Liese, how fun! I think it would be very interesting to attend a workshop with him. He does a lot of trauma research. I don't have any questions but please come back and let us know what he had to say.

TN

I absolutely LOVE his work.

My T has asked various people and I have contacted various researchers - about my severe lack of ability to hold my T in mind between visits. If I don't see her I totally believe she is dead or has forgotten me - I have no sense of object constancy.

We have tried all the transitional objects etc etc and they all are very brief help if any help at all. My T contacts me every 1 or 2 days and that helps briefly. I feel like a baby in a crib in a blackened room and I don't believe she exists unless she is in front of me and I can touch, see and hear her. If she calls my via phone - I still think it is a random voice in the dark room.

This whole stuff is holding my progress back. In fact right now I have terminated therapy as I cannot tolerate the distress. When i leave my T I immediately flip out - like severe separation anxiety - but it feels like she has died and it is severe grief. I go through death grief every day.

I just need to know how to soothe this. What is it called? What fixes it. If I saw my T 5 days a week for a year - it might help stabilise it and for me to get over the grief, but the twice I see her feels like she dies 5 days a week and pops up for 2 hours on 2 days.

Does that make sense?

If he has any ideas on this issue I would be grateful. At the moment I cannot tolerate it and the extreme feelings turn to SH and SU - this is clearly not a good thing and no way to live. You know that my T is an amazing T and I have a great and unusual and generous relationship with her but apart from living with her 24/7 and be totally reparented - I just can't see how I am going to get over this and be "repaired".

Somedays.

Liese, tell me if I am thread-jacking and I will take this elsewhere, but Somedays, I don't totally believe what you say about your lack of object constancy. I say that because you always come here and post about your T. So obviously there is a part of you that remembers her accurately even when she's not there. Now, there maybe a part of you that feels like she's dead every time you have to leave her, but that is only one part because you do have the capacity to realize that feeling is irrational. Does that make any sense to you?

Yes it does.

Liese--

How cool! I hope it is an awesome and life changing weekend for you (in a good way!). I don't think I know his work well enough to come up with a right question, but one thing I wonder about related to trauma is the worldview aspect of it. If you are traumatized in such a way that your view of the world is shattered, where do you start in putting together a new one? How do you go about it?

Don't feel like you have to ask him that if it doesn't fit. I was just musing.

BLT, about SD-- recognizing something is irrational doesn't mean she isn't experiencing it. Of course she "knows" her T is really there, but that's not the same as a felt experience of continuity. I don't see how announcing your disbelief is helpful.

ETA: Okay, I realize that sounded snappy. I just feel it's better to start with empathy than invalidation when someone is being so vulnerable. But I do think you meant to be helpful and your ideas about parts have some merit.

Bowing out of this now, and Liese, I am so sorry for the hijack.

SD....I've experienced similar....felt like I needed to die myself because of the severe separation anxiety the moment my foot hit the hallway outside of T's office. She always tells me it was just a matter of time, coming back each time and seeing she was still there, but it comes in waves for me. I went three weeks this past month and I thought I was dying that first week and a half. It was like she was not alive and I was grieving, like you said, which made me stay curled up in bed for hours on days....horrible way to live....Ninn

Liese, I am anxious to hear how your weekend went! Ninn

Hi,

No problem about the hijacks. I'm getting ready to hit the road. I will meet him tonight. We have group sessions tonight, tomorrow and Sunday. I'm very excited but I had some preliminary things to do this morning before I could leave town.

(((SD)))(((NINN)))

I totally get the feelings of grief. I used to feel like that every time I left my T. It was awful. It's gotten better and I wish I could say why. Definitely adding the second session helped. Knowing I could contact him 24/7 helped. I have verbalizing to him (and myself) that it's hard for me to say goodbye. We've worked on our endings.

There's a part stuck in the separation cry. The grief itself is irrational in the sense that the relationship is not over BUT getting that through to the brain is another matter altogether. There is a block there. Something prevents it from getting through so that it becomes a felt reality.


(((SD))) (((NINN))) Is there any way you can see your T more often until that part settles down?

Maybe it's a matter of just doing the grieving, little by little. I will ask him if I get a chance. I'm very curious about it too. And Held, yes, I'll ask him about the worldview. Tough questions!

I apologize if my comment came off as invalidating. It was not meant to be. However, I think it's important for SD to know if there IS a part of her that has some object constancy. It's much simpler (although still for from easy!) to get the part that DOES have constancy in better touch with the part that doesn't, than to build something totally new.

