Years after the guns fall silent, many veterans still suffer the trauma and stress from combat.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is brought on by surviving or witnessing dangerous, violent, traumatic events. To help veterans cope, Sedona resident Pete Sanders, himself a veteran, is donating free DVDs to organizations helping soldiers, veterans and their families.
Copies are available through the Sedona Public Library, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Prescott, VFWs in Camp Verde and Cottonwood, and the Marine Corps League.
“My approach to this is that out vets deserve the best — the best medical treatment, the best from our communities and societies,” Sanders said. “I’m too old to serve; I did serve, but this is something I can do to help the vets now.”
Sanders served aboard the destroyer USS Richard B. Anderson at the end of the Vietnam War and his son is actively deployed in Afghanistan.
While Sanders’ Joy Touch stress-reduction techniques can be used by soldiers from any war, those sent to Iraq and Afghanistan have endured long deployments, multiple deployments and the constant threat of improvised explosive devices detonating at any moment on any patrol. Over time, those factors can compound high stress into PTSD.
“No combat is good, but IEDs are more frightening than a live fire,” Sanders said.
The DVD is offered free to any organization working with veterans. Copies are locally available through the Veterans History Project through the Sedona Public Library, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Prescott, VFWs in Camp Verde and Cottonwood, and soon the Sedona chapter of the Marine Corps League.
Joy Touch is a meditative mind-body technique. Essentially, a practitioner presses their finger to their forehead and imagines it stimulating the septum pellucidum, one of several pleasure centers of the brain.
The septum pellucidum is a spinal-fluid-filled sac of nerve fibers like harp strings located above the limbic system and below the corpus callosum, the tissue connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Brain scientist Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath Dean of Tulane University School of Medicine discovered that implanting electrodes in the septum pellucidum of severely depressed patients relieved their depression and gave them an overall feeling of well-being.
“Why put an electrode there when you can get the same effect? Implanting electrodes is invasive,” Sanders said.
Sanders said he is actively triggering what people instinctively do to relieve stress. For instance, people rub their foreheads when they’re stressed.
“You’re trying to caress those fibers, but your hand can’t get through the bony plate of the skull,” Sanders said.
People use cold compresses on their foreheads to relieve stress, although the most logical location to apply it, anatomically speaking, would be around the neck, adjacent to the carotid artery.
“One of the reasons a rocking chair is soothing is that the rocking motion triggers these fibers,” he said.
Labyrinths have been used as a mediation method for hundreds of years.
“A labyrinth is an anti-limbic device. Regardless of people’s religion or beliefs, in the way brain science works, walking involves your higher cortex. Anything that pulls you to higher cortex breaks that limbic broken record,” he said.
Joy Touch takes instruction to learn how to trigger it properly.
“When I’ve taught veterans, they often say, ‘This is the first thing I’ve been taught to do to deal with my PTSD,’” he said.
Post-traumatic stress is a common biomechanical reaction to trauma, and a normal mammalian defensive strategy, according to evolutionary biologists with the National Center for Biotechnology Information. All mammals react to danger with avoidance, immobility, withdrawal, aggressive defense, appeasement and playing dead.
Also known as “shell shock,” “battle fatigue,” or the “1,000-yard stare,” post-traumatic stress is mixture of these six defensive strategies all acting at once to varying degrees. When these defense techniques continue well after the danger has passed, considered roughly a month by psychologists, normal post-traumatic stress can be diagnosed as a disorder.
When normal stress becomes a disorder, symptoms include nightmares, flashbacks, high-intensity anxiety, irritability, heightened aggression, avoidance of sights and sounds that may bring back memories and often withdrawal from family, friends and people in general.
PTSD stems from feelings of helplessness or guilt, Sanders said. Many cope with alcohol or drug abuse.
“In some ways, I would encourage vets to look at PTSD as a badge of honor. Don’t deny it, don’t be ashamed it, but understand it and treat it — like a bullet wound; we give Purple Hearts for those,” Sanders said. “Be proud of the fact that you cared enough to have PTSD. If you didn’t care about the people around you, you wouldn’t have developed PTSD.”
Veterans often lose a sense of purpose after they’re discharged.
“We teach them, ‘My new purpose is to not let PTSD win,’” Sanders said. “We give them a mission of teaching this technique to your fellow vets so they’re not helpless.”
Military families also suffer from PTSD, Sanders said. Joy Touch can help them as well.
“[First lady] Michele Obama said many of these families and vets are taught to be self-sufficient and not to ask for help,” Sanders said. “When that military member comes home with PTSD they want to help, be that supportive member by understanding, but so many of the family members don’t share their problems with their soldier because they don’t want to burden them.”
Sanders has traveled the country teaching Joy Touch, including inside the Pentagon.
The wife of Cmdr. Brian Sorenson, of the USS Mitscher guided missile destroyer, approached Sanders about producing a DVD to help more veterans. The video was shot at Judeo-Christian Outreach Center in Virginia Beach, Va., while he was teaching the technique to the military community there.
To get a free DVD sent to a veterans organization, contact Sanders’ Free Soul organization online. Any donations go to duplicating costs and postage.
