Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) and Primary Resolution of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Robert H. Moore

• Publisher: Loving Healing Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781615990795
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Index: Psychology

"Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) and Primary Resolution of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" provides a brief discussion illuminating the concept of PTSD: how it arises, what maintains it, how it progresses to increasingly constrain a person's life. PTSD also involves faulty thinking, but focus on such present-time reactions is ineffective without addressing the original trauma. PTSD is the consequence of attempts to avoid re-experiencing. Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) is a technique for overcoming this tendency, allowing the sufferer to experience the traumatic incident in a special, safe way. In the case of multiple traumas, this can be complex, needing to deal with each. It is necessary to find the original trauma, which invariably has led to more recent ones, and fully resolve it in one sitting. This provides complete relief from the burden of the past trauma. An individual session, designed to handles a single incident, may take between 20 minutes and 3 hours (average 1.5 hours). The primary incident may be obvious to the sufferer, or hidden. People with anxiety problems but no flashbacks may find forgotten traumas, the resolution of which through "Thematic TIR" can eliminate current symptoms. Currently occurring emotional and somatic symptoms are traced back in time until a root incident is found. Emotion and thinking are intertwined: correcting one will correct the other. TIR focuses on the emotion. Once the trauma is fully processed, the person is able to think rationally about it. Dr. Moore is a licensed marriage and family therapist, school psychologist and mental health counselor with graduate degrees in counseling psychology from Lehigh (1965) and Walden (1977) Universities. He is a Fellow and Diplomate of the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists; a Diplomate of the International Academy of Behavioral Medicine, Counseling and Psychotherapy. With over thirty years of practice, seventeen as Director of the Institute for Rational Living in Florida, he has co-edited or contributed to six popular books by Albert Ellis; authored chapters on various applications of Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Traumatic Incident Reduction for professional texts by Windy Dryden, Larry Hill and Janet Wolfe; hosted his own nationally syndicated daily talk radio program; and produced over three hundred psychologically-topical news and public service segments for radio and television. "Dr Moore's monograph will guide you in deciding whether you will benefit from TIR, and may inspire you to train to become a 'facilitator' who can help others with this powerful family of techniques."

TIR and Primary Resolution of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

By Robert H. Moore, Ph.D.

About the Author

Dr. Moore is a licensed marriage and family therapist, school psychologist and mental health counselor with graduate degrees in counseling psychology from Lehigh (1965) and Walden (1977) Universities. He is a Fellow and Diplomate of the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists; a Diplomate of the International Academy of Behavioral Medicine, Counseling and Psychotherapy.

With over thirty years of practice, seventeen as Director of the Institute for Rational Living in Florida, he has co-edited or contributed to six popular books by Albert Ellis; authored chapters on various applications of Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Traumatic Incident Reduction for professional texts by Windy Dryden, Larry Hill and Janet Wolfe; hosted his own nationally syndicated daily talk radio program; and produced over three hundred psychologically-topical news and public service segments for radio and television. He most recently operated a Domestic Violence Intervention Program in Clearwater under contract to Florida’s Department of Corrections.

Problem Profile

In the early 1990s, significant media attention was given to the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) of Vietnam veterans, whose post-war “nervous” problems (i.e., sleep disturbances, hypervigilance, paranoia, panic attacks explosive rages, and intrusive thoughts) were known to veterans of earlier campaigns as “battle fatigue,” “shell shock,” and “war neurosis“ (Kelly, 1985). As any number of mugging, rape, and accident victims have demonstrated, however, one need not have been a casualty of war to experience the problem (APA, 1987). PTSD appears in children as well as adults (Eth & Pynoos, 1985) and has been attributed to abuse, abortions, burns, broken bones, surgery, rape, overwhelming loss, animal attacks, drug overdoses, near drowning, bullying, intimidation, and similar traumata. It manifests as a wide range of anxieties, insecurities, phobias, panic disorders, anger and rage reactions, guilt complexes, mood and personality anomalies, depressive reactions, self-esteem problems, somatic complaints, and compulsions.

The PTSD reaction is most easily distinguished from emotional problems of other sorts by its signature flashback: the involuntary and often agonizing recall of a past traumatic incident. It can be triggered by an almost limitless variety of present cognitive and perceptual cues (Kilpatrick, 1985; Foa, 1989). Lodged like a startle response beyond conscious control, the reaction frequently catapults its victims into a painful dramatization of an earlier trauma and routinely either distorts or eclipses their perception of present reality. Although we can’t confirm that any of the countless animal species with which researchers have replicated Pavlov’s (1927) conditioned response ever actually flashed back to their acquisition experiences, the mechanism of classical conditioning is apparent in every case of PTSD. As salivation is to Pavlov’s dog, so PTSD is to its victims.

Like emotional problems of other sorts, however, PTSD is not accounted for solely in terms of antecedent trauma and classical conditioning. In order to provoke a significant stress reaction, as Ellis (1962) and others observe, an experience must ordinarily stimulate certain components of an individual’s pre-existing irrational beliefs. Veronen and Kilpatrick (1983) confirm that the rule holds for trauma as well as for more routine experience. Errant beliefs—related to the tolerance of discomfort and distress; performance, approval, and self-worth; and how others should behave—

“…may be activated by traumatic events and lead to greater likelihood of developing and maintaining PTSD symptomatology and other emotional reactions. Individuals who pre-morbidly hold such beliefs in a dogmatic and rigid fashion are at greater risk of developing PTSD and experiencing more difficulty coping with the resulting PTSD symptomatology”
(Warren & Zgourides, 1991, p. 151).

Also activated and often shattered by trauma are assumptions regarding personal invulnerability; a world that is meaningful, comprehensible, predictable and just; and the trustworthiness of others (Janoff-Bulman, 1985; Roth & Newman, 1991). Such pre-existing beliefs and assumptions, plus the various conclusions, decisions and attitudes specific to a particular traumatic incident (especially when held as imperatives) constitute the operant cognitive components of PTSD.

Primary and Secondary Trauma

What makes PTSD a particularly persistent and pernicious variety of disturbance is the occurrence, at the time of its acquisition trauma, of significant physical and/or emotional pain. Such pain, in association with the other perceptual stimuli, thoughts, and feelings one experiences at the time, constitutes the “primary” traumatic incident. The composite memory of the primary incident, therefore, contains not o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• TIR and Primary Resolution of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Psychological Foundations of TIR