Psyche, thanks for this thread. I read it all when you first posted and dug into most of my neuroscience papers looking for evidence to back up the information, or to disprove it. I'm happy to say all the trauma and other info I have backs it all up thus far.
Here is some info I hope others will find helpful in piecing together the dynamics and mechanics of trauma and how it might be Worked with:
Unable to neutralize affects with adaptive action, traumatized people tend to experience their affects as somatic states: either through their smooth, or striated musculature. Thus, people with PTSD tend to somatize (Saxe et al, 1994, ) or to discharge their emotions with actions that are irrelevant to the stimulus that precipitated the emotion: with aggressive actions against self or others (van der Kolk et al ,1991). When the disorganizing intrusions can be understood as failures of integration of traumatic experiences into the totality of one's life, the psychotherapist is in a position to recognize seemingly overwhelming affective experiences as actual reliving of past terror.
Deconditioning of traumatic memories and responses involves [...controlled exposure to (a) the stimulus components (environmental cues), (b) the response components (e.g. motoric actions, heart pounding), and the meaning elements (e.g. cues regarding morality and guilt) of the traumatic memory...].
This [deconditioning] consists of: (a) controlled activation of the traumatic memories, and (b) corrections of faulty traumatic beliefs. The critical issue is to introduce the capacity to flexibly remember the trauma.
...in order to overcome the intrusive, sensorimotor elements of the trauma, a person must transform the traumatic (non-verbal) memory into a personal narrative, in which the trauma is experienced as a historical event that is part of a person's autobiography.
This entails being able to tell the story of the shocking event without reexperiencing it.
It is generally assumed that once all relevant elements of the total traumatic experience have been identified and thoroughly and deeply examined and experienced in the therapy, successful synthesis will take place. The work by Resick & Schnicke (1992) supports the notion that exposure of all elements of the trauma, and their associated shifts in perception of self and others does lead to successful resolution of trauma-related symptomatology.
Excerpted from:
Approaches to the Treatment of PTSD; Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D., Onno van der Hart, Ph.D., Jennifer Burbridge, M.A. [Originally appeared in S. Hobfoll & M. de Vries (Eds.), Extreme stress and communities: Impact and intervention]
_http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/vanderk.php
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Animals with a history of trauma also have much more intense catecholamine responses to stress85 and a blunted cortisol response.25
Stress causes a return to earlier behavior patterns throughout the animal kingdom. In experiments in mice, Mitchell and colleagues98,99 found that arousal state determines how an animal will react to stimuli. In a state of low arousal, animals tend to be curious and seek novelty. During high arousal, they are frightened, avoid novelty, and perseverate in familiar behavior regardless of the outcome. Under ordinary circumstances, an animal will choose the most pleasant of two alternatives. When hyperaroused, it will seek the familiar, regardless of the intrinsic rewards.99 Thus shocked animals returned to the box in which they were originally shocked, in preference to less familiar locations not associated with punishment. Punished animals actually increased their exposure to shock as the trials continued.98 Mitchell concluded that this perseveration is nonassociative, that is, if uncoupled from the usual rewards systems, animals seek optimal levels of arousal,10,122 and this mediates patterns of alternation and perseveration.
Because novel stimuli cause arousal, an animal in a state of high arousal will avoid even mildly novel stimuli even if it would reduce exposure to pain.
[...]
Compulsive repetition of the trauma usually is an unconscious process that, although it may provide a temporary sense of mastery or even pleasure, ultimately perpetuates chronic feelings of helplessness and a subjective sense of being bad and out of control. Gaining control over one's current life, rather than repeating trauma in action, mood, or somatic states, is the goal of treatment.
...verbalizing the contextual elements of the trauma is the essence of treatment of acute post-traumatic stress...
...
Once the traumatic experiences have been located in time and place, a person can start making distinctions between current life stresses and past trauma and decrease the impact of the trauma on present experience.137
...
Psychotropic medicines may be of help to decrease autonomic hypearousal and decrease all or none responses. Lithium, beta blockers, and serotonin reuptake blockers such as flouxetine, may be particularly helpful. By decreasing hyperarousal, one decreases the likelihood that current stress will be experienced as a recurrence of past trauma. This facilitates finding solutions appropriate to the current stress rather than the past.139 The use of medications that affect the opioid system should be regarded as experimental and at this time needs to be avoided except in life-threatening cases.
[...]
ADDICTION TO TRAUMA
Some traumatized people remain preoccupied with the trauma at the expense of other life experiences137,141 and continue to re-create it in some form for themselves or for others. War veterans may enlist as mercenaries,128 victims of incest may become prostitutes,47,120,125 and victims of childhood physical abuse seemingly provoke subsequent abuse in foster families53 or become self-mutilators143a Still others identify with the aggressor and do to others what was done to them.21,39 Clinically, these people are observed to have a vague sense of apprehension, emptiness, boredom, and anxiety when not involved in activities reminiscent of the trauma. There is no evidence to support Freud's idea that repetition eventually leads to mastery and resolution. In fact, reliving the trauma repeatedly in psychotherapy may serve to re-enforce the preoccupation and fixation.
