PTSD counselor visits Oklahoma
ANADARKO — Dr. Carrie Elk, of the Elk Institute for Psychological Health and Performance in Florida, travels the nation to offer free counseling to post-traumatic stress disorder patients. She recently visited Oklahoma for the first time to counsel four special operations service members.
Elk brought four service members from across the country and the United Kingdom to Oakridge Christian Camp in Anadarko after being invited by camp director Brian Ball. The camp is less than an hour from Fort Sill.
Ball was willing to donate the camp space to Elk to work with her patients because he knows there are Oklahomans who need help with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Every year Elk works privately with 200 to 300 veterans. She also speaks to groups in auditoriums and serves as a guest on radio talk shows.
“PTSD is actually very simple to understand how you get it and how you fix it. What’s complex and daunting is living with it and all the complexities of it,” she said.
The disorder stems from a traumatic life event such as military combat or a family death. During a traumatic event, the body responds to threat in the environment with fight or flight, which is also known as sympathetic memory.
“You have a different kind of memory when you’re in fight or flight,” Elk said. “So any time you smell that smell later, or hear that sound, it’s attached to the sensory feeling.”
Elk works with patients to help them catalog traumatic experiences in their memories, to remove the physiological response as if the situation were happening in real time.
“They watch their traumatic scene play out for the first time from a relaxed state, and we have to go over it a few times,” Elk said. “It’s not happening, it happened.”
Each traumatic experience is allotted one two-hour session, with three sessions available for each participant in a week. That is usually enough time to catalog the experience as a part of the past rather than a current situation, she said.
The shorter sessions are spent addressing “splinters,” remnants of the traumatic experience that has been discussed. That is necessary about 10 percent of the time.
“I always want to make sure, if we’ve taken the time out of life to resolve one of your major traumas of your lifetime, we want to make sure we got it all taken care of,” she said.
Before and after a session, Elk asks participants how they feel. At first, she will hear words such as horrified, guilty and enraged. After the session, participants may say they feel relieved or at peace.
“When you’re in a situation like that, it’s happening to you and you definitely don’t feel strong when stuff’s happening to you,” she said. “But in 2017, when you’re looking back and it happened to you way back there, and here you stand, you can feel pretty powerful, pretty strong.”
The goal of counseling is not to remove the emotion surrounding a memory, but to recognize the memory as an event that happened in the past rather than a situation happening in real time.
“We don’t do trauma therapy so that people don’t have emotion about their traumas, we do it so they aren’t debilitated and they don’t get triggered,” Elk said.
Elk said she does not look for places to go and do counseling, but rather is responsive to where there are opportunities.
“We hope to bring her back,” Ball said.
Counseling, accommodations and travel come at no cost to participants. The Elk Institute is a nonprofit that relies on donations and sponsorships. Services from the Elk Institute are provided internationally.
“There’s just such a need for good treatment,” Elk said.
Elk, whose career in mental health spans more than 20 years, founded the Elk Institute in 2014.
To learn more about the institute, visit ElkInstitute.us.