Tag: accepting

Energy Leaks and Memory Maturation.

(Awakening Intuition – Mona Lisa Schulz)

Imagine that every one of us is a set of encyclopedias.  In the present perhaps your life has reached volume 17. But something back in volume 2, in the past, is still affecting you, causing you ulcers or some other disease.  You have to go back and figure out what this ulcer is all about.  Its cause could be five volumes back or four volumes, or it could be in the current volume.  The stomachache you have today may be due to your boss yelling at you this morning, but it may also be due to the fact that your mother yelled at you every morning in volume 2.

Trauma in the form of experiences such as child abuse, military combat, man-made or natural disasters, witnessing violence, or even lesser emotional and mental traumas increase levels of disassociation.  This means that certain emotions and memories are split off; they lie in the body tissue or areas of the brain we can’t talk about.  If not dealt with properly, they can create disease in the body.

The important point – and this gets a little complicated – is that it’s not the memory itself, not the actual trauma of the past, that causes our problems in the present.  What the memory means to us is what is important – as is the way we react to what that memory evokes.  In other words, it’s not the boarding school that caused your problems, it’s that you perceive college as being the same as being in the boarding school.  You could have an absolute angel of a professor, the class your taking could be wonderful, you can go out to lunch any time you want, but your body is perceiving the current experience as being just as traumatizing and stressful as the former experience.

This has been demonstrated scientifically.  In one study woman who were to have mammograms were questioned about events in their lives over the previous five to eight years.  Researchers discovered that they were able to predict which women would be found to have cancer based on the answers they gave to those questions.  Those women who had experienced a severe life event – living through a natural disaster, perhaps, or the loss of a loved one or the loss of a job in the last five to eight years were consistently more likely to be diagnosed with cancer.  Even if the woman had had a trauma in her early life, it was not that even that triggered her problem.  She did not come down with cancer because she had been a victim of incest and had never had the capacity for love.  It was because of the way she reacted to the more current events.

The researchers looked at the difference between the women who approached their crisis actively and those who disengaged from them.  Disengaging is a minor form of dissociating, separating conscious reality from our feelings about it.  They compared women who had formed an action list, a series of steps for dealing with the problem, with those who didn’t, and they compared women who got support from others in dealing with their problems with those who didn’t.  Which strategies do you think increased the woman’s chance of getting breast cancer?  Amazingly, it was the activist strategies.

You might think that the activist approach is really grappling with your problem is what I’ve been advocating.  But these women were faced with severe and unavoidable life events – death, permanent loss, inescapable stress.  There was no changing what had happened to them.  Their strategies might have been acceptable in other settings, but not here.  They had to face the question of when to hold them and when to fold them.  In the act of trying to fight something unavoidable, the activist women were actually reliving this inescapable event over and over, making the trauma grove deeper and deeper.  You can’t bring dead people back; you can’t relive your childhood.  Some things are simply irreversible.  It may not seem fair, but no one said that life has to be fair.  Look at the birds at the feeder sometime and watch the big, powerful bluejay with his long beak and cap swoop in and elbow out the little sparrows.  The birds don’t start squawking, “Hey, hey, hey!  You better get in line bubba!”  They just go back in there.  This is the way of nature, and the best thing to do is accept it.  In fact, this is called radical acceptance.  Without this capacity, the activist women were using up physical and emotional resources that could have protected or healed their bodies instead.  The researchers actually concluded that the women’s behavior caused their breast cancer.

We want to pay attention to body memories and figure out the emotions related to the body symptoms we’re experiencing. You want to focus on those memories, however, so that you can transform them, acknowledge them, deal with them, and then release them and move forward.  If you’re forever focused mentally on some trauma or emotion that occurred in the past, you’re losing energy to the past and sapping healing energy from the present.  Your lightbulb in the present will be operating on a level of 60 or 70 watts instead of 100.  In medicine this is called the steal syndrome.  Cancer cells have been shown to ‘steal’ energy from adjacent normal tissue.  So if you’re repetitively reliving and reexperiencing a traumatizing memory, two things happen: you begin to see the pattern of that memory every where and recreate it in the present, and it causes the area in your body that carries the metaphor for the trauma to steal energy from areas that are normal and to reinforce the disease in that area.

In psychiatry we no longer focus exclusively on the past; we teach our patients how to deal with the present.  We teach memory maturation.  This consists of four steps: (1) locating the traumatic experience in the past and differentiating it from current reality; (2) focusing on living in the present without feeling or behaving according to irrelevant demands belonging to the past; (3) decreasing hyperarousal by means of meditation, relaxation response, and exercise; and (4) decreasing intrusive reliving and stopping black hole cycles.

The brain has its own mechanism for decreasing the influence of painful memories.  As you lay down new memories that contradict the old one and help you reframe it, the neuroconnection to the old painful memory weaken.  It becomes the credit card you stop using.  In the meantime you use the other, new credit cards more frequently.  Think of the story of the pianist David Helgott in the movie Shine.  His father tyrannized and abused him while professing to love him, forming a traumatic childhood memory and helping set the scene for a mental breakdown.  But after the boy left home, he had a lot of other experiences of people being loving to him, including various teachers and mentors and eventually his wife.  Their love was expressed differently, and had a healing affect.  David never lost the memory of his father, but he was perhaps able to change the way he interpreted that memory, because it was replaced by memories of other people showing him love in a different way.  As the neuroconnections to those memories strengthened, the old ones weakened.

An illustration of how this works can be found in an eye study performed on monkeys.  Researchers put patches over the monkey’s right eye to force the left eye to do all the work.  Over the period that the right eyes were patched, the neuroconnections that helped those eyes function became retracted or pulled back.  When the patches were removed, the monkeys were functionally blind in their right eyes, unable to see clearly.  The neuroconnectionss to their left eye were strong, but the right ones had been weakened simply due to the lack of use.

Memories work the same way.  There’s no reason to believe that you are ruined or trapped for life if you have a bad memory.  If you don’t constantly reinforce the trauma, it will weaken.  WE all know people who go around talking, almost with pride, about their terrible allergies, for instance, and telling the story over and over of how they ate something that made them swell up so badly that they nearly died.  They keep looking out the same eye and reinforcing it.  Consequently, they’re not using the other eye, the one that can see all those times that they didn’t swell up and were absolutely healthy.

We can learn, forget, and change our behavior.  We can all put aside and learn to live in the present.  Our brains and memories can help us do that.