What's an approach I can take to lessen the intensity of PTSD caused by a religious cult?

I left a religious cult. I was going to seminary to become a pastor at one point. I've purchased the “get over religious guilt” hypno audio, along the “let go of the past” hypno, and the “Stop Being Indecisive” audio. The cult I left had potential to offer status and admiration, but I couldn't continue to be a part of it, in good conscience. Unfortunately I still have PTSD from religion. Is it possible to erase past memories that cause PTSD? If not, what’s an approach I can take to lessen the intensity of the PTSD?

This question was submitted by 'Greg'

Mark says...

Well that's a really interesting question, Greg, and coming out of a cult can be really difficult because of course, as you sort of hint at in your question really, the cult kind of meets all of your basic emotional needs, or sort of pretends to whilst you're in the cult with the overt or covert message that if you leave the cult then you'll be nothing and you'll have nothing you are nothing without the cult.

Abusive partners in relationships do this as well, ‘without me you're nothing… you couldn't survive without me’. The cult will try to stop you meeting other people outside of the cult so the cult is the only source of your ideas and the fulfilment of your emotional needs.

Now an abusive partner will do that as well, might stop you seeing your friends and relatives and people outside of the cult of two people as it were. and also tell you that ‘you can't survive without me’, you know, ‘no one will love you as much as I love you’, ‘you'll never meet someone like me again’... so all these messages.

So the person gets glued into the cult situation, whether it's an intimate relationship or whether it's actually in a cult as you were Greg. Now we don't ‘erase’ memories, and this is a question I get asked quite a lot about hypnosis, ‘can you erase memory?’ like erasing a piece of video or or an audio recording. And the fact is that we need our memories in order to learn and avoid what was bad for us in the past in the future.

What we do is we decondition the memory so if it's a post-traumatic memory that you have or a series of memories you have from being in this cult then you might find that something called ‘faulty pattern matching’ occurs whereby something reminds your brain of the incident that's particularly troublesome for you, and your brain responds as if you're back in that situation again.

Now this can sometimes take the form of flashbacks or or nightmares which is the brain's attempt to to flush out the emotional arousal so we use a technique called the Rewind Technique, whereby you comfortably approach the troublesome memory, and by doing so whilst in a detached relaxed calm and very unusual manner the brain has a chance to relog that memory as past and therefore no longer threatening. So you can think about that time in future whilst not getting anxious so the memory is still there, but the brain has retagged it and we help that along with the help of the Rewind Technique, which is a very powerful way of dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder.

And it's kind of a hypnotic technique - although people who aren't even trained in hypnosis often use it, psychologists and so forth.