A pill to solve trauma memories?

I  don’t know whether to believe this or pretend it’s April 1st: I just read a report that scientists had developed a pill to make us forget bad memories.

When you read further, it seems the 60 volunteers were seen over three days. Afterwards, they could remember the facts objectively but not the scariness they’d had to endure in the experiment. Much like downing an aspirin – mental health restored with a pill.

This means there could be – possibly – one day – down the line – another option for dealing with traumatic memories. But we have a load of effective methods already. Since I work in an integrative and child-centred way, I do like to have a few options available to suit different clients. I’m not cut out to be a one-way-suits-all practitioner.

One day, when a young person came to see me too upset to talk about the awful thing that had happened, I felt excited that, when they were ready, they could have a choice of ways of dealing with the memory. I wasn’t limited to “talking” therapy. In fact, it felt a bit like being ultra accommodating!

I don’t do flooding, so that was out. But I could offer EFT, EMDR or NLP – in addition to the option of starting to talk about it, narrative style, if the client wanted to when we had lowered the intensity of the distress sufficiently. 

So I described each, briefly, to the young person and sent them away to have a think.

The EFT option has the disadvantage of possibly seeming weird to a young person who meets it for the first time. I mean, tapping under your armpit or on the top of your head can put a barrier in the way of the relationship! But seriously, running the Tearless Trauma technique needs only minimal words to achieve its aim.

The EMDR option would need more setting up if the protocol was to be followed properly – but there are two pluses: the multitude of ways of achieving the bilateral stimulation that the technique depends on (in other words, suiting the client again), and the fact that it can be woven with play and talk in several ways. Slightly more verbalisation is required for EMDR, although “what comes up for you?” does not need discussion after the client has answered. You simply say: “Run with that.”

The NLP way of dealing with trauma is the Fast Phobia/Trauma cure, which, in essence, involves running the scene backwards and forwards on a cinema screen. No words are necessary – and this is the option my client chose as first choice. The disadvantage is, of course, the enormous amount of trust it took on my part to believe anything was happening when I couldn’t check it out! Talk about handing over control…

The idea of dishing out a pill never entered my mind.