Treating tsunami survivors for trauma
The effectiveness of a short-term psycho-physiological trauma treatment approach among South Asian tsunami survivors
Dr. Raja Selvam
© Journal of holistic healthcare
Volume 2, Issue 4, November 2005
you can find the original publication here
I am on the faculties of Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing professional training programmes and the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute.I lecture and teach internationally.
My increasingly eclectic approach draws from bodywork systems of postural integration and biodynamic craniosacral therapy,body-psychotherapy systems of somatic experiencing and bodynamic analysis,Jungian and archetypal psychologies, object relations and inter-subjectivity,affective neuroscience,and Advaita Vedanta,a spiritual tradition from India.My current interests are trauma and attachment on the one hand and trauma and spirituality on the other.
Summary
A short-term psychophysiological approach to trauma treatment was used to treat more than 200 adults and 50 children for symptoms of trauma from the Indian ocean tsunami of 2004.The treatments were offered to tsunami survivors from 13 fishing villages in Tamil Nadu,India,six months after the tsunami. Initial findings from follow-up research conducted four weeks after treatments indicate significant reduction in trauma symptoms in a majority of adults treated, even with single treatments.
Introduction
The picture was a devastating one. The mother and father grieving while holding the hands of their dead son lying on a beach in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, a south Indian state that lost thousands of lives to the tsunami of December 26, 2004.
I had carried around a copy of the India Todaymagazine with the picture of the grieving parents in it since the tsunami. And I had it with me when I arrived in Tamil Nadu with an international team of 11 trauma therapists six months after the tsunami to treat its victims.
In the course of the next two and a half weeks, we would treat trauma symptoms in more than 200 adults and 50 children from 13 fishing villages in three districts of Tamil Nadu. We would make seven presentations on trauma and healing in Tamil and English to those involved in tsunami relief work, and we would make arrangements to have all adults we treated interviewed four weeks after the treatments to assess whether our treatments offered lasting symptom-relief.
What will unfold in these pages is an account of the effective use of a short-term psycho-physiological trauma treatment approach based on Somatic Experiencing (SE) in a post-disaster setting. Initial findings from the follow-up research indicate that a majority of those treated were reporting significant relief from their symptoms four weeks after the treatments, exceeding our expectations.
The treatment approach
As a senior faculty member of Somatic Experiencing (SE) professional training programmes taught all over the world, a psychophysiological trauma treatment approach initially developed by Peter Levine and made popular in the book Waking the tiger: healing trauma1, I have always been interested in how to help people resolve their trauma symptoms in the least amount of time. With the opportunity to treat limited to one, or at the most two, treatments (only 10% of those we treated received second treatments), it was time to test in a post-disaster setting the theory and practice of short-term trauma symptom resolution refined over 10 years of teaching, private practice, and personal work.
Conclusion
The experience of treating tsunami survivors in India established the effectiveness of a short-term psycho-physiological trauma treatment approach based on Somatic Experiencing beyond our expectations. The non-government organisations we worked with in India have expressed a strong interest in further training, treatment, and research in the approach.
Trauma Vidya (meaning ‘knowledge’ in Sanskrit) is a non-profit organisation in the US set up to carry on such further trauma outreach projects in India and other countries.
Those interested in supporting its efforts can write to Beth Nielsen at bethmft@cox.net.
Treatment examples
The boy whose heart was beating fast
As team member Jeanne du Rivage was wrapping up for the day, a young boy approached her, took her hand in his hand, and placed it on his heart and uttered the word ‘tsunami’. His heart was beating very rapidly and he communicated his need for help with his eyes and gestures. He reported that his heart had been beating fast like that since the tsunami
Much moved by this interaction with the boy, Jeanne sought permission to stay longer to work with him.With the help of a translator, Jeanne helped him to normalise his heart rate by touching his chest and teaching him how to sense his body and help the discharge of high arousal in his nervous system through his arms and legs. The boy was very responsive and seemed to intuitively understand the process. At the end of the treatment, his heart rate was normal and he was more relaxed and happy.
The child that would not stop burning
Team member Lucia Ribas treated a nine-month-old male baby with touch.Touch is often not only necessary but quite effective in helping a traumatised child’s physiology to work through its trauma and return to self-regulation.The baby was three months old when the tsunami struck.The parents – who were both killed – placed him in a drawer and put the drawer on top of a closet.
The drawer floated away during the multiple waves of the tsunami. His brother found him hanging on a tree branch by his t-shirt several hours later a kilometre from the destroyed house. He had had a constant low fever since, with high peaks about twice a month. His aunt had sought repeated medical help for his condition only to be told that there was nothing physically wrong with him to explain it.
Lucia, who also practises energy medicine, found the physiological and energetic patterns in his lungs and in the back of his neck quite disregulated. As these patterns started to resolve with touch, his lungs went from being heavy to light and he started to breathe better. He started to laugh, his eyes and face became more soft and relaxed.