((((SD)))))

I asked Bessel about how to help someone when the pain of connection is greater than the pain of disconnection? He told me to "absolve her." I didn't correct him and tell him I wasn't a therapist. I just said, well, what if she is motivated to work through the pain. I said, what about the part stuck in the separation cry. He said that it was incredibly complex and he doesn't completely understand it all and that I should attend the workshop by his friend, Dick Schwartz. I looked up Richard Schwartz on Kripalu's website but don't see that he has any workshops scheduled yet though he did write a book, Introduction to the Family Systems Model. I'm sure BLT is familiar with it.

Anyway, sorry I couldn't get anything more concrete out of him.

quote:

I'm sure BLT is familiar with it.

Yes I am familiar with his work. Is there anything particular you want to know?

Thanks for asking Liese. I read further on the IFS stuff that Richard Schwartz wrote and it really resonated with me. Kind of coincided with me terminating therapy (i am sure that will be temporary) as I can't bare the pain nor the bad behaviours that happen after I leave T and me being aware over the past week of what parts inside are most active.

It would be great if T and I could attend the same IFS course at the same time. Yeah right.

((((SD))))

Knowing you and your T, attending the training together wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility.

((((BLT))))

Does he talk much about the part stuck in the separation cry? Bessel spoke very highly of him - not only when I talked to him but mentioned to the group that his workshop was a must attend another time - independently of my discussion with him.

(Liese)) - yes. If i manage to go back to her.... I think she would attend a course with me but only because she is so stuck with what to do with me.

Okay, here's the summary from Bessel:

He's a big fan of:

yoga
emdr
theater/acting
choir groups
hypnosis

and, tentatively,


mdmA
neurofeedback


In fact, if you want services from his clinic, you HAVE to take yoga. Not necessarily at his clinic but you have to take yoga.

Not a fan of:
DBT

He actually showed a study that Yoga was much more effective in two areas than DBT - which wasn't effective at all.

He basically said the most important thing to do is to calm the brain. That our repitilian brains are NOT connected to our language centers and that's why when the repitilian brain takes over, we can't see reason and/or understand why we are doing what we are doing.

That after calming the brain, we have to work on making those brain connections. That while we are hyperaroused, absolutely nothing is going to happen. This is where I thought of you COGS, going over and over the same stuff over and over again basically retraumatizing yourself. You won't be able to make those connections while in such a state of hyperarousal.

After we make connections, he feels it's important to have the parts get to know each other and become friends. After that, connection to others - which, ultimately, is the MOST important thing.

He was amazing and incredibly accessible, telling attendees multiple times to seek him out after workshops, that he'd be available, etc. He's an incredible human being looking for what really works and looking to share what he knows.

A final note about acting. Held, I didn't actually get to ask him your question but thought about it when he talked about acting as acting allows us to take on a different role and feel something different than we typically feel. See ourselves in a way that is different than we have always seen ourselves - and that's what opens up the door to develop that new sense of self and hopefully a new worldview.

Just thought I would add an anecdote that Bessel told.

He said that one of his clients had internalized one of her perpetrators and would often come in and say to him, "I'm a slut, I'm disgusting, I wanted that to happen, etc."

For three years, he would tell her, "you are not a slut, you are none of those things, etc." And, she would reply, Yes, bessel, you are right.

But, then, three years into therapy she told Bessel, you know, Bessel, now that I know you better, I have to be honest with you. When you said those things, I just told you that you were right because I didn't want to hurt your feelings but the truth is, it didn't help at all and just made me feel more alone than ever before.

He said that, ultimately, she was going to have to make that connection herself. She would have to go back to those memories from the viewpoint of an adult (after her brain was calm) and see that she wasn't any of those things. Nothing he could say would change her feelings. (He bashed CBT quite a bit.)

He also mentioned that the freeze response was always related to an attachment issue. The normal response would be flight or fight but when someone freezes, it means that no one has been there to help that person.

The things you are writing about the course are helping me SO MUCH.

quote:

Originally posted by Liese:

He also mentioned that the freeze response was always related to an attachment issue. The normal response would be flight or fight but when someone freezes, it means that no one has been there to help that person.

Liese - can you give some examples of this so I can work out whether it is the reason I do it.

SD

Liese

quote:

That our repitilian brains are NOT connected to our language centers and that's why when the repitilian brain takes over, we can't see reason and/or understand why we are doing what we are doing.

Are you sure he meant our reptilian brain? and not our mammalian limbic brain? The reptilian brain plays little or no role in the emotional mind. Reptiles don't "do" emotion!! I mean, even the basic fight, flight or freeze emotions are mostly a product of the mammalian brain?.

I can see that there would be little connection between the reptilian brain and the neocortical language centres; but all three of our triune brains have evolved to communicate with one another to some degree or another.

So I'm wondering if he meant making and strengthening those neural connections between limbic and neocortical brains in a sort of prosody?

