Step 1: Identify a “Target Learning”. This refers to the body responses that are caused by the trauma.For example, with the law enforcement officers, a frightening altercation with an armed assailant may leave someone with flashbacks to the event, intrusive thoughts, avoidance, insomnia, and nightmares. This is the target learning that can be rebooted and rewritten. Remember, all of these symptoms have a physiological basis—trauma, like anxiety, begins in the nervous and endocrine system. The goal is then to make sure that these kinds of triggers no longer cause these kinds of physiological reactions. Instead, the technique helps you come up with more appropriate responses that fit the level of threat in the here and now. Step 2: Set Up a Mismatch Experience.

Your nervous system responses happen whenever something reminds the brain of the traumatic event. In our example, having someone walk or move behind the law enforcement officer may instantly remind them of that terrifying situation. But as with systematic desensitization, we can create our own situations here in the present and condition a different set of responses. Setting up a mismatch experience will make you feel safe. This is done by “reliving” the trauma, but in a way that doesn't overwhelm you, and then taking yourself back to a safe place. In our example, the “target learning” (in other words, the conditioned response or the mental association) is that people moving behind you equals danger. You cannot change the past of what happened then, but what you can do is replay and rehearse a different outcome to the same experience.

Creating a “mismatch” experience is where we create a moment where someone being behind us equals calm and neutral. Every time you rehearse this rewound experience, you are essentially training your neurochemistry, your endocrine system, and your mental associations to play out a scene differently. Step 3: Repeat the Mismatch. The mismatch process is as follows: 1. Visualize the “safe place” before the incident. 2. Watch yourself watching the TV screening of the traumatic event. 3. Embody the movie and rewind quickly to the safe place. Let’s take a closer look.

Fully relaxing, you take your time imagining a calm and safe place in your mind’s eye. As you do this, you are creating real physiological feelings of calm in your central nervous system. Now, from within your safe space, you then expose yourself to the trauma, but with some psychological distance— as an observer rather than a participant, you watch the event unfold on TV. In your safe space, literally picture a TV screen playing the trauma, and you’re holding the remote control. If this still feels a little difficult, you could even watch yourself watching yourself on TV! Imagine that the film on TV begins before anything bad happens. Let’s say in our example that the police officers are entering a house without any fear or concern.

Then, the bad event is played through step by step. Then, when it’s finished, the person imagines pausing the film and floating into the screen where they are now experiencing it in first person point of view. They imagine that, while they are embedded in the film this way, the scenario is rewound so that they experience themselves moving swiftly backward through the event. They experience the event but moving backward. They end up at the beginning of the scene where it was safe and before anything bad happened. For the police officer, this means seeing the assault running backward and seeing the assailant move away from him and run backward out of the house and away. And that’s it.

Repeat this process, each time landing up in the place of safety, i.e., the moment before the bad thing happened. Remember to play through the story forward while at a comfortable, safe distance (i.e., watching the TV from afar), and play through it backward while you are embedded in the story, watching it through your own eyes. Eventually the association of the trigger and trauma response begins to fade. You will no longer experience the same emotional reaction when faced with the trigger. Seems like magic, but it isn’t. Instead, it simply confirms what scientists now know about how the brain responds to trauma and how that response can be “overwritten." Every time you rehearse this situation but reverse it, you are teaching your brain that it has a pleasant outcome, that it results in safety, and that it always ends in a neutral way.

And your brain rewrites itself accordingly. If the process is still successful, you will still remember the trauma and be able to look at it and talk about it, but you will no longer have the embodied physiological trauma response that you used to, the one that is so characteristic of PTSD. The rewind technique works because it addresses every human being’s need for “emotional checks and balances." When our need for safety is not met, mental health problems and especially PTSD can develop. By reviewing and replaying traumatic events, you expose yourself to trauma but in a physically dissociative (i.e., defused) way, and so you eventually fade that emotional component. It may be helpful to seek out a trained therapist to guide you through this process, at least in the beginning. The great thing about this method is that you can practice the technique without ever having to reveal names or details of the trauma or having to recount the narrative to a therapist.

