Even the sensationalist headline talks "merely" about "erasing" PTSD: the stress disorder -- NOT the memories.
Until full processing and integration (which can take years, decades!), traumatic memories are LIVE and unprocessed memories; they are re-experienced as if it was happening NOW; again and again (see e.g.: fMRI studies show that they activate brain regions responsible to process the present, in stark contrast to normal memory recall). This is not comparable to "being reminded about a past event and having strong feelings about it". That is the goal. Not erasure as if nothing ever happened.
you can know something is bad and act accordingly without having a disordered and painful relationship with it
Most people will have no capacity to feel what you feel about it. You have the gift of feeling what is necessary to feel about that event. It's precious, and it needs to be nurtured. My utter contempt and sorrow for what I feel about certain things belongs in the world, as best as I can hold and steer it.
No one can feel your pain, and if you zap it, then not even you can feel it. It's unloving to yourself and your experience.
I think these treatments are better understood as methods to encourage one's mind and body to reprocess some experience so that it is "merely" a terrible thing that happened so they can live a stabler, more balanced, more normal life.
It kind of reminds me of Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind. You cannot just erase something. Drugs effectively erase the bad feelings, but they don't last. Okay, so such a treatment being discussed is, I suppose, an everlasting solution. Why would I be against this? Because you cease being you in your entirety (which includes your trauma).
It's not an easy sell by any measure, especially for those who just go "well fuck that, I can erase this with some cocaine right now". Erasing it is a solution, for sure, but it's not a free solution. Something is lost in the process (you). Understanding that, stay with me here, that it's beautiful is part of it, that you have a beautiful part of you forever. It's completely didactic, you have to teach the person that they went through something and are PRETTIER in their surviving of it. Then it stops being traumatic.
If we zap them, we take away the pretty. If I zap you, and then say lets talk about it, and you say "well I don't feel any which way about it anymore", then it's lost. It's gone. So something is lost in the process. So yeah, this is exactly what is told to the most beaten down people in life.
I wouldn't zap the mustard seed.
You cease being you every second of every day.
It’s like having something in your mouth. It doesn’t go away. PTSD therapy is not about zapping the object to make it vanish. It’s about gaining the possibility to chew and swallow it.
You're tilting at windmills, mon frere, by exaggerating egregiously.
> You are custodian of the trauma.
True, and beautiful, but debilitating trauma that destroys its vessel is not delivered to the future that would learn from it.
There's an obsession with erasing the past and not digesting it. The subconscious wants reconciliation, and it will emerge over and over, that's what PTSD is. Lobotomizing someone is certainly one way of reconciling it. The only way out is through imho, that you are forever changed and saw the face of mankind, and your subconscious will not accept any cheap reconciliation for the most part.
"Just zap it", I sense the subconscious will not let you get away with that. You are custodian of the trauma.