Interesting links for PSTD, "happy childhood" module ideas

[belle99]

Or do you think by changing your beliefs and emotions about the trauma will release the body memories as well?

My understanding is that the body IS the mind. The cells in an organ or a muscle or joint receive emotional peptides when they are pumped out from the hypothalamus.

I think all these biochemical changes could take place through conscious control of one's emotions and changing how one reacts through the force of one's will, over time. But why make it any harder than it should be.

[belle99]

More articles

Here's an interesting article on yoga and PTSD. Yoga postures, poses, breathing, etc. can all be used to help normalize the neurological processes, and help a person self-regulate their emotions. Twisted Yoga | Learning Center

Brain abnormalities consistent with PTSD can make it more difficult to create with deliberate intent: The human brain and the law of attraction - Psychology - Helium - by Laurel Cozzuli

Excerpts from that article:

Another point of consideration that relates to LOA is the brain's propensity for pattern recognition....

Generally, pattern recognition involves two areas of our brain: the nucleus accumbens, and the anterior cingulate. These areas are responsible for humans viewing the world in predictable patterns....

Not surprisingly, past emotional trauma seems to be a factor in a person developing "runaway" or "hyper" pattern recognition. A poorly functioning anterior cingulate and/or the nucleus accumbens leads to a person having poor emotional regulation, with a host of dysfunctional behaviors to boot. What could very well have helped the caveman survive is the same emotional-behavioral pattern that modern day doctors call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Even as early as 1995, the work of Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., shows that persons suffering with PTSD produced brain scans with low activity in their anterior cingulate. This suggests that the anterior cingulate is not allowing the right and left hemispheres of the brain to share information, as this is one of the roles of this brain area....People with hyper pattern recognition tendencies do not thrive well in today's world. Such persons may be in enormous debt and have a history of bad relationships....

Sadly, these patters are pervasive and endure even after years of cognitive-behavioral interventions, including LOA. Furthermore, our survival instinct is intimately connected with the same areas of the brain that generate extreme pleasure, the nucleus accumbens. The irony is that LOA states that we want to "feel good" in order to send out the magnetic signal of happiness.....

So now we can understand the cyclical nature of so called "unsuccessful" persons who attract the same type of dead-end job, marry another unsupportive or abusive spouse, etc even though these qualities do not contribute to a good life. LOA practitioners and counselors can stop shaking their heads, wondering why in the world certain clients "just don't get it" and why these "stuck" persons (who claim over and over again that they really, really want to fix their life, and they are trying really hard to use LOA!) continue to make bad choices, even after hours upon hours of intense LOA coaching. The problem lies within the structure of their brain that simply "stalls out" upon the intake of new information, especially when the information does not fit their experience of the world through vigilant pattern recognition.

In a nutshell, the person that has the most difficult time putting LOA into action is the one that 1) has a hyperactive amygdula, 2) has a low functioning prefrontal cortex, 3) has impaired functioning in the anterior cingulate, and 4) has a nucleus accumbens that is "running the show." Persons with just one of these brain problems will be more successful at implementing LOA than persons with two or more of these circumstances. It stands to reason that a person with completely healthy brain functioning will experience the most success in implementing LOA. This is because his/her prefrontal cortex can override panic responses of the amygdula. He/she can visualize and consistently act upon goals, with little interference from the anterior cingulate or nucleus accumbens.

Does this mean that people with less-than-ideal brain function are doomed for failure? Not necessarily. Scientists and mental health professionals are incorporating therapeutic methods designed to enhance the functioning of the human brain. Such interventions can assist clients in the ability to take action in support of future goals.

[belle99]

addiction to negative thinking

I'm also on the successful living 1 module (second time around).

When a person is addicted to negative thinking, it is like they are shipwrecked. The traumatic event is like the event of the shipwreck that caused a person to see the world in a negative way, and look for negative patterns and always connect the dots from one negative thought to another.

The person who is totally overwhelmed and depressed can't find anything to cling to, so they desperately tread water.

The person who just hums along in the doldrums of low-grade anxiety and blanket cynicism finds pieces of the shipwrecked boat to cling to. These pieces floating in the water are like the negative thoughts of the person.

Like the cliche of the battered person going back to their abuser, the person who is addicted to negative thinking hangs onto their negative thoughts, because those thoughts feel safe and familiar.

Only when there is no more pleasure in beating oneself up with the negative thought, will the person look up and see a way to get to real safety.

