Ernie’s Story
A Veteran with Nightmares for 43 Years!
Ernie joined the army and went to Vietnam when he was just 19. He was there in Khe Sanh during some of the worst parts of the war in 1968. He was wounded by getting shot and he killed many Viet Cong soldiers and saw many of his comrades get killed.
He was deeply traumatized by all of this and he started to have nightmares and other PTSD symptoms even during the war. After his tour of duty he returned to the USA and continued to suffer from PTSD symptoms. Ernie wasn’t diagnosed with PTSD until many years later at the Veteran’s Administration hospital. Once diagnosed, he began cognitive therapy at the VA hospital. Unfortunately, these sessions were not very effective.
In 2010 Ernie came to a presentation that I gave to a group of vets who all had PTSD in which I explained our new method of resolving the underlying causes of PTSD symptoms and gave a short demonstration. Then a few of my colleagues and I gave some additional brief demo sessions to some of the vets who were there. One of them was Ernie.
We then invited all of them to make appointments and come to my office in Carlsbad, CA; which was close to the Fort Pendleton military base in Southern California.
Ernie came to my office for a personal session with me. He took a seat and it was clear that he looked quite tired. When I mentioned this to him, he admitted that he had only gotten 2-3 hours of sleep the previous night. Ernie further explained that this was a common experience for him each night. He added that within two hours of him going to sleep, he would suffer from nightmares and find it next to impossible to go back to sleep peacefully. Any light or sound would disturb him and he reported that hypervigilance was a typical experience for him as well. This was evidenced by him often getting up and checking to see if the windows and doors were locked.
Ernie said that he had been living this way for the past 43 years. Despite feeling somewhat helped by the cognitive therapy sessions at the VA for the past 17 years, he still suffered from horrible nightmares every night.
Ernie desperately sought relief from his nightmares, and he looked into many other treatment options to help him, but nothing had truly helped eliminate his nightmares.
When I asked him if he’d like to get a good night’s sleep that coming night he looked a bit surprised and said, “Well yeah!” So, I gave Ernie an orientation. Because he had already been to my previous presentation, I was able to make it brief and we got started with the session.
I used IGO’s special form of testing to determine that he had 5 traumas that were at the basis of his nightmares. We went through the procedure that I had used with many other PTSD sufferers. He started with remembering things from the nightmares and got access to the first three of the energies in his body and resolved them using the IN Technique.
As the session progressed, Ernie began to look more relaxed. For the 4th and 5th energies we used the LOCATE Technique to find them and then shifted to the IN Technique to resolve them.
When we finished, we double checked both with having him think of the nightmare content and also testing with our unique testing method. He said that he could remember the content of the nightmares but that it was quite different to think of them now. He said that the painful feelings that had been associated with the memories were gone now and the whole thing seemed more like watching a movie but with no terror of emotional pain. He was quite amazed.
We agreed that he would check in with me the next day and let me know how his sleep had been. He called me the following day and reported that he had slept for 9 hours straight with no nightmares what-so-ever. He said that it was the first night this had happened in 43 years!
In just one session of using the Conquer PTSD Techniques, he was nightmare free and has been ever since. I saw him about a year and a half later and asked him how his sleep was and he said that ever since that one session he has been completely free of nightmares.
When you have nightmares, it typically means that you have old painful emotional energy patterns held in your body that are left over from some traumatic experiences in the past. Even though the events are long over, the energy patterns of your emotional reaction to the events continue to live on inside of you.
We describe these traumatic energies as “incomplete experiences.” This doesn’t mean that the events are incomplete. It also doesn’t mean that there’s some intellectual thing to complete about the events like somehow learning to accept something about it, etc. That doesn’t work to resolve the nightmares. It means that the experience of the energy patterns that were continuing to cause the nightmares were now complete and wouldn’t cause nightmares any more.
So, after 43 years of nightmares every night and 17 years of cognitive therapy and still having nightmares, now, in, one 90 minute session, Ernie’s nightmares were completely eliminated permanently.