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November 30, 2022 - August 16, 2023
Lacking friends in elementary school makes a crucial difference.
They can’t keep up in the normal envy-driven inclusion/exclusion games, in which players have to stay cool under stress. Other kids usually don’t want anything to do with them—they simply are too weird.
Autism-like, but about sexuall-abused girls
THE DSM-5: A VERITABLE SMORGASBORD OF “DIAGNOSES”
Medicine then was transformed by its attempts to discover ways to get rid of those organisms rather than just treating the boils and the fevers that they caused. With DSM-5 psychiatry firmly regressed to early-nineteenth-century medical practice. Despite the fact that we know the origin of many of the problems it identifies, its “diagnoses” describe surface phenomena that completely ignore the underlying causes.
the DSM largely lacks what in the world of science is known as “reliability”—the ability to produce consistent, replicable results.
Our great challenge is to apply the lessons of neuroplasticity, the flexibility of brain circuits, to rewire the brains and reorganize the minds of people who have been programmed by life itself to experience others as threats and themselves as helpless. Social support is a biological necessity, not an option, and this reality should be the backbone of all prevention and treatment.
every dollar invested in high-quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs.
The men were interviewed in detail about their war experiences in 1945/1946 and again in 1989/1990. Four and a half decades later, the majority gave very different accounts from the narratives recorded in their immediate postwar interviews: With the passage of time, events had been bleached of their intense horror. In contrast, those who had been traumatized and subsequently developed PTSD did not modify their accounts; their memories were preserved essentially intact forty-five years after the war ended.
Most of us still have precise memories of where we were and what we saw on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, but only a fraction of us recall anything in particular about September 10.
Disputed
We remember insults and injuries best: The adrenaline that we secrete to defend against potential threats helps to engrave those incidents into our minds.
the more adrenaline you secrete, the more precise your memory will be.3 But that is true only up to a certain point. Confronted with horror—especially the horror of “inescapable shock”—this system becomes overwhelmed and breaks down.
the imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations.
The Path
early researchers referred to traumatic memories as “pathogenic secrets”9 or “mental parasites,”10 because as much as the sufferers wanted to forget whatever had happened, their memories kept forcing themselves into consciousness, trapping them in an ever-renewing present of existential horror.
Demon thread
Charcot believed that women would be a critical factor in this struggle, and his investigation of hysteria “offered a scientific explanation for phenomena such as demonic possession states, witchcraft, exorcism, and religious ecstasy.”
Also in contrast to Charcot, whose research focused on understanding the phenomenon of hysteria, Janet was first and foremost a clinician whose goal was to treat his patients. That is why I studied his case reports in detail and why he became one of my most important teachers.
Science vs medicine
Several times a week she would stare, trancelike, at an empty bed, ignore whatever was going on around her, and begin to care for an imaginary person. She meticulously reproduced, rather than remembered, the details of her mother’s death.
Like ghosts
Janet treated Irène for several months, mainly with hypnosis. At the end he asked her again about her mother’s death. Irène started to cry and said, “Don’t remind me of those terrible things. … My mother was dead and my father was a complete drunk, as always. I had to take care of her dead body all night long. I did a lot of silly things in order to revive her. … In the morning I lost my mind.” Not only was Irène able to tell the story, but she had also recovered her emotions: “I feel very sad and abandoned.” Janet now called her memory “complete” because it now was accompanied by the
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Vanishing of Ethan Carter
“[U]nable to integrate their traumatic memories, they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is … as if their personality has definitely stopped at a certain point, and cannot enlarge any more by the addition or assimilation of new elements.”19 He predicted that unless they became aware of the split-off elements and integrated them into a story that had happened in the past but was now over, they would experience a slow decline in their personal and professional functioning.
emotions of the trauma were stored separately as frozen, barely comprehensible fragments. If the problem with PTSD is dissociation, the goal of treatment would be association: integrating the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that “that was then, and this is now.”
All soldiers with psychiatric problems were to be given a single diagnosis of “NYDN” (Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous).
More than a third of the women (38 percent) did not recall the abuse that was documented in their medical records,
Then we asked them to focus on specific sensory details of those events, such as: “Are you ever somewhere and suddenly have a vivid image of what your husband looked like on your wedding day?” The answers were always negative. “How about what your husband’s body felt like on your wedding night?” (We got some odd looks on that one.) We continued: “Do you ever have a vivid, precise recollection of the speech you gave as a valedictorian?” “Do you ever have intense sensations recalling the birth of your first child?” The replies were all in the negative.
Normal autistic episodic memory
The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography.
