PTSD is the result of a brain - information processing attempt "gone awry".

When you encounter an "event" (external to you or internal - in your mind & emotions) which you initially perceive as a possible threat to your survival, your amygdala puts you on "high alert", body, mind & emotions. So you get the initial fight or flight reaction.

Immediately you begin scanning your environment very rapidly with all your senses, trying to detect the cause of the triggering event (This is all automatic within your mind-brain - body system & happens so fast most people who don't experience PTSD just experience a slight bump on their path so-to speak if the threat turns out to be nothing).

So information shuttles rapidly between midbrain (emotional control centres), frontal cortices (information processing & integration) your senses (rechecking for more "data"), reticular activating system (RAS - in brainstem, & which is the initiator of the first alert as it detects change in your environment - external &/or internal).

For people who do not suffer from PTSD or panic - anxiety attacks, the amygdala shuts down your high alert status (ie your fight or flight reaction as soon as it is determined there is no threat.

Or it gets you to fight or flee if the danger is real. Important for people who suffer from PTSD - If fight or flight are not possible & the danger is real, a person will freeze until the threat has ended. (like an animal "playing dead" under similar circumstances).

At this time if you are okay you would continue on in your life. If possible you might release the built up energy (say by getting very angry & striking out, or by crying & shaking "uncontrollably" - to whatever extent. This is the body's way of letting the blocked energy go so your energy can flow normally.

Animals do this naturally, unless they are prevented somehow (which can be due to different things, including physical restraint, previous traumatic experiences, or "social & cultural expectations" - you can probably think of other reasons for this).

People are often conditioned by social & cultural expectations not to "let it go", "be a man", "don't let them know you're afraid" etc.

When this happens the energy gets "stuck" in your body - mind system & causes blockages. (Acupuncture is one way to attempt to get the stagnant energy to "release" so the energy can flow freely again). This "stuck" energy can cause physical, mental, emotional & psychological symptoms of "dis-ease" on the person. The severity can be related the severity of the triggering event but will be more likely associated with with your success or failure to "release " the original energy block.

In your case, you were tortured & you were unable to resist (fight), unable to escape (flight), & you most likely had no way to release this blocked energy.

PTSD appears to be a result of a "glitch" in the amygdala such that it keeps the sufferer on "high alert" even after the feared event has passed or been understood by the mind to be harmless. It's like the "switch is stuck on". You may notice that your anxiety lowers due to exhaustion.

This dysfunction in the amygdala seems to be a chemical imbalance caused by the original traumatizing event(s). It appears to mimic minimal brain dysfunction & used to be thought to be untreatable ("brain damage" or so it was believed).

However, it can be alleviated, by "letting go" of the blocked energies in your system. EFT is one way this can be achieved, however you may have a lot of blockages due to the nature of your traumatic experiences.

There is a book by Eugene Gendlin called "Focusing", Which you may want to check out. It describes a method of "digging into" these feelings & subsequently releasing the blockages often slowly, however it will work. There are also "focusing "groups throughout the world.

Brainwave entrainment can also be helpful, however it can dig really deep & cause you to feel extremely overwhelmed. If you do try this, use focusing with it to give direction to your energy work. Brainwave entrainment can dig deeply but without focus or direction.

Peter Levine talks of this in "Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma".

Last, but very important, you need to have the intention to get control of your anxiety, even while you don't yet know how to go about it. Without your intention (I don't mean faith or belief, although these might help) you will be "swimming against the current"

May you find your resolution... I know it can seem hopeless at times.

Best regards, Michael

The extent to which you believe those illness is the degree to which they will cloud your life is the degree to which they will.

In our society those labels are often given terms with permanency, and terms of self-limitation, and destructiveness, but rest assured that these are just symptoms of believing it is so and not coherently stuck empirically within the physical misalignments themselves.

Firstly, remove the insistency of labelling those items as "illnesses."

Secondly, learn whatever it required from those states of being the misalignments put you in. They put you in misalignment for a reason; uncover how and why with curiosity.

Thirdly, give yourself the new term to heal and never had been affected by any such stuff ever.

Oh my, I had no idea that someone would even conceive of this. Wow.

Now that I think about it, this is what the Aztecs did, who were known far and wide as the darkest culture on the continent. That's how far I have to go to find any kind of analogy.

I sympathize very much, because some of my first challenges in life were a (by comparison) very very very mild version of the same, so here's the best I have to offer in the hopes that it will helpful.

A process that immediately comes to mind is soul retrieval. It is practiced in various forms of shamanism, and you can do it yourself. It can be even more impressive (and hence healing) when someone performs it for you. It is the most heavy-duty healing tool I am aware of.

When experiencing something really, really painful the body's natural response is to compartmentalize, resulting in chronic muscle tension that can lead to chronic malnutrition of the affected body areas, which leads to all sorts of ailments.

It is the shamanic point of view that everything happening on the physical level, in this case, severe compartmentalization, is also happening as a dream. So if you make a change to your body, your dream changes- and when you make a change to your dream, your body changes. Huna in particular uses many forms of dream changing to achieve a change to your emotional state, which results in a change of your body. The simplest is symbol healing, where you ask yourself for a symbol of a pain, change it to your liking, and send it into your body as an instruction with a lot of imaginary fanfare.

Soul retrieval ups the ante by personifying the pain as a part of yourself that just couldn't take it anymore and left. You can see the similarity between the physical chronic-tension-compartmentilization and the dream of a soul that had to go.

So you imagine that your soul part has gone, and you set out on a quest to find it, and persuade it to return.

If you are willing to train yourself as a shaman in the process, you can use any technique of shamanic journeying to do it- go to your inner garden and bring a power animal, find the entrance to the underworld and descend. If you would prefer a more metaphysical approach, you could just have a gentle talk with that part of you, and if you are more witchcrafty, you could set up a ritual using herbs to represent yourself and the lost part.

You dialog, and you listen, and you keep having the dialog, and you find all kinds of pleasurable reasons for that part of yourself. Take your time, get to know that part of yourself, and do use creative denial a lot- when that part of you says the world is dangerous, tell it no, it's not, that is over now. Keep repeating that as long as the claim comes up, be gently, persistently persuasive.

Once your soul part has your trust, gently ask it to take a ride in an imaginary bag, and place it into your naval, and make a gesture of completion.

You may well have to repeat this process many times for different compartments- I still have some, but I seem to have gotten to many, many others and healed them, and my aches and pains have gone away in proportion. Your body knows how to heal itself, but your spirit needs to be whole so it can- and you can make it so, little step, by litle step, by little step, and they really add up.

Finally, in addition to admitting and using a process to heal negative things directly, I find it quite helpful to have a particular positive circumstance to think about a lot, something exciting to give energy to for a little while a couple times a day- a positive seed to plant, so to speak, and to water and watch grow, a place where all that liberated energy from your return soul parts to express themselves positively.