c-ptsd

Brain Sculpting

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

 

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Did not do any EMDR yesterday as I was too exhausted still, a week after the previous session!

My wife was like this too, so very very tired until the day before the next session, the following week, so she was averaging one day in seven when she wasn’t knackered. It is hard work, I have to say, being this tired all the time.

I asked my therapist about this, she wasn’t sure why it is so tiring so we decided I would research it.

There is not much out there in the research about why EMDR is so tiring. Most research said EMDR was so much more rapid in getting positive treatment outcome than other “talk therapies”  so I guess there is a lot of soul surgery and healing which accounts for me being so tired.

I have had to put most of my life on hold which kinda annoys me. Part of my attachment disorder is always doing stuff to make myself feel better about my self. Much of my self esteem is attached be getting approval for being good at stuff, being talented.

I am often too busy being a human doing rather than a human being to quote one of my old counselers!

I buffer my sometimes fragile and sometimes low self esteem through various achievements such as research and running my own business.

Not being able to do this stuff to the same extent has been tough.

The last couple of days have been full of sadness and anger.

I am seeping out sadness from  my past and then being really angry about it.

It seems incredible I am healing stuff that has been eating away at my very soul for forty years!  It seems a colossal waste of time some days. Why so much suffering for so long?

I wish I had come across  EMDR decades ago. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it then?

Anyway I am full of grieving for a multitude of losses.

The loss of my mother who’s passing I have not really grieved in recovery, the loss a self defining part of me (now I gotta grow a new shell?) the losses that trauma, C-PTSD and my alcoholism and addictions have caused in my life, the loss of opportunity, choices such as having had a child with my wife as we kinda decided against this due to my rampant alcoholism,  addictions and at times chronic mental health.

I have to be careful of not slipping into shame and self pity. It is a balancing act, feeling the pain I have blocked out on one hand and not indulging in it on the other.

I have to be careful sadness does not slide into self pity. I have to remember I am not a normal person doing EMDR for PTSD related incidents. I am a chronic alcoholic in recovery who has to guard that the treatment of one disorder does not trigger off the other. Which is kinda why I am doing this treatment in the first place?

Equally I have to feel this stuff, the decades of pain, sadness, anger that I have numbed out, run away from. I have to fully experience and let it be part of me and who I am.

I have to let it be and not react. Instead of avoiding it, only for it to constantly seep through into my consciousness and trigger my emotionally overreactive behaviours.

I have still to get to the root of many of my behaviours, to the source of where they began.

I have hit a milestone moment for sure in therapy recently but there are other layers of this psyche onion to unpeel.

Many years of emotional pain seems to be seeping out, like a puss and I have to accept this, not run or avoid, as this has been my way of coping from the past, a maladpative coping mechanism.

I have also been grappling with my pride and shame.

I do not think I have been explaining fully enough the process of EMDR which is remiss of me and has made me feel a bit stupid.

Although I am fairly intelligent, I live in fear that my “stupidity” will be outed one day and every one will know the real me, the “not as bright as I would like to think I am” me. As my cleverness or otherwise is linked to my sense of self esteem, I feel pained when I do not research something properly. It feels like a self inflicted wound.

My sense of self is threatened even.

I have not described the process of reprocessing properly I believe.

When I had my major therapeutic breakthrough last week I did not clearly state that the reprocessing bit was when I acted as an adult to my childlike self, to my childlike sibling and then to my parents. I was in charge, in control with making things right, in consoling and comforting way to make sure everyone was okay, loved and comforted. This is what I mean by cognitively reprocessing the past.

I revisited a traumatic memory, the scene of a traumatic memory, I was desensitized to this memory to a large extent because I was acting doing the bi lateral stimulation, the watching of the therapist’s finger moving from left and right, left to right. This desensitization is supposed to happen as the amygdala, implicated in distress states,  is somehow calmed by this process so the brain and mind are not as distressed as normal, so the revisiting of a traumatic scene is not as usually distressing.

This allowed us to adaptively  reprocess this scene and traumatic experience on three levels. First we feel it on a physiological level, we become aware of our body sensations and where they are on the body and just observe them. Secondly we are aware of the emotions that accompany these sensations and the trauma experience.

We discussed these to understand the unprocessed feelings. Then we cognitively challenged these feelings. For example feeling guilty for doing something any child would have done or feeling guilty for something that was not one’s fault is achieved and the emotions are somehow quelled. Then cognitively we can think about what we would say or do in relation to this scenario, to the child or the others in the scene from the perspective of now as an adult.

I consoled my child, spoke to my mother and asked her to speak reassuringly and in a comforting way to my child, then I extended this invitation towards my sisters, then my father joined us and we were all consoled my older adult me, in a way no one was at the time of the trauma. This was in essence a cognitive reprocessing of the event.

The reprocessing means that this memory will now have a different  cognitive, emotional and physiological resonance for me from now on. It was lodged in more long term memory.

The memory is still there in a sense but it does not have the cognitive, emotional or physiological  charge as previously. Hence it does not have the same influence, impact or prompt to certain behaviours that it once had.