[...]
Seeking Stress to Relieve Stress
This controlled study supports numerous other clinical reports about the relationship between childhood abuse and self-destructive behavior.52,106,118 In these people, self-mutilation is a common response to abandonment; it is accompanied by both analgesia and an altered state of consciousness, and it provides relief and return to normality.
The pain, cutting, and burning are apparent attempts at "repairing the cohesiveness of the self in the face of overwhelming anxiety."35 This pattern is reminiscent of spouse abuse described by Walker:145 "tension gradually builds, an explosive battering (self-mutilating) incident occurs, and a 'calm, loving respite' follows."
[...]
Victimized people may neutralize their hyperarousal by a variety of addictive behaviors, including compulsive re-exposure to victimization of self and others.
Addiction to Background Stress:
The "opponent process theory of acquired motivation" explains how fear may become a pleasurable sensation and that "the laws of social attachment may be identical to those of drug addiction." Victims can become addicted to their victimizers; social contact may activate endogenous opioid systems, alleviating separation distress and strengthening social bonds. High levels of social stress activate opioid systems as well. Vietnam veterans with PTSD show opiod-mediated reduction in pain perception after re-exposure to a traumatic stimulus. Thus re-exposure to stress can have the same effect as taking exogenous opioids, providing a similar relief from stress.
...victims may need high levels of support and care for soothing:
Childhood abuse and neglect enhance long-term hyperarousal and decreased modulation of strong affect states. Abused children may require much higher external stimulation to affect the endogenous opioid system for soothing than when the biologic concomitants of comfort are easily activated by conditioned responses based on good early caregiving experiences.
Excerpted from:
Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma Re-enactment, Revictimization, and Masochism Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Volume 12, Number 2, Pages 389-411, June 1989
_http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/vanderkolk/
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For anyone interested in more research on trauma and its related issues, here's at least 22 more papers on Trauma and PTSD:
_http://canttell.net/research.html
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When 'Michael' said this:
Psyche said:
Move your attention, not to the back of your head as you did with walking the cable, but closer to your face. The level of your eyes is where your perception is centered, and if you try to focus your attention on that level and do not allow it to jump back inside your head, you may experience pure perception, and you won't get lost in the spaces of your memories. Try it."
I recognized what appears to be the technique for 'mode switching' the Pre Frontal Cortex. IOW, Michael seems to be giving a technique for practicing this consciously. Similar to what I have called the inductive, or context-based awareness, where you see something in terms of the context in which it exists and any evaluation is done by inference, based on its context. This is contrasted with seeing something, Not in terms of part of an external context, but in terms of knowledge you already have. IOW, any evaluation is done by deduction based on previous knowledge and experience.
The net result of the two modes is either: 1) you learn something new or 2) you "set it and forget it" (categorize it and dismiss it).
More on the two modes of the PFC in case it's helpful:
Recent neuroscience has shown that a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) shifts between two extremes of "hardware configuration", which are suitable for doing different kinds of things. One mode has been known about for ages. In it, the PFC has a low level of background excitation and localized areas of high excitation. This is good for tasks involving focused attention, and in older papers it is described as having a good "signal to noise ratio". (An interesting aspect of focused attention is that when we are using it, we can always say what the next step is, before we perform it).
The other mode is a more recent discovery, perhaps because the tasks that it is good for are harder to test using controlled laboratory experiments. In this mode, the PFC has a medium level of excitation all over, and the tasks it is good for involve "cognitive flexibility" and working memory. An example I've used before: subjects are given three words which can all be the second half of compound words, and the subjects have to guess the common first half of the compound words. So given "shoe", "flake" and "man", the subject might guess "snow".
People are much better at doing this when fMRI machines show that their PFCs are in the second mode. Notice that with this kind of task there is no "working out" involved. We can’t state any steps before we perform them - the word "snow" either pops into the subjects’ minds or it doesn’t.
What’s interesting about this is how the brain shifts from one mode to the other. It’s stress that does it. When we (or other animals) become stressed, we release the chemicals norepinephrine and dopamine, and these chemicals bias the cells in the PFC towards the focused attention mode. This makes sense, especially from an evolutionary perspective. The animal is wandering around on the lookout for food or predators, but as soon as it sees a predator it needs to focus in on it, see what it is doing and avoid distraction.
So this mode switching would obviously be useful - perhaps a bit like zooming in on something of interest. In normal situations, this state would be more like a narrow-perspective 'tunnel vision-like' mind set. And when you throw in the "stress addiction" concept from the trauma neuroscience papers, it becomes easier to see how people might just get 'fixed' in this state, losing access to the second mode and all the properties/characteristics that go with it...including one's sense of humor, which can aid stress reduction efforts.
The full explanation and fMRI images can be accessed here:
Functional organization of the prefrontal cortex in humans at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives:
_http://www.isc.cnrs.fr/dre/uk/Research_1.htm
Noradrenergic Suppression of Synaptic Transmission May Influence Cortical Signal-to-Noise Ratio:
_http://jn.physiology.org/content/77/6/3326.full
