By Joni BoydWednesday 14 Aug 2024Hope MorningsHealth and WellbeingReading Time: 3 minutes
When Craig Thomas was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (a total and permanent disability) and was told he’d likely never work again after 21 years as a paramedic, he was desperate to find help.
Key Points
- “It felt like all hope wasn’t lost – that maybe this could bridge it.”
- “We knew straight away, this is where we’re being called to.”
- “For us it’s a real testimony of Gods goodness in our life in spite of the hard times.”
- Listen to Bridget’s conversation with Hope Mornings’ Ben McEachen in the player above.
Craig experienced two years of weekly appointments with a psychologist, sleepless nights and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), with little to no improvement.
“We were pretty desperate by that point. I had been through a lot of traditional therapies over the course of two years that weren’t really having an impact,” Craig said.
“It felt like all hope wasn’t lost – that maybe this could bridge it.”
“I wasn’t sleeping, my family weren’t sleeping, it was incredibly difficult, and it didn’t seem there would ever be a light at the end of the tunnel for me.
“Then a friend of ours recommended float therapy alongside my EMDR therapy – I was ready to try anything.
“Within a couple of months, I instantly started to feel relief.
“It felt like all hope wasn’t lost – that maybe this could bridge it. Then with each visit I saw an improvement.
“I’ll forever be grateful.”
So, what exactly is floating?
“The water is that buoyant, [that] it’s keeping you up,” Bridget explained.
“It’s the size of a double sized bed, and it’s got 1000 liters of water to 400 kilos of epsom salts, so it’s impossible not to float. It’s a bit like the Dead Sea.”
(L-R) After 21 years as a paramedic, Craig was diagnosed with PTSD, The pair have opened a City Cave in Richmond, to help others in a similar situation.
Alongside his wife and former emergency nurse, Bridget, they began speaking to their peers, other first responders who were “just hanging on.”
“We knew straight away, this is where we’re being called to, we need to look at doing this going forward, and to share the experience with as many people as we can,” Bridget said.
The pair opened their own City Cave centre in May 2024 in Richmond, marking the first step on their mission to present float therapy as a natural solution to regulate a person’s nervous system and address underlying stressors before they have an irrevocable impact.
“We knew straight away, this is where we’re being called to.”
“For us it’s a real testimony of Gods goodness in our life in spite of the hard times,” Bridget said.
“The plans He had for us were good. He never left us and promised to bring beauty from ashes and this is what it was for us.
“With that came a surrender though and a trust that we had to rely on him totally and completely no matter how it looked or felt in the moment and walk through the season with him trusting he would bring us through and that it needed to be his ways not ours.”
“For us it’s a real testimony of Gods goodness in our life in spite of the hard times.”
Seeing their peers float and gain the benefits of the therapy reinforced Craig and Bridget’s desire to meet the demand for this type of remedy to heal or prevent.
“We need to be able to get this out there for other people to start helping them or help prevent them from experiencing what I went through,” Craig said.
“I felt that if I had this available to me before my injury, I may have been able to recover from the more regular trauma exposure that I had.”
Listen to Bridget’s conversation with Hope Mornings’ Ben McEachen in the player above.
Feature image: All photos supplied and used with permission.