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I am harmless to others and others are harmless to me. I feel safe with the young and with the old.

I feel safe with those who are like me and those who are different from me.

I feel safe with animals, I feel relaxed with animals, I live in harmony with all animals.

The weather is my friend. I am in harmony with all of life—the sun, the moon, the winds and the rain and the earth and the movement of the earth. I am at peace with the elements. I am always comfortable in any weather. My body adjusts to the outer temperature. I am at ease.

I have also learned to be tranquil. In the midst of chaos, I can be tranquil. Tranquility is inner peace.

I practice being peaceful when others are agitated. I do not have to buy into people’s agitation.

For me, peace of mind and loving myself is the most important state I can experience.

By changing my thoughts, I now create peace in my world.

Peace replaces fear, terror is replaced by tranquility, scariness becomes serenity, uncertainty becomes confidence.

Love replaces hate. Repression makes for freedom. I bless all people with love, I surround the planet with love.Excerpted with permission from the upcoming release Heal Your Mind: Your Prescription for Wholeness, Through Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition (2016) by Mona Lisa Shultz, M.D., Ph.D. & Louise Hay

I know we are safe. All is well, and so it is.

Perimenopause and PTSD

If you’re perimenopausal, and you have symptoms of anxiety and panic from PTSD, there are a variety of other medicines. Corydalis tuber treats nervousness, agitation, insomnia, and headache. Coptidis rhizome treats nervousness, anxiety, chest pressure, hot flashes, and memory issues. Then magnolia cortexpromotes relaxation, decreases anxiety, and helps with insomnia as well as the stomach upset.

THE AFFIRMATIONS
When it comes to handling trauma, the first thing Louise does is have a person re-create it in herself and in her world. To help a person handle trauma from the past, especially childhood, she helps them create a “healthier inner child,” one with memories of safety and security. Other therapies do the same. They call it “re-parenting yourself.”

Louise’s affirmations for the inner childhelp you establish thought patterns in your brain for the child in you who saw the world as anxious and fearful.

So, before we get to those exercises, is there really a way that that could affect your brain?

Is there really a way that healing the inner child with affirmations could really rewire the injured brain circuitry of a person who has PTSD?

Quite possibly, yes.

There is a lot of science to suggest that past trauma changes the way we perceive the world. When you have trauma at a young age, the memory warps your brain circuits. Affirmations help you change the wiring.

So perhaps by doing these inner child exercises, we are implanting in our brain competing thoughts and memories that dilute or drown out traumatic ones. I don’t think you can ever remove a traumatic memory. Many wonderful, brilliant, and great people’s lives have been formed and directed by trauma.

Nelson Mandela, for one, was imprisoned for 25 years and, to say the least, was subjected to catastrophic humiliation and physical and emotional suffering that later took its toll on his physical health. And his trauma gave birth to a form of wisdom that is a revolutionary force to create peace in our society. You don’t want to remove all your traumatic memory, do you?

If you do, think again.

Erasing traumatic memory may remove sources of wisdom that could inform your future avocation or calling. Once again, try a dialectic: I, Mona Lisa, personally can understand the desire to wipe out pain and suffering in one’s past—and (notice I didn’t say “but”) I choose instead to think of all the sundry painful and traumatic events in my life as, in fact, a credential.

Many people think my best credentials are my B.A. from Brown University, my M.D. or my Ph.D. and certification in psychiatry. That may be true, and you may also agree that I’ve received wisdom in some other critical ways:

• Scoliosis and having a rod in my spine with a fusion from my neck all the way through
• Epilepsy and narcolepsy, where I “fall asleep,” once falling asleep while running across a bridge and getting hit by a truck and thrown 86 feet, fracturing my pelvis, ribs, and scapula and probably sustaining a brain injury
• Bilateral invasive breast cancer with a double mastectomy and reconstruction
• During one spinal fusion revision surgery, bleeding out on the table, taking 10 minutes to be resuscitated, and being in the ICU for two and a half weeks
• Foot-long clot in a vein in my left hip
• Four small bowel obstructions
• Dyslexia and ADHD

Suffice it to say, it’s been a bit of a ride. I managed to survive, maybe even thrive, despite the fact that I have a lot of scars on my body and my brain, and yes, maybe a vulnerability in my spirit, though I wouldn’t want to admit it. I bring to you this credential. Now join me in Louise’s meditation.

