[Applause]
well I’m so glad to see you all here
right this afraid it was gonna be like a
middle-school concert where by the end
there’d be like four sad parents I’m
gonna be talking about veterans and
treating post-traumatic stress disorder
obviously veterans aren’t the only
people that have trauma or get PTSD and
I’m sure pretty much everybody here has
some connection to trauma unfortunately
either directly or through somebody they
know but to set a context in a study
that was published just last year on
treating veterans with PTSD it was
reported that 11 percent of the veterans
in Vietnam continued to report
debilitating symptoms of PTSD forty
years after the war imagine we have
soldiers right now that are still
getting PTSD this means that 10% of the
people that serve our country all the
way back from Vietnam through Iraq
Afghanistan and 40 years into the future
may continue to suffer with flashbacks
nightmares insomnia panic attacks hyper
vigilance and all the other symptoms of
PTSD so let’s start by looking at the
current research a study that was just
published in January
looking at the three first-line psycho
therapies for PTSD reported that of
those people that finished the study the
people that finished treatment
approximately 35% of them generally no
longer met criteria for PTSD now that’s
actually a very good result for most
interventions now they didn’t report how
many sessions were involved in them and
they did report the drop
Rachel would sometimes was quite high
sometimes the dropout rate was as high
as 39% but I’d like to compare those
results to the movie theater technique
in the first published results by the
research and recognition project 97% of
the participants that completed
treatment no longer met criteria for
PTSD they were in complete remission
there since has been to different
replication studies one with male
veterans and one with female veterans
and in both cases they had similar
results and finally we just finished an
even larger even more more robust study
that was grant a grant in New York State
now the final results are in but every
indications once again the efficacy was
well over 90% so how is this possible
how can there be such a difference well
oddly enough it starts with the
realization that PTSD and phobias have
the same basic underlying structure
overwhelming responses that occur in the
present are connected to traumatic
events in the past okay
that’s say like a dog phobia most people
that have a dog phobia we’re probably
scared by a dog when they were a little
kid probably not bad dog but nonetheless
sorry it’s the Internet age it couldn’t
resist once you realize that you can use
phobia treatments it changed the
landscape quite a bit now the movie
theater phobia technique was actually
developed by Richard Bandler and John
grinder and first published in 1979
since then we’ve learned an awful lot
about how the brain works and because of
that the research and recognition
project was able to develop an
experimental protocol called the
reconsolidation of traumatic memory or
the RTM protocol now the brain process
at work here is called reconsolidation
theory most of us are familiar with
consolidation theory that’s the idea
that over time short-term memories
consolidate under certain circumstances
become long-term memories okay
reconsolidation theory builds on that
but it has kind of a twist basically it
turns out when you access one of these
long-term memories especially the
emotional content they become labile or
changeable for a little while and then
they reconsolidate into a new permanent
long-term memory
imagine your brains like a commute a
computer and we keep our memories in a
file folder okay what we’re saying is
you can pull a file out of the out of
the folder open it up in an application
like Photoshop change the memory itself
and then refile it back into long-term
memory so if you can change the memory
what do you change well with a movie
theater technique we actually focus on
the structure of the memory not the
content so to explain that let me offer
you a couple of thought experience for
the first one I’d like you to think of
one of your favorite foods it doesn’t
really matter what it is as long as it’s
something that you really like but to be
honest experience tells me that it’s
probably pizza in the ace of spades so
what am I going to do is for a second
just make an image of your favorite food
in your mind’s eye and if you’re most
like most people you’ll notice that it’s
a color picture okay now I don’t know if
you remember knobs okay we used to have
knobs on TVs and there was one called
the color knob and you can take that
knob and if you turned it down the
picture would become black and white
with the younger folks here it’s kind of
like filters and Instagram so what I’d
like you to do is once again think of
the favorite food start out with the
color picture turn it down to black and
white and notice how your experience
changes most of the time people report
that it seems a little less tasty a
little less compelling I’ll give you
another example with the roller coaster
what I’d like you to do is imagine
riding a roller coaster so you’d be
sitting have a seat in the front of the
car and you could see the track going up
in front of you
then the bar comes down and to going up
the hill you might even feel a little of
the anxiety really excitement contrast
that with the same memory but step out
of it so you can see the roller coaster
in the distance imagine yourself getting
on the car and then it starts to go up
the hill to do it’s a little bit
different right it’s almost like it’s
somebody else doing it over there so
what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna take
those pieces and we’re gonna combine
them to make kind of a stripped-down
version of the movie theater technique
so you can see what it’s like we start
out by having a client tune into the
memory that was traumatic just briefly
and then rating the level of intensity
between zero to ten then we have them
imagine a movie theater in their mind so
that they’re sitting in the theater okay
and they can see the movie screen up
ahead they imagine the memory as a movie
up on the screen and once again you make
it black and white so now they’ve
stepped out of the memory it’s in black
and white and then to make it even more
distant we have imagined floating up to
the projection booth so they can look
down to feed themselves in the seats and
then that them down there looks at the
younger them up on the screen now they
review that memory enough times that it
starts to get down to a zero believe it
or not at that point it will
reconsolidate so that now the long-term
memory no longer has any effective
charge on and when they get triggered or
when they remember the event
there’s no PTSD symptoms left at all now
the fact that we changed the memory
directly okay and we changed the
structure of the memory allows us to get
much stronger effect that lasts much
longer time in fact all the results of
97% were in only three sessions on
average and there was zero dropout rate
now unfortunately I don’t think that
wars or trauma are gonna stop anytime
soon that’s why I think the movie
theater
technique is so important we can’t stop
trauma of the suffering that’s caused by PTSD doesn’t need to continue