Trauma and PTSD Therapy - Andrey Laugman

12/11/2025

12/11/2025

Schema: when presence keeps flickering out

You're mid-conversation and suddenly realise you've no idea what you just said. You drive a familiar route and arrive with zero memory of the journey. You read a page three times before the words actually land. Your consciousness blinks on and off like a faulty bulb - functional enough to pass as present, but fundamentally absent.

Why the pattern entrenches:
• Negative reinforcement – Each micro-disconnection provides instant relief from overwhelming stimulus or emotion, training your brain that absence equals safety. The more you escape, the more automatic the exit becomes.
• Sensitisation – Your dissociative threshold lowers with repetition. What initially required major stress to trigger now activates from minor discomfort, until you're fragmenting multiple times daily without conscious awareness.

Managing dissociation is like bailing water from a boat with a hole in the hull - you can keep yourself afloat temporarily, but the leak remains. Grounding techniques, mindfulness apps, breathing exercises offer moments of relief, then the flickering resumes.

Working with the root mechanism that taught your consciousness to fragment rebuilds the hull itself. That's the difference between symptom management and structural repair. One keeps you functional but exhausted. The other restores continuous presence as your baseline. If you're ready to stop bailing and start rebuilding, the work exists. When you want to discuss what that looks like for your specific pattern, reach out.

11/11/2025

When Memory Goes Dark on Purpose

A client once said: "I know terrible things happened. People told me. There's evidence. But when I try to remember, there's just - nothing. Blank space where something should be."

Here's the mechanism. When threat becomes unbearable, your hippocampus - the part of your brain responsible for forming coherent narrative memories - essentially goes offline. Extreme stress floods your system with cortisol, temporarily shutting down the very circuitry that would encode "what happened" into retrievable story form. Your amygdala registers the terror, your body stores the sensations, but the autobiographical recording function stops. It's not malfunction. It's protection. Your brain made a calculation: experiencing this is overwhelming enough.

Remembering it in detail would be worse. So it fragments the file, scatters the pieces, leaves you with blank spaces where the narrative should live. Studies show 19-40% of trauma survivors experience significant amnesia for their trauma. The gaps aren't evidence it didn't happen. They're evidence of how catastrophic it was.

Those blanks can fill in - or not - depending on what serves your healing. Some memories return. Others stay merciful fog. Working with the root mechanism addresses what the memory left behind in your nervous system, whether you retrieve narrative details or not. You don't need perfect recall to dismantle what trauma built. When you're ready to work with what's actually there rather than endlessly searching for what's missing, let's talk.

11/11/2025

Exhaustion That Sleep Cannot Touch

You sleep eight hours. Ten hours. It makes no difference. You wake already depleted, as if you've been running all night. The fatigue sits in your bones, your muscles, behind your eyes. Coffee doesn't shift it. Rest doesn't restore it.

Here's what's actually happening. Your nervous system is running a marathon whilst you lie still. Trauma keeps the threat detection system online continuously -scanning, monitoring, preparing for danger that may never arrive. Your body burns through energy defending against ghosts. The dorsal vagal system collapses under chronic hypervigilance, pulling you into shutdown. That exhaustion is physiological collapse, not ordinary tiredness.

Sleep refreshes a nervous system that can genuinely power down. Yours can't. Not yet. It's still in the war, still trying to protect you from what already happened. The body keeps score -and exhaustion is part of that accounting. But this is changeable architecture. A system stuck in survival mode that can be recalibrated when you work with the root mechanism, not the surface symptom.

There's a difference between endlessly managing tiredness and dismantling what's causing your nervous system to drain itself daily. When you're ready to address the source rather than the spillover, let's discuss your situation. The answer exists.

11/11/2025

10/11/2025

When trauma arrives late

You survived the event. Weeks passed. Maybe months. You thought you were fine. Then the system crashed. That delay is not about weakness or denial. It is about how the nervous system files what it cannot process in real time.