You can try the technique on any event, long or short term, or practice it with many separate events and triggers, as is usually necessarily with CPTSD—complex PTSD. The technique can help you stop involuntarily returning to traumatic memories and cut down on intrusive thoughts and flashbacks. It’s as though your mind is given the opportunity to “put to bed” unfinished traumatic experiences, and the trauma response is rewritten and erased. Take a look at the story of Katherine Vilnrotter from the website of theHuman Givens Institute, which is a group of professional organizations and psychologists who believe that rewind therapy is a way to reboot some of the ingrained genetic “givens” we all start with in life. Says Katherine: “We established that my calm, relaxing safe place would be a warm beach filled with sunshine and soft rolling waves. As Sue slowly counted to twenty with my exhales, I felt myself slip into adeeply relaxed statewhere I was fully conscious of everything happening around me. Sue’s soothing voice then led me to a television set on the beach with a DVD player holding a DVD of my trauma experience.

As soon as she mentioned the contents of the DVD, I was immediately transported back to it—I was there—and I instantly started crying and feeling the same life-threatening distress of the trauma. I had never accessed it so quickly before. She brought me back to my relaxing beach to recover from the shock of feeling my naked emotions hit me so quickly. A few deep breaths later, I was ready to try again. Sue took me through therewind process. I saw myself watching the TV with the trauma playing forward and backward several times, but not actually seeing the screen. I then watched it play forward on the screen and I went backward through it.

As the memory was playing faster and faster, all I saw was a blur with particular moments as snapshots within it. I felt the distress on my face lessen and my breath normalize. After seeing it fly by countless times forward and backward, from various angles and points of view, I began to disconnect from it. My emotions were neutral, and I saw the trauma as a matter of fact and nothing else. After I had the pleasure of destroying the DVD in any way I wanted, Sue took me through scenarios that had triggered me in the past, describing my calm and confident reactions to them in the future. Sue then took the opportunity to remind me of positive aspects of my personality and my life accomplishments and reinforce the idea that I have the ability to realize my dreams. In short, it felt like she helped me remove the negative feelings and replace them with positive life-affirming feelings.

After she brought me back to the room, I felt relaxed, happy, and emotionally exhausted." Again, it’s important to seek out professional help if you’re experiencing debilitating symptoms of PTSD or trauma. Though the above process is not difficult by any means, you may benefit far more from receiving tailored advice and support from a therapist who can adjust the technique to suit your unique situation. That said, you don’t need to have a full-blown case of PTSD to benefit from the technique’s power to essentially “rewind” situations. We now know how influential certain life events can be on the core beliefs we develop, our self-concept, and the stories we tell ourselves. Clara, Thea, Nick, and Jamie all experienced their own individual patchwork of thoughts, feelings, expectations, biases, blind spots, shadows, secrets, habits, assumptions, hopes, dreams, fears, and difficulties. Most of these came directly from their early childhood experiences or by living through difficult events and relationships.

But what if these challenging situations were dealt with as and when they occurred, before they had a chance to embed themselves in the psyche as maladaptive thought patterns? Wouldn’t it be nice to proceed through life with a continually updated and renewed psychological “clean slate”? If it seems appropriate to you, you can try combining the rewind technique with other approaches discussed here. Think of it as a kind of mental hygiene. Every time you experience a shock, a loss, a disappointment, an embarrassment, and so on, you pause and employ the rewind technique to take some of the neurochemical sting out of the experience. The technique fits comfortably alongside positive visualization, calming and breathing techniques, opposite action, self-questioning, cognitive defusion, and even shadow work and reparenting. There’s no reason you can’t put memories from your earliest childhood on the TV, or watch from the security of your safe place possible future events that you might want to “cope forward” with.

When you are your own self-therapist, you are empowered to use whatever techniques help you feel more self-empathy, more presence, and more awareness. With heightened awareness, you can tell when you are having a physiologically anxious “fight or flight” response and can proactively choose to rewind through it again and again until the stimulus no longer produces that reaction. Your awareness lets you know how well your approach is working and gives you the confidence to adjust as you go, trusting in your own patience and consistency. No two people are the same, and the challenges that each of us face are completely unique. Nobody can say what your journey to mental wellbeing will look like. But at the same time, no matter who you are, healing, coping, and resilience are all familiar human challenges, and they can all be met best with plenty of compassion, conscious awareness, and the courage to take action to make change.