For me thus far, this desensitizing and reprocessing has altered a maladaptively processed memory in terms of physiology, emotion and cognition and made it adaptive i.e. it is processed in a way that can help me not cause further pain. The behaviours that now follow it are more likely to be adaptive and healthy.

Some researchers have suggested that the sate of consciousness that one goes into during bi lateral stimulation is akin to REM sleeping. Thus, as with REM sleeping, the brain is active in resolving conflict in the mind.

I will probably have to consolidate this experience again at a later date but have grown some sort of membrane over this painful gaping wound of a memory, this hole in the soul.

I feel differently about this now as a result. It affects me in a differently way to before.

Something changed, possibly for ever.

In terms of the Adaptive Information Processing Model, on which EMDR is based, in order for a memory or experience to be processed properly, according to this model, it has to be processed on these three levels of physiology, emotion and cognition.  I have taken a memory that was not processed in terms of body sensation which probably reflected a heightened stress chemical response, not processed it in terms of emotionally coming to terms with it and not processed properly in terms of my thinking about it, for example, I had not fully considered it’s repercussions from a cognitively perspective.

This third perspective was not missing from what I mentioned in earlier blogs, I simply discussed the two levels of physiology and emotion

That is my understanding of it in the present now anyhow. That may change.

I have come across a number of excellent papers on how EMDR works which I will either upload here on this blogsite or more likely on http://insidethealcoholicbrain.com/ as this therapeutic process is fairly amazing in that it seems to rapidly reorganise certain networks in the brain.

http://insidethealcoholicbrain.com/2016/03/11/adapting-the-maladaptive-how-emdr-reprocesses-the-past/

In fact it is like taking a new adaptive memory and inserting or stitching it in to where the maladaptive memory was or in more technical terms like delving into the coding script of memories and rewriting some of the code underlying these memories. Like removing by a massive defragging.

It is profound stuff either way.

Any way why so tired from EMDR? I think the answer lies in the fact that EMDR leads to this rapid neuroplastic reorganisation of the brain.

In simple words, these means that neural networks in the brain are quickly created, redirected to become more adaptive. For example one area implicated in PTSD is the hippocampus which plays a major role in memory (especially explicit, episodic memory) but also has a less known role in stress regulation.

It appears that even after only about 8 EMDR sessions that the hippocampal region of the brain can increase in volume by about 12%!

This is fairly rapid and immediate reorganising of neural networks to increase a role the hippocampus in explicit memory (perhaps as opposed to the implicit memory network of the dorsal striatum which is implicated in more automatic, reactive responding, or stimulus response activity, with distress often being the stimulus of emotionally overactive responding) and stress regulation.

If my brain is re-organising so rapidly in  a matter of weeks then the brain will be using up much energy, brain glucose,  in re-sculpting my my brain’s neural circuitry.

Which is kinda mind blowing.

There is A Solution! To Complex Trauma

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

There is A Solution – To Complex Trauma

I suffered from my own active alcoholism for over twenty years and found a solution to my alcoholism via the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and their 12 step program of recovery. A program of recovery  I still, for a large extent,  follow today. I generally trust God, clean house and help others, the three basics.

This program has not only saved my life but helped me acquire a new sense of self and a way of life and manner of living that I never knew existed.

I have added to my program of recovery by coming to understanding my disorder of addiction as one of emotional dysfunction.

I have difficulty identifying, labeling and verbalising emotions and this can lead to impulsive behaviour, poor decision making and  at times distress via undifferentiated emotions. In other words, I am not always sure what or how I am feeling.

I often need to discuss my emotions with others so that I can cognitively process them and identify them as feelings.

It is in identifying what I am feeling that then leads to rational goal directed behaviours rather than distress based impulsive decisions and behaviour. Processing my emotions, so that I actually know what I am feeling, helps with subsequent emotion regulation so that I do not emotionally react as much I used to, I do not need to react as much via ego defense mechanism, I do not need to have a life shot through with fear and resentment.

I can now say this situation or person made me feel like this, e.g. they upset me and I can then act accordingly and adaptively rather having rampaging revengeful thoughts fueled by  resentments and reactive behaviour.

These are some of the reasons why I have ten years in recovery, I have learnt ways, coping skills for dealing with me and my emotions, usually my negative emotions.

Via this new attitude and behaviour my brain I  believe has changed for the better, via neuroplasticity prompted by the adaptive behaviours of more mature emotional regulation, as opposed to immature emotional responding, the regions of my brain that control emotional response have altered and recovered.

My brain is now wired in such a way as to encourage more effective emotion regulation. Even when i do take something personally it does not last a mere fraction of the time it used and the intensity of the negative emotional reactions is so small compared to early recovery and the succeeding years. I can now live life on life’s terms a lot better (although far from perfectly).

However, regardless of all this improvement in my brain and behaviours, in my stress and emotion regulation, there have been several times when my recovery has been threatened.

Six years into recovery I thought I was going to relapse. I did not want to drink but I was so distressed emotionally that it seemed inevitable at one point. The more distressed I got the more my brain was screaming at me to drink. I was understandably shocked and dismayed, frightened and upset by coming so close to relapse.