In the exercise below, Louise tries to help us rewire our brains’ vision, hearing, and memory circuits by guiding us through an inner child meditation; she tries to re-create a safer and more loving world. Perhaps she is helping us rewire our amygdala and hippocampus circuits as we “re-parent” ourselves.

Inner Child Work Meditation

See your inner child. Notice how the little child looks and feels. Comfort your child.

You might apologize to your little one for having neglected it for so long and only berated it and scolded it in the past.

But now you can promise your inner child that from now on, you will always be there for it, you will never leave it alone, and whenever this child wants your comfort or advice or playtime with you, you will always be there.

You acknowledge that this relationship with your inner child is one of the most important in your life.

Tell your child how much you treasure it. Build its self-esteem and self-worth with praise.

See your child relaxed, safe, peaceful, enjoying itself, laughing, happy, playing with friends, and running free. Enjoying everything it does, school, studying, being creative, sharing with others, touching a flower, hugging a tree, picking a piece of fruit, eating with delight, playing with a puppy or a kitten, or swinging a swing high above, laughing with joy, running up to you, giving you a big hug.

See the two of you, healthy, living in a beautiful, safe place, having wonderful relationships, parents, friends, co-workers, being greeted with joy wherever you go. Having a special kind of love with a special person.

Now visualize the teenager within you, being comforted as it moves through the bewildering time of puberty that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood, building its self-esteem and self-worth.

Visualize the adult in you now with love and congratulate yourself for having come this far. You were always doing the best you could at any point in time and space.

Build your own self-esteem and self-worth. The love and acceptance you have for yourself now will make it easy to move in the next level of self-love.

You are very powerful. You have the power within you to help create the kind of world you want all of us to live in.

Using Cognitive Behaviorial Therapy (CBT)

Now that you have been medicinally and pharmacologically rewiring your body, you might as well do the same with your brain and your behavior. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you start to identify the thought patterns in your brain, the “what if” and “I could, but I’d rather not” thought patterns.

Exposure therapy can help stop the pattern in which you avoid more and more things in the world. This is a procedure where you use imagery and with a tremendous amount of support start to imagine past traumatic events and conceive present circumstances that remind you of them. With support, you’ll learn to desensitize your brain and body.⁴

It’s important, at this stage of your treatment, to tell yourself that you are a brave survivor for having come so far and that you want, paradoxically, to face new situations that might be scary and out of your comfort zone.

Holding two thought patterns that are seemingly opposite concepts (i.e., paradox) is the key to healing trauma. For example, “I love myself just the way I am” is a phrase that can be coupled with its seeming opposite, “I want to change.”

Often people who have a history of trauma and abuse have difficulty holding paradox and are prone to black-and-white thinking. So, you might say, “I’m a survivor, I’ve come this far, this is what I learned to do to feel safe.”

However, if the way you’ve learned to feel safe is by limiting your life to only one or two friends, you’ll feel less anxiety at first, but in the long run you’ll socially starve. Limiting happiness and freedom because you are panic-stricken means you are still shackled to your trauma.

That’s all right. You can love yourself where you are and want more.

How do you do that?

Dialetical behavioral therapy (DBT) helps you train your mind to handle seemingly opposite thoughts and get rid of the black-and-white thinking that escalates panic and limits your life. Dialectical behavioral therapy for many is the treatment of choice for PTSD and panic disorder.

This kind of cognitive behavioral therapy is based on Tibetan Buddhism and mindfulness. It helps you learn how to regulate panic, fear, sadness, anger, shame, and guilt. You may also want to consider hypnotherapy, EMDR (stands for “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing”), and other therapies that help people alter their mind-body networks for trauma.

