When the Past Is Always Present

Emotional Traumatization, Causes, and Cures

Ronald A. Ruden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781138872615
• eBook ISBN: 9781135271756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

When the Past Is Always Present: Emotional Traumatization, Causes, and Cures introduces several new ideas about trauma and trauma treatment. The first of these is that another way to treat disorders arising from the mind/brain may be to use the senses. This idea, which is at the core of psychosensory therapy, forms what the author considers the "third pillar" of trauma treatment (the first and second pillars being psychotherapy and psychopharmacology). Psychosensory therapy postulates that sensory input—for example, touch—creates extrasensory activity that alters brain function and the way we respond to stimuli.

The second idea presented in this book is that traumatization is encoded in the amygdala only under special circumstances. Thus, by understanding what makes an individual resistant to traumatization we can offer a way of preventing it.

The third idea is that traumatization occurs because we cannot find a haven during the event. This is the cornerstone of havening, the particular form of psychosensory therapy described in the book. Using evolutionary biological principles and recently published neuroscientific studies, this book outlines in detail how havening touch de-links the emotional experience from a trauma, essentially making it just an ordinary memory. Once done, the event no longer causes distress.

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A THIRD PILLAR

This chapter introduces a group of therapies that treats emotional and physical disorders encoded in the brain as a result of traumatization. We term this group the psychosensory therapies. This term ties together techniques that have long since been introduced by others. It is suggested here that the psychosensory therapies be included along with the psychotherapies and psychopharmacology as one of three pillars for the treatment of physical and emotional suffering. While language in the psychotherapies and drugs in psychopharmacology are the tools that are used to produce change for these two pillars, it is the extrasensory response to sensory input that effects change in psychosensory therapy. In the psychosensory therapy havening, touch produces the change. It is not just the simple act of touch and the brain’s concomitant response that is therapeutic; it is the meaning the brain ascribes to the touch that appears to be critical.

Memories are the stuff we are made of. They consist of acquired knowledge, the forms, faces, and personalities of people we have met, things we have seen, and things we can do. There are memories that provide pleasure, and others that cause pain. We are traumatized when, reminded of a painful memory, we reexperience the original emotions and feelings.

Traumatization Appears to Produce Immutable Feelings, Thoughts, and Behaviors as if Written in Stone

You cannot find a safe place. Everywhere you go there is danger and distress. You wish for safety and seek it continually, but it never comes, for there is no rest without a haven. Anita, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, won’t leave home without a loaf of bread in her purse. Every night before going to sleep Sarah checks under her bed for snakes. Marty has suffered from a nonstop headache for two years. Rosa panics whenever she leaves her home. Josie worries about low-flying planes crashing into her apartment. John’s left nostril has been congested for seven years. For these individuals, this is life following their traumatization. Strange behaviors, unremitting pain, extraordinary physical sensations, and irrational fears are the consequences of the pathological brain-mindbehavior-body connections caused by traumatization. These abnormal connections produce distress beyond words. What causes this to happen? How does it happen? Why doesn’t it get better? While there are currently few answers, two facts are secure: Traumatization changes the individual, and the place where the change takes place is the brain.

Traumatization Always Involves Intense Emotions

We remember things because they are associated with strong feelings. There is no traumatization without them. Yet our entire life is filled with emotional events that aren’t traumatizing. What is unique about a traumatizing event? Ultimately, traumatization is about being trapped in the uncompleted act of escape. Here, in this book, we will describe a method to help the traumatized escape from the in escapableand find a safe haven. It is here, in this safe place, that our response to the memory of the event is changed forever.

How does one gain entry into the brain systems encoding those memories that produce abnormal behavior, thoughts, emotions, and feelings so they might be altered? We offer the psychosensory therapies as another approach, a third pillar (along with the two current pillars, the psychotherapies and psychopharmacologies) if you will, to change our response to these memories. To understand why the psychosensory therapies deserve to be called a third pillar, a brief review of the two current therapies is necessary.