[future pather]

Belle,

Thank you for this info. Regarding :

Sadly, these patters are pervasive and endure even after years of cognitive-behavioral interventions, including LOA. . . . In a nutshell, the person that has the most difficult time putting LOA into action is the one that 1) has a hyperactive amygdula, 2) has a low functioning prefrontal cortex, 3) has impaired functioning in the anterior cingulate, and 4) has a nucleus accumbens that is "running the show."

I was able to make a tad of progress using faith and giving my problems to God when they seemed overwhelming, but still that did not do much to keep me from repeating bad patterns no matter how much I tried. The Master-Key System did help me and then while I was studying that, I tried PATHS.

Within 2 weeks on the PATHS self esteem module, I was making changes by leaps and bounds after about 5 years of getting worse and worse with the negative cycling. I doubt anything else would have given me the same effect. (To be fair I never tried prescriptions besides a few uses of xanex and a muscle relaxer - not sure what consistant use of a psych prescription would have done for me but I was against trying it.)

Jessica

[belle99]

Jessica,

I just find that the scientific explanations for why some people have a harder time letting go of negative thoughts allow me to forgive myself more readily for any hurdles or overthinking. It really is no different from the "emotional scale" because you are jumping from anxiety or anger to acceptance. From acceptance it is a lot easier to go to joy than it is directly from anger or anxiety.

[future pather]

Good point, Belle.

I wanted to share that I am now into my second month on the Deserving module and would recommend it for issues discussed in this thread


XO Jessica

[belle99]

Cool, I will consider it.

[belle99]

Jessica,

I've added Deserving to my new theater (which also contains Mood Elevator, Ultimate Body, and Defying Gravity).

I can't wait to see what happens.

[future pather]

Wonderful things continue to unfold for me as I progress with the deserving mod. I am being better to myself as well. I don't think you will be dissappointed

[belle99]

Goodness gracious

Well, I certainly need Deserving.

I watched it once and the inner negative voice started to loudly complain. This part of me is very "sour grapes." My inner negative self is getting quite worn out by the successful living module, but it seems to really rail against the Deserving module!

I realized that my coping mechanism to get out of the pain of past trauma was always the "sour grapes" defense. I would look at what the other person had that I did not have (and often these were intangibles, such as more supportive friends or family, rather than material things) and make myself feel better by saying "well, what they have must be bad, because if it is good, I can't handle the arbitrariness of them having it and not me."

I believed I was powerless to just easily have an uncomplicated, relatively happy and painless life, because I didn't see the others doing anything to deserve it any more than I was doing. So, there had to be a "logical reason." When I was a child, I did not understand certain truths such as like attracting like, so I made up other "logical" reasons to explain and cope with the world.

I decided that things I wanted, desirable things, must be "bad," because I couldn't make them happen for me to save my life. I saw others having them, so I decided that they must have been doing something "wrong" to get it. So then, if I decided I still wanted one of those "bad" desirable things, I had to have a whole maze of struggles and difficulties before I would let myself have it.* And if something good just fell in my lap, you could bet money on it that I would psychically sabotage it. You see, I got all of my ego strength from telling myself that I was "different" from all those "bad" people out there with the happier lives!

*And of course, I would never let myself have it, because then what would I do with myself? I wasn't equipped to live life through anything other than the paradigm that "people who get the goodies are bad, and the good people live a life of emotional poverty."

This is how I have created just about every dissatisfaction in my life, and why I have struggled more with habituating the Successful Living module than any other module.

Probably the most painful way that my belief system of undeservingness has manifested in my life is in all types of relationships-- family, friends, work, and dating. I now see how any one of those could have been successful, but I believed that it would have made me a "bad person" had these been successful relationships. So I made them go awry in a multitude of ways to maintain my identity as "superior" to all those "idiots" and "bad" people who had pleasant, happy relationships.

At this point, I am not really confident that any of my current human interactions is capable of overcoming the months or years of "struggle" energy I put into it. I fear that my belief that if any of them magically started to go well would make me a bad person set in motion things that I cannot now undo with a change in my core belief structure, but I'm open to hope so.

[belle99]

Waking the Tiger by Peter A. Levine

I'm almost through Waking the Tiger, by Peter A. Levine. I'm not going to go into a full summary in this post, but I will start posting a few of the insights from the book that I think will be most transferable to the PATHS/RDT modality.

The basic premise of the book is that trauma in humans is the result of a natural physiological process gone awry with the help of our conscious minds. Like other mammals, humans have the instinctual (reptilian) brain, the limbic (emotional or mammalian) brain, but we also have the neo-cortex to complicate and enrich life.

