How to Treat COVID PTSD at Home
Trauma can literally make your autonomic nervous system lose its ability to orient you in time and space. COVID PTSD is a problem that involves being "frozen in time" at a moment when you were traumatized due to COVID. Releasing yourself from this "frozen" state will restore your emotional health.Post-Traumatic Stress is no joke. Through health coaching and integrative psychotherapy for psilocybin and other sacred medicines, Lydian and I work regularly with people who have been traumatized by the healthcare system, but COVID was a situation that went beyond healthcare into social settings and sacred places. So a lot of people in the world today have Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD) due to COVID. So below, I’m going to talk in depth about how to self-treat COVID PTSD at home.
Click here to schedule health coaching for COVID PTSD.
Treatment for Trauma due to COVID
In order to talk about treatments for trauma due to COVID, we first have to talk about “trauma” and what trauma IS. Trauma, according to the textbook definition, is any situation or event that causes a person to feel as though their life or the lives of their loved ones is threatened. According to this definition, trauma is something that happens to us often. Trauma, in fact, can be a daily occurrence for some people (policemen, for example). So why does trauma affect some people negatively while others seem to be unaffected?The short answer to this question has to do with whether or not we’re in a position to ACT when we’re faced with trauma. A policeman, for example, may chase down the bad guy. He/she gets to ACT on his or her fear. As a result, the policeman doesn’t take on the trauma and store it in the body. He/she works it out through the sympathetic nervous system which is the part of our bodies that light up when adrenaline takes over and we go into a fight-or-flight mode.
All animals are built to express fear through fight-or-flight when faced with an extreme danger. Here is a link to a video of a polar bear that is shot with a tranquilizer gun and later “shakes off” the fight-or-flight reflex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDlR-wl7iFI
Our bodies are designed to “shake off” fight-or-flight when we’re faced with stress and trauma, but as humans, there are many reasons why we don’t just “shake it off”. One biggie is that it’s socially unacceptable. Maybe your friends and neighbors have moved past the COVID lockdowns and they think you’re being overdramatic in regard to your own COVID experience. Maybe the mere mention of COVID is like a trigger for you and other people roll their eyes because they don’t understand why you can’t just get over it.
Triggers are weird and often people don’t really know what their triggers are so, while you might be triggered by having a neighbor with COVID, it’s also possible that you body is triggered by something really mundane like Daschund dog. Maybe you heard about COVID while you were standing near a pet store with Daschund puppies for sale and you found out at that time that animals could transmit the disease. Now, every time you see a Daschund, something weird happens to you and you feel anxious and stressed and “triggery”. This is how trauma works. Trauma is encoded in the autonomic nervous system as symbols rather than as words. Often, people have no memory or no full memory of what actually happened to them that was traumatic as trauma, by definition, is something that hits you in a way that is hard to describe in words. I had a dental appointment, for example, that caused me to develop panic attacks several years later. I detail how the trauma started, evolved, and turned into panic attacks in a discussion at this link of a personal trauma that caused me to develop PTSD (which was later resolved, I might add, using the treatments I talk about in the article below).
Trauma actually can cause a person to become split or dissociated into two or more parts as a result of a basic disagreement between the brain-mind (the cerebrum and associated structures) and the body-mind (the autonomic nervous system). Dissociation can look like PTSD, multiple personality disorder (known today as Dissociative Identity Disorder), panic attacks, phobias, depression, generalized anxiety, insomnia, bipolar disorder, and even yes, schizophrenia. This may sound far-fetched, but as someone who has studied past the master’s degree level in psychology, I can say that it makes sense and that trauma can, in fact, look like any of the various major mental illnesses that are currently on the books.
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But now, let’s look at the idea of dissociation from another, more scientific and logical point of view. Trauma is something that specifically registers in the autonomic nervous system. This system consists of 3 branches:
- The sympathetic, fight-or-flight branch
- The parasympathetic, rest-and-digest branch
- The paraympathetic, play-dead or “freeze” branch
While the sympathetic nervous system deals with adrenaline and situations that require us to run away or fight, the parasympathetic play-dead or “freeze” branch deals with reactions that cause our bodies to give up the fight and “play-dead” as a last resort in an effort to survive. For example, if a gazelle is running away from a cheetah and the cheetah catches the gazelle by the neck, the gazelle will stop running, stop fighting and suddenly go limp. This sometimes fools the cheetah into releasing the gazelle because the gazelle seems ill. Our human bodies are designed to react in the same way that the gazelle reacts to stress and trauma too.
