Could playing games REALLY reduce your trauma?

Remembering a visual image of trauma while playing a visual game blurs the trauma and knocks the edges off it.

I recently talked about trauma therapy with a trainee; she suggested I listen to a podcast about this. Professor Emily Holmes was speaking in the Life Scientific series on Radio 4.

Her research had developed around visual imagery and its power.

What was most interesting was that she looked at two versions of this visual imagery.

The first was recalling a traumatic event.

Here, we hold onto ‘snippets’ of the event, which become intrusive. I had already latched onto this in my trauma therapy. This concept of a ‘snippet’ that embodied the whole pain worked well to focus the work on. It’s also a concrete anchor for clients to hold onto and work on.

This made a lot of sense, including that we didn’t have intrusive thoughts of the whole incident, only parts. These do intrude and affect us day to day.

The second was even more enjoyable! It was a clear image or video of what would or could happen.

The example was of someone with agoraphobia (couldn’t go out). This person had an explicit video of people laughing at them if they went out. No one had ever asked about this before! Working on that helped resolve the phobia quickly.

Following this, Professor Holmes described people feeling suicidal, having a clear visual film of what they would do. All of this was new to me. It may also hold for nervousness about presenting, public speaking, attending school, and many other issues.

What Professor Holmes then did

The next stage was realising that if we recall these images or snippets of trauma as clear visual images, we can’t then do a complex visual task and still hold onto the trauma images as clearly.

I would have assumed that the traumatic images were deeply imprinted and challenging to move. Not so! The evidence was that doing this reduced the feelings from the trauma following this.

It was suggested that visual tasks simultaneously blurred the trauma (and reduced its power and hold) or knocked the edges off it.

The original studies looked at visual tasks, and then one of the younger research team members suggested Tetris as precisely the sort of task they were looking for. It is a simple game with blocks and is relatively universally accessible. Showing this to those who had been in a traumatic accident in Emergency Departments helped reduce traumatic memories afterwards.

Listen, if nothing else, it helps pass the time waiting in the hospital!

This resonated with me. It didn’t heal the trauma directly, but it did have a lasting effect in reducing it. So two things help—Tetris reduces it, and Trauma Therapy heals it.

The two trauma therapies I’m thinking of specifically are EMDR (the original Grand-daddy of PTSD treatment) and Blast (a newer, faster, re-ordered version of EMDR). These heal the trauma by also ‘calling up’ the visual snippets or images, stimulating the two sides of the brain individually and repeatedly. So we stimulate the left side and then the right, and repeat that, most often with a pen torch or light. The theory is that this disconnects the two sides of the brain, which can’t work together with this repeated separate stimulation. When they can’t work together, we get space to reprocess the trauma.

What does this knowledge mean?

Firstly, it helps support the basis for EMDR / Blast.

Secondly, it is a tool clients can potentially set up at home if doing exercises to try and find their traumas. They are unlikely to have immediate access to therapy at that point, and this could be instant help at home alone.

I would undoubtedly feel more confident in my book, asking readers to look for their trauma if they had something helpful immediately available.

Thirdly, it might be helpful in multiple situations.

Could it be used (content-free, where we don’t ask about the details of the trauma) in classes at school?

Could it be used before starting therapy to help clients?

Could it be built-in to virtual courses or programmes?

I can’t thank Hannah enough for steering me towards this podcast. It ignited something, and I hope to contact Professor Holmes next in New Zealand.