Levine believes his method of re-negotiating traumas through the "felt sense" of the body is the way to bring the natural process out of the frozen deer-in-the-headlights phase, to a healthy resolution. Levine also believes that the hysterics of therapies that make a person re-live or re-enact the original traumatizing experience actually can re-traumatize a person. Those methods aren't a whole lot better than the unconscious re-enactment traumatized people do when they continually sprain the same ankle, create the same lousy job, or get in the same car "accident," over and over again.

What can this do for PATHS, or a PTSD module?

1. The module can help the person manage the effects of trauma: the emotional dysregulation can be corrected through the right behavioral and biochemical instructions to the brain, weird symptoms can be managed, etc. This will enable a person to function a whole lot better and gain insight into the landscape of their trauma, so that the "re-enactment compulsion" (what Lynn Grabhorn calls the "vibration forever seeking its match") is switched off to allow the person to at least quit screwing up their life before the root is addressed.

2. Address the physiological root of the trauma, what Levine's method aims to do, but swifter and more effectively with use of RDT. The way I understand this, the problem is less about certain "triggers" for a person, it is more about addressing the physiological reasons why a person can never seem to respond to the "trigger" a different way, despite all the cognitive and emotional work on that issue in the world. The physiological picture of trauma is the person is physically stuck in the "freeze" or deer-in-the-headlights response.

To be continued....

[PATHS, S.A.]

Very Interesting stuff!



Looking forward to more insights!

[belle99]

I hope this is helpful information!

[Inika]

This is great Belle,

I am beginning the 2nd year of 3 of Peter's work: Somatic Experiencing and have been receiving the work almost every week for about 1 1/2 months. There is no hypnotherapy but a continuous pendulation between the trauma vortex and the felt sense. This allows the nervous system more space to hold the present and the past. What has been important to me is letting me go into the trauma vortex and coming back out so I'm not sure that getting rid of the trauma vortex is the answer but rather going to the edge of it so the nervous system can learn how to regulate.

One thing my therapist said is when there is sexual abuse healing is more effective in relationship, one on one. My suggestion is to use Paths as an adjunct or a partner and also have someone to talk to, ideally an SE therapist. There are 2 kinds of SE therapists: the bodyworker and the psychologist. The difference is the bodyworker can hold your hand or put a hand on your knee. For other PTSD that is not relational it may not matter so much.

I have watched Peter work with people and it is phenomenal! He is a keen observer, looking for all the ques to understand what state the client is in and then leads them either toward the trauma vortex or toward the felt sense. He uses touch when appropriate and intuition.

When I work with clients (in the water) I can track where they are by body language and can follow them with my own felt sense. This is a reality check for me about how we are all connected.

Here are some notes about SE:

1. Very important to work with the felt sense and orienting. This is the basis of the work which allows people to come back to the present and ground when faced with a rise in the sympathetic nervous system. Orienting is allowing the eyes to look at what they want, to get a sense of the present and where you are.

2. Pendulation: allowing a rise in the sympathetic NS toward the trauma vortex and swinging back to parasympathetic NS and the felt sense.

3. Somatic responses:
a. trembling and shaking allows the discharge of energy. Tingling that feels good is a discharge.
b. Freeze: unresolved movement such as running away or shielding or pushing away with hands and arms: ie. feet begin to tap, hands flutter
These movements need to be slowed down so the nervous system can experience them and finish the movement successfully. Dissociation: a type of freeze, a feeling of floating or checking out, spacing out, numbness
c. sleepiness, yawning shows a return to parasympathetic NS

4. Dorsal-Vagal response.... I have to read more about this.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I can get my notes and continue this later. There is alot that isn't on the web.

I hope this is intelligible since I am over my sleep time

[belle99]

Inika,

Thank you so much for weighing in on the Somatic Experiencing process. it sounds like it "gets" an important piece that many guided processing therapies do not.

I've been through modalities that were not effective, I think because it put too much weight on re-telling the painful events, the value of which I was not entirely clear at the time. I have experienced and witnessed what happens when the stuck energies start to act like they want to move (trembling, shaking) but then the process switches to an airing of grievances or emotional meltdown, and the momentum of the energy turns hard in the other direction and carries them right back deeper into the vortex. It can be like a leaf blower, stirring everything up just to let it settle somewhere else. There is cathartic relief in re-telling one's story again, but that relief is temporary in such settings.

I've seen many people become addicted to the distress-relief cycle provided by some therapies, or become attached to the unconditional acceptance in the form of the therapist, without improving their real emotional landscape one iota. Of course, different things are going to work with different people.

I would think that any sort of relational trauma (abuse or neglect) would be way more complex to fix with SE than phobias, war, natural disaster, or freak accidents...?