Coronavirus patients with inadequate equipment or knowledge. 

My mind broken, I began having nightmares of being chased and killed several times a night, every night. I’d see a crowds of people attending a football game or shopping and I’d suddenly flash back to the mob. I’d drive around and remember the body of the person in a fatal crash I’d been called to. With no sleep and all my energy spent on attempting to regulate my emotions, I had no energy for anything else, so I spent my days lying in bed feeling depressed most of the time.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Burnout: that’s what they said I had, and The Ambulance Service Charity (TASC) was kind enough to organise Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for me. The therapists I spoke to told me that I’d never be cured of PTSD, so I’d just have to learn to manage it, giving me a box of tricks for when I lost my mental balance.

So I began to organise my life around my mental health; an initially positive move, but one which only precipitated a collapse later. I moved back home and used Intuitive Eating and Joyful Movement to work on my relationship with food and exercise. I gave up full-time work and spent more time in nature and growing food in community gardens. I was lucky to find a job in an area of work that I loved that paid me enough to live, was remote and flexible enough to work around my mental health, and was only 15 hours a week. With great effort, I began to recover from burnout and manage my PTSD.

That was until my job disappeared, and, realising that I wasn’t well enough to do another job that didn’t have the aforementioned perks, it plunged me back into the deep spiral of depression and PTSD. After months in bed, with plates and pans piling up around me, the thought occurred to me that just managing PTSD was a pretty bad strategy, and that if I was to be able to go through life not plunging into despair at every small challenge, I’d have to overcome PTSD - no matter what the CBT therapist said. At this point I was desperate enough to try anything that might cure my trauma.

Out of this desperation arose what I’m sure will be a turning point in my entire life, when I was reintroduced to Trauma Tapping Technique (TTT), thanks to the founder of the charity I was working with when I got attacked.

I say “re-introduced” because I was first introduced to it while working in the camps a few years previous, where TTT was a mental health treatment offered to refugees in the camp clinic. But as a Paramedic rooted in western medicine, I was highly sceptical: “Of course people enjoy a face massage in a quiet environment with someone who is there because they care,” I’d say, “But you just cannot fix severe trauma with something so simple”. How thankful I am to have turned out to be so wrong.

I was sent a book called “Trauma Tapping Technique: A Tool for PTSD, Stress Relief, and Emotional Trauma Recovery” by Gunilla Hamne. I was still sceptical, but I was desperate more, so I tried it.

I remember one of the first feelings that came up after trying TTT and reading the book was that of liberation. Here was a technique I could do on myself whenever I wanted or needed (no appointment required) and didn’t rely on anyone else, was free (as I couldn’t afford anything involving a professional) without having to beg a charity for money, and that could actually free me from my trauma. 

And so I began to tap every day, sometimes several times a day. I would light some incense, put on some relaxing music and tap for 45-90 minutes until the tapping came to a natural stop. And within a week, I noticed something strange. For the first time in my life, as far as I can remember, I experienced a day without being triggered. I didn’t know that that was even possible, let alone normal. I thought it was normal to get that rush of adrenaline and fear at some point every day. A week later, I had a difficult conversation with someone I loved that I couldn’t have had only a few weeks before - again, without being triggered. It felt like I’d had a brand new nervous system installed. I noticed a space opening up in my chest that had been occupied by a ball of stress so long I’d stopped noticing it. 

It took around 3 months for me to get to a point where I didn’t consider myself to have PTSD any more. It’s hard to describe a transformation that only I can see. If I had undergone a physical change, it would be more obvious externally. If it were a physical transformation, it felt as if I started as with a frail and sickly body, with barely the capacity to lift even a cup. After a week, I began to regain some strength in my body to look after myself. After 3 months I returned to a normal body health again, and after a year I feel like an athlete reaching for the highest potential my body can reach.

After moving past my PTSD, I found myself following the thread of trauma back through my life, processing emotions and traumas from early adult life, secondary school, then primary school all the way back to re-experiencing my sleep training at a few months old. In each moment, I experienced my inner child and, with TTT, I was empowered to reparent him with love.

I found it difficult to communicate what was happening inside me, so I came up with different analogies along the way to help people understand. The first part of my journey felt like finally finding the pressure release valve of my highly-pressured emotional system, where I had been squeezing my feeling into since my parents screamed at me that I’d be sent to boarding school if I didn’t stop crying. The next bit felt like TTT was giving me a suit of armour so that I could chop back the thicket of brambles that I’d just get hurt by when I tried to cut it back without it, allowing me to get to the root of the thicket or problem. The third bit involved feeling the feelings that were causing certain limiting beliefs and stories to become stuck inside me, and once those feelings had been felt, I experienced those stories gently floating away like a cloud. And now, it feels like TTT has taught my nervous system what I should have been taught as a child: how to feel feelings in the moment as they arise. TTT has regenerated my capacity to feel emotions.

And the healing work now carries on by itself, with TTT only featuring rarely for the times I need some extra processing strength. I now go months without being triggered, being left with just a small discomfort that is less like being on fire and more like when your favourite restaurant is closed when you were looking forward to going. But when life does present me with some pain, I find I can sit with the feelings instead of repressing them and a few days later, not only are they gone but it’s healed some of the underlying wound too. I had spent my life running around hitting ‘snooze’ on a million alarm clocks that filled my head with the noise of alarm, and TTT taught me how to find the ‘off’ button. I still have to wait for each alarm clock to go off again to know it’s there, but when it does, I find myself happy that I’ve found one more I can turn off.

I still have nightmares occasionally, but they don’t cause me to jolt upright like they did before, and I understand that these dreams are my brain doing the healing even in my sleep! Having processed the attachment wounds that were playing havoc in my relationships, I found myself feeling secure in attachment and able to provide space for good communication, leading my relationships to flourish with genuine and authentic love, no longer weighed down by my need for love and to feel important. As a result, I also found in myself a capacity to hold a healing space in which others can experience discomfort and triggers in a safe and loving way too. 

The openness and calmness that has come over my mind has also allowed me to experience an intense spiritual journey, bringing myself into awareness of my service to something bigger than me and all other beings. 

Not only did TTT help me throw off the chains of PTSD, it also evolved my capacity to really feel and release my emotions, and through that, helped me process my childhood traumas and let go of limiting beliefs. It gave me my life back, and I’ve never been more happy to have been so wrong about something.