Just a thought; but interesting to hear of his ideas.

AV.

((((AV))))

He was definitely talking about our reptilian brains, the only brain on-line so to speak when we are born. He did also talk about the limbic brain but more often referenced our reptilian brains.

There are so many facets to this, AV. It's awfully complicated but I did understand him to say that, yes, in traumatized people - there is no connection between the traumatized memories - stored in a sensory fashion - to the language center in the brain. He actually showed scans of the brain that showed that traumatized people are missing one very important brain wave. Completely missing. And another one is quite off. He showed some amazing brain scans.

(((AV)))

Good to see you around, btw. Hope you are well. Bessel would be a big fan of your new therapist.

(((SD)))

The example he gave was how when we are hurt when we are little and we go to our parents for soothing and they aren't there. If that happens over and over, we are just going to shut down and freeze. There's no where to run and nothing to fight. KWIM? IT makes sense to me, SD, because that's what I do too, I freeze, and my family definitely wasn't there for me.

He talked about cutting and said he's a big fan of cutting. He said at least it's an attempt to regulate emotions and any attempt to regulate emotions is good - even if it's bad. I asked if cutting was a step above freezing. At least the person is taking action, I thought. He said that with cutting, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous systems were both active while we freezing, you are just numb. From Mr. Google:

quote:

Although incompletely understood, the freeze state is known to occur when an animal in fight or flight perceives that its current state sympathetic arousal will not work. When this happens, unconscious processes in the brain suppress the SNS response with the very powerful freeze state, which is associated with severe downregulation in a last attempt to survive until the danger is past. This freeze or immobility state may resemble a form of hibernation or near death and is associated with trauma See below for more.

(((AV))))

Here is something for you to read:

trauma and damage to brain

I think it has to do with the fight or flight response kicking in (hyperarousal) and in that state, we cannot reason. He talked a lot about our heart rates and how he thinks being able to regulate our heart rates is going to be key in treating trauma.

He said A LOT and it was a bit overwhelming.

more stuff

quote:

When any living being experiences a threat to its survival, the organism generates enormous physiological energy to mobilize in response to the threat. When that energy is not used, it can become locked up or frozen in the nervous system. Medically this is known as trauma. You might also know it as burnout or psychic numbing. Trauma impairs the healthy and creative functioning of living beings.
Research on animals in the wild shows that they frequently encounter threats to their survival, but they don't experience trauma. They discharge the energy through physical movement and through re-playing, literally playing, the events of the threat and their escape. Unfortunately, humans seem to have trouble discharging our energy in the face of danger.

Why don't we humans discharge our energy after a threat and avoid trauma? Perhaps because the threat seems unceasing and ever increasing. Perhaps it is because cultural messages have conditioned us to believe that "fight" is the only heroic option and have shamed us into believing that flight and especially freeze are cowardly. Psychological research shows that trauma is more likely to occur when the intense emotions accompanying threatened survival are linked with a sense of powerlessness, helplessness and/or humiliation.

Bessel talked about a three year old traumatized girl who couldn't talk. They put her on a trampoline and eventually she started talking. There was something about moving the body that helped her release the trauma and make brain connections.

Thanks ((((Liese))))

I'm starting to become a fan of my new T as well She has some very good and up to date ideas!

By the way; there's more learning done 'in utero' than we might think. An unborn babies brain is already decoding and storing its mothers vocalisations allowing it, once born, to orient itself to those already familiar sounds! The green shoots of attachment and memory poke through before we're born It seems to me that all 3 brains are 'on line' to some extent once we enter this wonderful world of ours.

It is all interesting stuff indeed.

AV.

Ah Liese; reading the article on that link I can see why we're getting a little confused.

[QUOTE]The limbic system is part of what’s called the ‘reptilian brain’, or the oldest part of the brain. It regulates basic emotions, drives and instincts, such as the ‘fright and flight’ response when danger is present. /QUOTE]

I'd be inclined to disagree with that statement. The limbic brain is separate from the reptilian brain and a lot more recent (in evolutionary terms at least ) developing when early mammals evolved from lizard like reptiles. The way it's put above implies we have only reptilian and neocortical brains and NOT the triune setup as commonly thought. Reptiles have one brain; mammals (excluding homo sapiens and perhaps a few other primates) have two brains, and we have three!!

Gosh; this is turning into a Monday afternoon science lesson

quote:

Does he talk much about the part stuck in the separation cry? Bessel spoke very highly of him - not only when I talked to him but mentioned to the group that his workshop was a must attend another time - independently of my discussion with him.

