HELL’S KITCHEN, N.Y. (NEXSTAR) — When Vietnam veteran Mike Moreno returned from the war all those years ago, he was only 23 and says he — like many veterans — came back with PTSD.
“I was getting nightmares,” says Moreno, who served as a rifleman. “I was getting flashbacks. I’d hear a noise and I would go into panic. I never could talk to anybody about my experiences in Vietnam. It brings back too much anxiety and depression.”
Moreno says he didn’t even learn he was suffering from PTSD until about a decade after his return home. For 12 years, Moreno says he attended group and individual therapy sessions but these offered little help.
And though many veterans have found help with the aid of Transcendental Meditation, Moreno says it only made him grouchy.
But early last year, Moreno, then 78, started a new, cutting-edge therapy known as RTM, short for “reconsolidation of traumatic memories.” Moreno’s therapy was administered over three sessions with New York mental health counselor Florence Maroney. She says RTM alleviates painful memories in a calm setting.
“The treatment allows clients and therapists to work to a level of safety to move through what what they’ve experienced,” says Maroney. “Without experiencing the intensity of their memories.”
The therapy uses a short visualization process to retrieve and alter memories.
In Moreno’s third and final session, Maroney challenged Moreno to imagine a movie screen. Moreno was tasked with mentally projecting and reviewing non-traumatizing similar-but-different images of his memories on that screen.
Moreno described the process as “just pictures of horrible things that I’m looking at,” and said that the trauma he’s lived with is gone.
“It took a traumatic memory and put it into ‘general memory,'” says Moreno. “I can think about it. I can talk about it. It’s no longer that bad, bad, horrible memory box.”
Moreno says RTM therapy has worked wonders in his life, including in relationships with his four daughters and eight grandchildren.
“This therapy has opened up my life again,” says Moreno. “The demons that haunted me for 55 years… are no longer there.”
RTM therapy is gaining popularity as a PTSD treatment, with a reportedly high success rate and little risk of relapse. The therapy — or “protocol,” as it’s official called — was founded by Dr. Frank Bourke, PhD and was first used to treat survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.