• You experienced painful emotional or physical trauma in your family growing up.
• You’ve suffered emotional or physical trauma in one or more of your relationships.
• There has been an event in your life in which you’ve been threatened with such serious physical or emotional harm that it would be out of the range of what we consider normal life experience.
• Some examples might be living through war, witnessing an accident with loss of life or limb, experiencing rape or incest, or seeing your children suffer abuse.
• Whatever the trauma you’ve experienced, you tend to have “repeat performances” of this painful pattern in one relationship after another, one job after another, and so on. The painful pattern seems to replay over and over in your life like the movie Groundhog Day.
• You have thought patterns of terror, fright, panic, and edginess.
• You have a feeling that you might be hurt or harmed, or that someone might reject or criticize you.
• You believe you won’t get the help you need.
• You feel you’re incompetent to change the situation.
• You feel like you’re going crazy.

Body Symptoms of PTSD

In addition to the symptoms in the previous section, you may have these:

• Trembling and shaking
• Hot flashes and cold chills
• Numbness and tingling
• Nausea or a sick feeling in your stomach
• Pressure in your chest
• A pounding heart
• Cold sweats
• Shortness of breath
• A lump in your throat
• Dizziness and vertigo
• Feeling like you’re “out of your body”
• Feeling like you’re dying

You’ll find that trauma can rewire the brain, and if the above descriptions sound familiar to you, read on. You will have a whole host of solutions you can use with your health care team to create physical relief and emotional serenity.

DOLLY: ANXIETY AFTER A TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE
Dolly, 28, came to Mona Lisa Shultz, M.D., Ph.D. because her family was concerned for her after a traumatic childhood. Here is Dr. Lisa’s account:

THE INTUITIVE READING
I saw Dolly as if she were in a house and someone was walking in and out and slamming the door. The individual in the house who seemed to be creating terror seemed to have violent mood swings, so potent that they would affect people nearby, in the same room or even on other floors of the house. It felt like Dolly’s world was threatened, and the horror of being around this person reverberated in her body.

After meeting that family, I saw that Dolly’s life seemed unstable in so many realms. Did she have a hard time making friends outside of her family? I had a hard time seeing a partner or other relationships. It didn’t seem like she could last in a job and make enough money to support herself.

THE BODY
Her head felt shaky. Her body felt shaky. Everything about Dolly’s mind and body felt nervous. Was there dizziness and vertigo in her head? I sensed a lump in her throat. It seemed that she was constantly out of breath, and her heart skipped a beat in a way that was terrifying.

I could see that her digestive tract tended to look like it had butterflies in it, giving her that nauseous feeling. All the muscles in her body seemed tight, making her feel exhausted. I could see Dolly up all hours of the night trying to get to sleep.

THE FACTS
It turned out that Dolly had seen her father beat her mother on multiple occasions. His explosive temper drove away everyone except, of course, Dolly. Dolly still lived with her father because she couldn’t manage to find Mr. Right, nor could she make any job last. Her problems with focus and attention made it hard for her to finish school, and she was soon diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Dolly told me that doctors gave her antidepressants for irritability, and then they said she had bipolar disorder, the idea of which she thought was ridiculous. Dolly began to medicate away the memories of her father’s violence with alcohol and marijuana. All she wanted was to have the episodes of panic go away. She wanted the chest pounding, the choking, the trembling, the nausea all to just leave so she could start to have a happy life.

I often ask clients, “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” We all have opinions on who was right and who was wrong according to our own perceptions, and we can all find ways to justify our feelings. We want to punish others for what they did to us; however, we are the ones running the story over and over in our own minds. It is foolish for us to punish ourselves in the present because someone hurt us in the past.

To release the past, we want to be willing to forgive, even if we don’t know how. Forgiveness means giving up our hurtful feelings and just letting the whole thing go. A state of nonforgiveness actually destroys something within ourselves.