No, I have never heard him talk specifically about a part being stuck "in the separation cry." However, he has talked extensively about parts being stuck in different traumatizing situations at different ages. I assume his procedure for dealing with a part stuck in a separation cry would be the same as for any other stuck part. You would first have to negotiate access to the part with any protectors that might be in the way. Then you would have to get into Self (a state of mind he defines in terms of it qualities of clarity, compassion, etc.) and make contact with the stuck part. After witnessing the feelings and memories (including body memories) of the stuck part, you would reparent the part in whatever way it needed and then assist it in letting go of any negative feelings or beliefs it was holding, and if necessary in leaving behind the negative circumstance in which it was stuck. It's a process with a number of steps, but I don't think it's overly complicated...

((((BLT))))

Thanks for the explanation. I know you are a big fan of IFS and apparently so is Bessel. I'll have to look into it more than I have already.

(((AV)))

Glad you are liking your therapist! My brain is definitely not on-line this morning. I don't know enough about it to discuss it with you but will take your word for it.

(((AV)))

I'm always confused about our three brains and then how our left and right brains fit into the picture. Can you tell me how?

You might be interested to know that Bessel has a colleague who has studied the woman who were evacuated from the twin towers and who were pregnant on 9/11.

Hi ((Liese))

Well, I can try

As for the difference between the reptilian and mammalian limbic brains; look at it this way. A human can and does enjoy limbic 'resonance' with his or her pet dog or cat for example (both mammals). We, and they, can both 'sense' the emotions present in the other. People will often say 'my dog/cat seems to know when I've had a bad day' etc. Try doing that with your pet tortoise or your goldfish for example! They are missing the limbic mammalian brain.

As for the left and right brains; they're the two halves of the neocortical brain aren't they? Two large cerebral hemispheres that surround the limbic brain, which in turn surrounds the reptilian brain.

Have a look at this site for some more info:-

the brain from top to bottom

AV.

Av

Thanks for the link. It was really interesting reading. I'll have to study it.

Liese,

I have really enjoyed this thread and it has made a big impact on me. I have sent a lot of the info to my T although we are in the middle of a break in therapy as I cannot bear the separation grief. I really shut down last week as I was SH and felt SU immediately after leaving therapy and that is no way to live. I hit a brick wall (metaphorically) and turned everything in my head off. Turned off the switch so that I could breathe.

After reading the thread, reading the IFS stuff, watching some youtubes of Bessel - I realise my trauma is so ingrained, so deep that no wonder it isn't budging and it seems to be getting worse. It is pointing to a lot of grief in me and my treatment in utero and as a non-verbal baby/toddler and then as a child. The freeze response - explained it well for me. The cutting - Bessel's comments on that made sense to me.

Interestingly T and I do therapy when walking or sitting in parks or on the floor or wherever - and I had said to her that I usually say things that I wouldn't usually say -as I think my guard is down a bit. Maybe a bit of that trauma that is locked at the cellular level is being discharged?

I will do more research on the area and see what fits with me. I focus at times on the attachment and I lose sight of the initial traumas that happened. I think that is the root of my issues. Will have to read more about that.

And Grief. and people dying. Death. I know that I immediately freak out and SH when I am confronted with death and grief. A lot of my attachment issues with T is that I am scared something will happen to her and she will be taken away, terminate me, die, retire etc etc. I can't relax - I am always on hyperalert, hypervigilant, cannot relax enough to do therapy. Which then ties in with Bessel's comments about the heart rate and states of alertness.

I told T that I am exhausted. I grieve for her death 5 days a week! Then she is alive for the 2 days when I see her. I am exhausted from the constant grief and I feel that my brain and body are fried from the continuous flood of adrenaline or whatever chemicals are flowing around and I am too exhausted to ever operate on a therapeutic level.

Thanks again Liese. You have kicked off a series of events here in my part of the world that for 1) got me communicating to my T again and I have commited to attending tomorrow's therapy session and 2) helped me focus where to look for next for answers to help me (and my T).

SD.

((((SD)))))

I feel for you because I know how much it hurts. You are brave for continuing to tackle this. I'm so glad it was helpful even though Bessel couldn't really give us an answer but yes, like you, I do think it has to do with some very early attachment issues, relational trauma, maybe trauma during separation.

I told my T today that for me separation means disconnection. Do you feel that way too?

Yes, separation really does mean disconnection - and that then for me feels like death and grief. That then kicks off a another cycle of trauma reaction.

I have a lot of understanding why I feel like I do - i have a logical understanding, but I can't get in the middle of that high level knowledge of why things happen and then to change anything.

SD

((((SD))))

It makes sense that you would be unable to get into the middle of that high level of understanding when you are hyperaroused. I could just see Bessel shaking his head saying, "Of course you can't." You are not alone. I can't access that reason either when I am triggered.