The First Pillar: The Psychotherapies

Lady Macbeth’s physician failed. He could only watch as she sleepwalked, rubbing her hands, trying to remove the “damned spot” of the murdered king’s blood. Aware this behavior was beyond his understanding, he was nonetheless prescient when he commented, “Infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.”¹ The physician who spoke Shakespeare’s words was referring to what happens during sleep. Three hundred years later Freud ² listened to those secrets in the imaginary world of sleep, in stories we call dreams. Dreams, Freud declared, were the “royal road to the unconscious” that led to where the infection lay buried. By bringing these memories to conscious awareness and analyzing them, the unconscious would yield its secrets, thus uncovering both their origin and an approach to treating the problem. This could be accomplished, according to Freud, by talking with a trained professional who helped decipher the metaphorical clues in dreams. His ideas are described in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams. Other early researchers, including Jung ³ and Janet,⁴ also dug into the dreams arising during sleep to find the moment of traumatic encoding.

Over the last century, various methods for talking to patients as a way of treating problems became grouped into an approach called the psychotherapies. By using language, as in conversation, it was hoped the response patterns to memories could be altered. The pillar of psychotherapy attempts to deal with distressing emotions arising from life experiences.⁵ In general, most practitioners use the problem-cure model. The goal is to help the individual understand the origin of his or her feelings and reframe them so that they are no longer distressful. Psychotherapy uses only spoken conversation and occurs within a structured context. I do not know any talk therapy that encourages the therapist to touch the patient. In fact, it is generally forbidden—the cordial shaking of hands being the only exception. Research reveals that the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the client has a greater influence on client outcomes than the specific type of therapy used by the therapist. Below are listed several systems of psychotherapy.

Cognitive behavioral

Person centered

Psychodynamic

Psychoanalytic

Rational/emotive

Systemic (including family therapy)

The Second Pillar: The Psychopharmacologies

Decades later, armed with research showing that thought, mood, and behavior were a function of the amount and types of chemicals in the brain, physicians attempted to heal the mind by altering the brain’s chemistry. It was found that different substances (drugs) entering our bodies, by either ingestion or injection, could correct an imbalance of these chemicals. By doing so, symptoms arising from these abnormal levels could be ameliorated. These drugs, instead of reframing the underlying problem, restored normal levels of the chemicals needed for information processing, which in turn changed how we felt. For most symptoms, if the underlying issues are not resolved, the beneficial effect of the drug lasts only as long as the substance remains in the brain.

Psychopharmacology ⁶ is the study and use of chemicals to change mood, sensation, thinking, and behavior. The brain is a complex chemical soup. Dozens of substances are found to influence information processing and perception. The consequences of chemical imbalances include most of the disorders we consider psychological in nature, such as anxiety, depression, paranoia, and bipolar disorder. Thus, we have antianxiety drugs, antidepressant drugs, drugs that help us focus better, drugs that inhibit compulsive behavior, drugs that stop hallucinations, drugs that help us sleep, and drugs that help keep us awake. There are no drugs proven to cure a traumatization.

In psychopharmacology, the therapeutic relationship between the drug prescriber and the drug taker is of little consequence. The patient relates the effect of the drug, and the therapist adjusts the medications accordingly. This approach does not deal with the causes of the problem; rather, it relies on a diagnosis based on the manifestations in thought, behavior, and mood, which in turn, we have learned, reflect levels of the neurochemicals. This then leads to the choice of drugs. Below are listed some psychopharmacological drug classes.

Antidepressants

Antianxiety

Anticompulsive Antihallucinatory

Mood stabilizers

Pain relievers

Given the complexity of the brain, it is indeed remarkable that medications can truly be of help.

The Third Pillar: The Psychosensory Therapies

This book proposes a third pillar. This pillar comprises those therapies that use various forms of sensory input to alter brain function. We call this third pillar the psychosensory therapies, a body-mind approach. We argue that the psychosensory therapies, by using sensory input to restore dysfunctional systems to healthier function, represent a third pillar for the treatment of psychologically based problems, as they produce change by a different mechanism than the two previous pillars. Since sensory input has no inherent psychological component, we seek to explore those extrasensory responses to sensory input that allow for healing. We define an extrasensory response as one that arises, unbidden from sensory input.