One of the most dramatic forms of the “play-dead” response is called “Resignation Syndrome” and it has been observed and studied in some of the refugee children in Sweden who have fallen into a coma upon hearing news that their families are being sent back to a violent situation. These children have this response without any knowledge that Resignation Syndrome exists.
Some scientists believe that autism and autism spectrum disorders are related to Resignation Syndrome in that the body is reacting on a cellular level to a perceived danger of some kind. Dr. Naviaux, for example, has studied a substance known as suramin, which is found in anise, as a possible treatment for autism because of its ability to bring cells out of a “play-dead” state of dormancy.
Click here to buy The Origami of Autism: Transforming 2-Dimensional Thinking about ASD into 3-Dimensional Solutions.
But this is a huge topic and if you’re reading this article, it’s likely that you’re most interested in how to treat COVID PTSD yourself. So let’s talk about trauma treatments that you can do at home that target the autonomic nervous system:
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR
EMDR is a powerful healing modality that works adjusting the cranial bones through eye movements that resemble the movements that are made during REM sleep. When we are inundated with trauma or toxic thoughts, our cranial bones, which “float” over the cerebrospinal fluid and meninges can move slightly such that they are pinching the cranial nerves that are part of the autonomic nervous system.EMDR works quickly, it is extremely gentle, and it can be used with other types of at-home treatment for COVID PTSD. The use of EMDR with psilocybin microdosing and macrodosing is one of the fastest ways to naturally overcome PTSD, but for people who don’t wish to work with psilocybin, EMDR is a good place to start along with any of the other treatments listed below.
Click here to do a free trial of EMDR online.
Psilocybin microdosing for PTSD does not work as quickly as psilocybin macrodosing. Most people with PTSD need a number of full macrodosing trips to be able to access the traumatic material and release it permanently. Though it is possible to do psilocybin at home, integrative psychotherapy is very important to process the material from your psilocybin trips. Psilocybin is one of the most effective sacred medicines for PTSD as well as complex PTSD.
Click here to buy psilocybin online.
DreamLight.app
The DreamLight.app is another valuable tool that uses brain entrainment tools like flashing lights, ischronic tones, music, guided meditation, and online hypnotherapy to treat PTSD and other physical symptoms that are caused by unconscious trauma that is being stored in the autonomic nervous system. The DreamLight.app is easy to use and like EMDR, it is non-toxic and can be used with any of the other treatments listed below.Consider working with a combination of EMDR and the DreamLight.app as a natural cure for COVID PTSD. These treatments are especially valuable if you know exactly when and how you were traumatized. If you arrive at a point in your treatment when trauma is unconscious and you don’t have memories to guide you through the specific traumatic moments, the DreamLight.app works better to release these traumas without having to relive them or even remember them consciously. Click here to try a free online EMDR trial. Click here to try the DreamLight.app too.
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L-Theanine
I would rate L-Theanine as a very gentle herbal remedy for PTSD, but nonetheless, it is worth exploring as an herbal substance that reduces anxiety. If you’re just starting to work on COVID PTSD self-treatment, L-theanine is a good substance to work with in the initial stages because it can reduce anxiety without challenging the patient in terms of triggers and flashbacks. Click here to read more about the use of L-Theanine to treat PTSD.
Agmatine
Agmatine has been used to help people overcome Complex PTSD naturally. Complex PTSD and regular PTSD are similar except Complex PTSD involves repeated traumatic experiences and a different type of dissociation. If you’ve been in and out of healthcare settings and you’ve had multiple negative and traumatic experiences due to COVID, consider working with agmatine as a very gentle way to grow new connections in your brain to make it easier for you to release triggers Click here to read more about how to use agmatine to treat Complex PTSD naturally.
Psilocybin
Psilocybin either as a full dose or as microdosing is similar to agmatine but much more powerful. Though some people have taken agmatine with psilocybin, we don’t recommend using both of these substances at the same time because agmatine can reduce the effectiveness of psilocybin for COVID PTSD.For best results as a cure for COVID PTSD, come up with an intention before you take psilocybin either as a microdose or as a macrodose. In our experience it takes about 20-30 full-dose sessions with microdosing between sessions to overcome complex PTSD. Psilocybin sometimes enhances negative feelings associated with COVID PTSD as a part of the process of releasing these feelings from the autonomic nervous system. Please contact us at [email protected] to work with us as integrative psychotherapists who can help you through the use of psilocybin to treat COVID PTSD.
