Soul guitar.
Very interesting. A year before I began to suspect that I might have PTSD, a year before I really acknowledged that there's a mental illness called "PTSD", I developed a theory on stuttering (and strongly suspected that it works for every mental illness), which main theme was the hemispheric imbalance. The theory was based upon my - I can't put it better - existential experience: that I stopped my stuttering, and experienced the same what Irs experienced in his "morning".
My "guitar" was thinking: purely, strictly logical, but I had to think with - excuse me - my soul, because I was at the bottom of a severe depression, facing my darkness, my inner demons, and I couldn't afford it to avoiding the truth anymore.
The key is not in the switched hands, but in the balanced use of your brain, or - excuse me (I too never had thought before that experience that I have one) - your soul, all the same. When you're playing guitar, you use both your hands, your whole brain. Irs wasn't that good player with his genuine hand: maybe because his brain wasn't balanced. And according to my theory our left brain has too low, and the right too high activity, so then why helped his left hand to Irs, which makes stronger the right side? So it's not ambidexterity what's makes the difference (I'm left handed but do everything else with my right side). - But:
When you learn to play it with your other hand, it needs very intuitive logic: just look at yourself as your fingers try to move instinctively - as they had learned before -, with your brain desperately calculating the mirror equivalent of the other handed playing. I emphasize: intuitive logic, instinct & calculation, instinctive calculation. And to achieve it, you must achieve patience, strict movements, strong focus, serious concentration, with the emotional sense of the tone, tune etc.; the traits which you couldn't achieve during the harsh and sudden trauma, thus your brain stuck. With that stuck brain you can play in the real world with a lot of acting, the help of drugs, therapies etc., but - funny thing - you can't learn to play guitar with your other hand. So in the end, a guitar helps you over your trauma.
That is what worked for me too, without any instrument but my brain/soul, and it surely had taken practice, a lot of pain, failure before the picture came together. I had to learn, step by step, patience (it is a torment for an anxiety sufferer!), I had to really really calm down (from then on I can't redo it, it's that hard), forcing my thoughts to be as strictly logical as "existential", etc.: that combination led me to a distinctive change in my brain, allowing me to let in the truth about myself.
I must emphasize the "existential" side of that, because after all that was the key moment in Irs's recovery. Because "brain" is just a physiological name of something much more existential thing, may I present it: YOU. It's YOU who had the trauma, it's you who reacted with denial, not your "brain", no, it is a scientifically respected lie, may have the doctors over with it, but not yourself. In whatever guitar you need to play your own song.