I often see people confused by their own timeline. They expect trauma to announce itself immediately. When it does not, they assume they escaped unharmed. Then six months later, the sleep breaks. The anger surfaces. The world stops feeling safe. They think something new is wrong. But the nervous system was holding the record all along. It just needed time, or a trigger, to file it as a threat. That is the mechanics of delayed onset. The event happened. The response waited. Not because you are broken, but because survival required you to keep moving. The system postponed the reaction until it sensed enough safety to fall apart. That is not failure. That is a function. But the cost is real. You lose months thinking you were fine, then spend years wondering why you are not.

10/11/2025

Fight-or-flight was meant to save your life once. Then it stayed. The nervous system kept the mode running long after the danger passed. That is the bitter part. What protected you then now exhausts you. The signal fires at shadows. Your body mobilises for threats that are not there.

You cannot talk yourself out of it. The route bypasses conscious thought. By the time you notice the racing heart, the system has already decided. Fight or flight. No third option registered.

Here is what most people miss: this is not about anxiety. It is about a pattern locked in place. The nervous system learned a lesson it will not unlearn through reassurance or breathing exercises. It needs new evidence. Repeated. Specific. Accurate.

That evidence can be built. The mode can be interrupted before it fully fires. You can teach the system to read the difference between then and now. The route is technical. The method exists.

09/11/2025

09/11/2025

Naming What Hurts
People arrive carrying something shapeless. "I don't know what's wrong. Just heavy. Stuck. Can't move forward." We start unpacking it together - carefully at first, then with more precision. Then comes the moment: they say it aloud.

"I'm burnt to nothing." "I'm furious at them." "I'm alone in ways I can't describe." "Guilt is eating me alive." "The future terrifies me."
Something shifts. Not dramatically. Not immediately. But in that second when the nameless weight becomes a specific thing, the brain does something crucial. Your amygdala - your threat detector - has been screaming danger signals for months, maybe years. When you name what's happening, your prefrontal cortex steps in. It says: "This isn't just danger. This is grief. This is rage. This is shame. We've seen this before. We know what it is."

The monster under the bed becomes furniture you can move.
Naming reduces intensity. Fear named as fear stops being all-consuming terror and becomes observable, survivable. You create distance - you're not your panic, you're experiencing panic. That distinction matters more than most people realise. Control returns. The unnamed thing controlled you. The named thing? You can work with that.

My work isn't advice-giving. It's creating the conditions where you can finally say aloud what's lived inside you as whisper or scream for years. When something formless has been destroying you, precision becomes the first tool of transformation.
Next time it rises, ask yourself: "What is this? One word." Write it. Say it quietly. Tell someone who'll listen. Naming it is the entry point to changing it.

09/11/2025

Therapy Hasn't Worked. What Now?

You've tried multiple approaches. Some brought temporary relief. But the core problem remains.

Here's what I observe in clinical practice. Different therapies carry different philosophies and produce different outcomes. Some methods work at the symptom level. They reduce discomfort for a while. The root cause stays untouched.

Traditional psychology often settles for symptom management rather than actual resolution. Years pass. Relief comes and goes. The problem persists. Think of it like treating a broken bone with painkillers alone. The pain dulls. The fracture remains unhealed.
There's another factor. Sometimes clients themselves seek comfort over transformation. "I just want to feel better right now" differs fundamentally from "I want this problem gone." These are two distinct goals requiring different methods.

Certain approaches cannot address root causes by their very design. Yet people spend years in such therapy without realising they've been polishing symptoms rather than dismantling the structure underneath. The foundation stays cracked. No amount of surface work changes that.

Clear goal-setting matters. With my clients, we define the problem precisely. We establish a measurable endpoint, not vague wishes for wellbeing. This clarity produces tangible results in trauma and PTSD work. The method I use has structure and focus, not months of soothing without progress. If you're ready for transformation, for ending years of pain, I'm prepared to help. Compassion has its place. But solving actual problems requires more than sympathy.

Transformation isn't fantasy. It's accessible when you work with methods designed to reach the root. If you're ready to discuss your situation with someone who focuses on elimination rather than management, contact me.

Trauma and PTSD Therapy - Andrey Laugman