My daughter just returned to her normal self…
In late May, on a Saturday afternoon, my 9 year old and daughter and I were casually walking down the road to a friend’s house. As we chatted and laughed together, a suspicious looking car drove past us, slowed and stopped just ahead of us. I immediately felt on edge. The driver opened his door and pointed to his phone, asking me to come and show him some directions. I held my daughter and stepped away from the car. In a split second, he’d jumped out and held me at knife point, the passenger jumped out too and pointed a gun at us. My daughter just screamed! All I had on me was a phone, I just threw it at the driver. He grabbed it and just as quickly they drove away. It was an utterly surreal experience. My daughter just cried and cried and shook with shock. We slowly turned back and returned home to tell my husband about it all, where I then fell to pieces.
I contacted Kerry asking her advice about what to do for a child whose experienced such an incident. She advised me to get counselling within 48 hours and also offered for myself and my daughter to come and see her to have this new “post trauma technique” she’d recently learnt, done. It was incredibly effective. 3 Days post the event, we were both having a lot of flashbacks, my daughter was irrationally angry with her little brother and I was very emotional all the time. The technique took about 5 minutes for Kerry to do on each of us and it just drained the negative energy and the power of the incident away.
My daughter just returned to her normal self and has barely mentioned the event since, no nightmares or fear or sleeplessness. I stopped thinking about it all the time and when I did, it was so much less all-consuming. It’s just a memory rather than an entire physical experience, where I’d break out in a cold sweat and enter into fight and flight mode just with the thought of it. The incident has left me still very wary when walking in the neighbourhood with my children, I’m on high alert when I’m out, but I certainly don’t relive what happened all the time.
I would highly recommend this technique to anyone who has experienced any form of trauma.