Again, autism-related non-autobiography
We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable, and predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case. In order to understand trauma, we have to overcome our natural reluctance to confront that reality
Culture of self-delusion
even words have a dual meaning: “Otherwise, someone [in the camps] who has been tormented by thirst for weeks would never again be able to say: ‘I’m thirsty. Let’s make a cup of tea.’
There was no sense of time, no past, and no future. There was only pain, terror, and horror. I felt isolated from all humanity, profoundly alone in spite of the people surrounding me. The sphere was closing in on me.
Groff-like experience
“Interestingly, I function very well at work, and I am constantly given positive feedback.
Understanding why you feel a certain way does not change how you feel.
We become reactive and disorganized; our filters stop working—sounds and lights bother us,
Autism-like
Learning how to breathe calmly and remaining in a state of relative physical relaxation, even while accessing painful and horrifying memories, is an essential tool for recovery.
in contrast to the timeless, ever-present experience of trauma,
Hell from game Painkiller
mindfulness as a lens, taking the scattered and reactive energies of your mind and focusing them into a coherent source of energy for living, for problem solving, for healing.”
Frightened adults respond to the same comforts as terrified children: gentle holding and rocking and the assurance that somebody bigger and stronger is taking care of things, so you can safely go to sleep.
Explain God in one sentence
the promise of closeness often evokes fear of getting hurt, betrayed, and abandoned. Shame plays an important role in this: “You will find out how rotten and disgusting I am and dump me as soon as you really get to know me.”
For KK
Some people don’t remember anybody they felt safe with. For them, engaging with horses or dogs may be much safer than dealing with human beings.
When we play together, we feel physically attuned and experience a sense of connection and joy. Improvisation exercises (such as those found at http://learnimprov.com/) also are a marvelous way to help people connect in joy and exploration. The moment you see a group of grim-faced people break out in a giggle, you know that the spell of misery has broken.
Imporov
Mainstream trauma treatment has paid scant attention to helping terrified people to safely experience their sensations and emotions. Medications such as serotonin reuptake blockers, Respiridol and Seroquel increasingly have taken the place of helping people to deal with their sensory world.28 However, the most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked. This helps with excessive arousal and makes us feel intact, safe, protected, and in charge.
Touch not drugs
“You have to meet their point of resistance—the place that has the most tension—and meet it with an equal amount of energy. That releases the frozen tension. You can’t hesitate; hesitation communicates a lack of trust in yourself. Slow movement, careful attuning to the client is different from hesitation. You have to meet them with tremendous confidence and empathy, let the pressure of your touch meet the tension they are holding in their bodies.” What does bodywork do for people? Licia’s reply: “Just like you can thirst for water, you can thirst for touch. It is a comfort to be met
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Long quotation on massage
Feeling the pleasure of taking effective action restores a sense of agency and a sense of being able to actively defend and protect themselves.
If you’re hunched over and too afraid to look around, you are easy prey to other people’s sadism, but when you walk around projecting the message “Don’t mess with me,” you’re not likely to be bothered.
Rel
translating it back again in terms of the past.”
When people remember an ordinary event, they do not also relive the physical sensations, emotions, images, smells, or sounds associated with that event.
Neurotypicals...
Hypnosis was the most widely practiced treatment for trauma from the late 1800s, the time of Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, until after World War II.
Exposure sometimes helps to deal with fear and anxiety, but it has not been proven to help with guilt or other complex emotions.
eight-hour psychotherapy sessions, mainly using internal family systems (IFS) therapy, the subject of chapter 17 of this book. Two months later 83 percent of the patients who received MDMA plus psychotherapy were considered completely cured, compared with 25 percent of the placebo group. None of the patients had adverse side effects.
MDMA
drugs cannot “cure” trauma; they can only dampen the expressions of a disturbed physiology. And they do not teach the lasting lessons of self-regulation. They can help to control feelings and behavior, but always at a price—because they work by blocking the chemical systems that regulate engagement, motivation, pain, and pleasure.
Patients on SSRIs often feel calmer and more in control; feeling less overwhelmed often makes it easier to engage in therapy. Other patients feel blunted by SSRIs—they feel they’re “losing their edge.” I approach it as an empirical question: Let’s see what works, and only the patient can be the judge of that.
he conducted a survey of 225 people who had escaped from the Twin Towers. Asked what had been most helpful in overcoming the effects of their experience, the survivors credited acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR, in that order.1 Among rescue workers, massages were particularly popular.
Therapists have an undying faith in the capacity of talk to resolve trauma.
Silence reinforces the godforsaken isolation of trauma.