It is not surprising that sensory input can alter the brain. For example, we can experience joy when listening to music, cravingwhen passing a bar, or comfort when being massaged. In fact, we experience extrasensory responses all day long. Whether smelling the chicken soup wafting out from a restaurant, stroking a pet, or enjoying a beautiful sunset, our senses evoke responses beyond those of simple sensory input. We take for granted all that happens to us during our hectic daily routine, and many of us miss the opportunity to use what we touch, see, hear, taste, and smell to make us happier and calmer, literally not stopping for that moment to “smell the roses.” While the mechanisms by which sensory input produces these extrasensory responses are not well understood, it must somehow involve the “meaning,” learned or innate, of the input to the organism.

Some psychosensory therapies produce a permanent change, while others require long-term maintenance therapy. A partial list of the psychosensory therapies is given below, and a fuller, but brief, discussion can be found in Chapter 9.

Group 1

1. Havening
2. Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)
3. Callahan Techniques–Thought Field Therapy (CT-TFT)
4. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)

Group 2

1. Yoga
2. Acupuncture
3. Biofeedback/neurofeedback
4. Exercise and related activities
5. Music
6. Light
7. Aromatherapy
8. Massage
9. Reiki Rolfing

Psychosensory therapies can be grouped into two major divisions, one in which the mind is activated by the memory of the event or a component of the event just prior to sensory input, and one in which the mind is at rest prior to sensory input. The first group is mind activated and addresses life-specific events and places them in a category called exposure therapies. The second group acts more generally to downregulate stress and its impact on information processing.

The specific event therapies are very similar in that they require a component of the event to be brought to conscious awareness. This book explores havening. A brief discussion of EFT, CT-TFT, and EMDR is given later; however, it is likely that similar mechanisms are at work for these four therapies.

Can we use the extrasensory responses of sensory input to alleviate suffering arising from a deeply rooted sorrow? To change our subconscious? It is our goal to begin to answer these questions. We will show that psychosensory therapies, including havening, have in fact a solid neurobiological basis. By the end of this book, I hope to have proven that the use of sensory input to treat trauma-based disorders is indeed a third pillar and worthy of study.

We begin by exploring the question: What it is about emotions that is necessary for traumatization, and further, why do we have emotions and what are they good for?

References

1. Shakespeare, W. (1603). Macbeth (Act V, Scene 1).

2. Freud, S. (1899). The interpretation of dreams. Vienna, Austria: Franz Deuticke.

3. Jung, C. (1947).On the nature of the psyche. Collected works (Vol. 8). London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

4. Janet, P. (1925). Psychological healing: A historical and clinical study (2 vols., E. Paul & C. Paul, Trans.). London, UK: George Allen & Unwin.

5. Wikipedia. Psychotherapy. Retrieved December 12, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychotherapy

6. Wikipedia. Psychopharmacology. Retrieved December 12, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopharmacology

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THE ROLE EMOTIONS PLAY

What are emotions? Why are they important? What role do emotions play in memory? What role do they play in survi...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• ROUTLEDGE PSYCHOSOCIAL STRESS SERIES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• 1: A THIRD PILLAR
• 2: THE ROLE EMOTIONS PLAY
• 3: ANCIENT EMOTIONS AND SURVIVAL
• 4: MEMORY AND EMOTION
• 5: ENCODING A TRAUMATIC MEMORY
• 6: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF TRAUMATIZATION
• 7: DISRUPTING A TRAUMATIZATION
• 8: HAVENING
• 9: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOSENSORY THERAPIES
• 10: TRAUMA STORIES AND TRAUMA CURES
• APPENDIX A: NONTOUCH HAVENING
• APPENDIX B: CULTIVATING RESILIENCE
• APPENDIX C: AN ANALYSISOF FEAR OF FLYING
• APPENDIX D: NIGHTMARES, NIGHT TERRORS, JUST BAD DREAMS, AND HAVENING
• APPENDIX E: SUGGESTIONS FOR TREATMENT
• APPENDIX F: TRANSDUCTION, DEPOTENTIATION, AND THE ELECTROCHEMICAL BRAIN
• APPENDIX G: HAVENING TOUCH: CLINICAL GUIDELINES
• APPENDIX H: THE DOWNSIDE OFREMOVING A TRAUMATIC MEMORY
• APPENDIX I: NOTES AND ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
• APPENDIX J: GLOSSARY