To learn that I have a brain that will lead me to drinking alcohol when I have not desired to drink again ever! I showed me what could possibly meant in my case by the Big Book when it states “the alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink” !

The distress that led to me having scant mental defense against the first drink was not prompted solely by my alcoholism. It was my alcoholism, which is it seems a parasite that feeds on motivation and emotion, was feeding like a parasite on the distress caused by unresolved complex trauma from childhood. In fact the distress in this instance was at Christmas and I could not stop thinking and feeling very emotional about my parents, who are now both sadly deceased.

It was more than grief, however, it was traumatic distress I now understand.

Why was I so distressed. It was this distress that was so active and apparent in my alcoholic drinking, the unbearableness of this distress prompted many a drinking spree.

It took six years of recovery to realise that I was still very effected by something profound to do with my parents. I then in later months became aware of the fact I often dissociate in a variety of ways. So badly that I can almost return to real childhood experience, or rather the somatic re-experiencing of being a traumatized child.

On one occasion I was so worried that I had inadvertently hurt the feelings of some one in AA that  I was convinced it would lead to their relapse and  I kept saying to my wife that I thought this guy will relapse and die because of me and what I thought I had done, which was a minor incident blown up to extreme madness by my catastrophic and paranoid  thought processes. It became evident that this minor episode was a trauma trigger to another incident in childhood, still unresolved in my psyche after decades.

My reactions were not actually about this guy in recovery who was fine and oblivious to my mad thoughts or even what my crazy mind had convinced me I had done to hurt him. This smallest of triggers propelled me experientially back through time to early childhood experiences

Interestingly, what I thought at the time and what I now know to be true is that a misconstruction of what is going at one point in time can be internalised as the truth and live on in our bodliy and mental responses to similar episodes decades later. The past quite literally lives in our bones.

My miscontruction by which I mean I perceive or build up a picture of what is happening now based on what I have pictured in my mind as happening in similar episodes in the past.

Over the next few months and through year 7 of my recovery I was steeling myself to start therapy again. Then my wife had a car accident and ended up suffering PTSD herself. I then shelved my own treatment plans as my wifes’ condition needed more urgent attention. For the next year and a half I helped my wife recuperate and get steadily more mentally well.

She used this therapeutic process that I had read about called EMDR and which after much research I recommended to her although I wasn’t really sure it would work. It was more hope than faith.

Miraculously it did seem to work, in fact it seemed way to good to be true. The effects were so profound.

My wife would say that she felt like some vital part of her brain had been “plugged in again”

She had felt the trauma had pulled some plug out in her brain and it had led to a whole assortment of psychological difficulties such as hyper-vigilance and perceptual distortions, e.g. seeing Bees as flying zeppelins, or constantly seeing errors every where. She felt she had lost her mind, as life seemed to overwhelm her, there was too much information somehow which she struggled to mentally filter.

The part of the brain that supposedly deals with these things is called  the cingulate cortex, mainly the anterior cingulate cortex, wedged  between the neo-cortex and the limbic regions of the brain. it deals with among other things, attention, stress and emotion regulation, emotion processing, with monitoring error in the environment.

It seemed to have been overloaded and compromised by her trauma and the reactions of her brain afterwards to that trauma. amazingly for her and for me the EMDR therapy seemed to put it all back in place, got her broken brain working again.

I thought this amazing but remained cautious and at times skeptical about ti it. To be honest, part of me did not want it to be true, as it meant I would have to give it a go myself at some stage.

I researched and researched trying to find some holes in this miraculous therapy. All the studies universally said it worked well, that the patient outcomes were positive and long lasting.

Damn I thought.

How could reprocessing memories from the past lead to such a profound alteration in one’s consciousness. The cingulate  cortex is also said to be the seat of consciousness in the brain.

How could this be? All that was really happening, to me at least, in her therapy sessions was a therapist moving her finger from one side to the other  while her eyes tracked these fingers, and while simultaneously thinking about a trauma experience from childhood.

The therapist also supported this process  by prompting her to  talk about what she was feeling in relation to whatever came up in her mind in relation to this bilateral stimulation.

There is so much to this therapeutic process than this I can assure you  but I don’t want to go into details now – if you want the technical stuff please go to http://insidethealcoholicbrain.com/2016/01/14/how-the-brain-reacts-to-emdr/

to see what happens to the brain etc during EMDR.

Here I want to describe how it makes you feel and maybe even suggest how it works.

The reason I am disclosing all of this, the inner workings of my traumatized and healing brain is simple – this EMDR does seems to be miraculous in it’s healing potential

Admittedly I have only had one bilateral stimulation session but i think I had good results already.

I have been a thirsty man for psychic healing for nearly 45 years so you will have to excuse me being so overwhelmingly grateful and overjoyed to have finally found a solution to the problems I had years before alcoholism and addiction and which not only fed into these disorders but which could actually prompt relapse in these conditions.

I left the session thinking what came up in our therapeutic exchange prior to the bilateral stimulation touched on things I had heard a thousand times before from the mouths of hundreds of people in AA meetings.

Are the majority of us in AA actually traumatised? If not by childhood or other traumas but by the trauma of addiction itself, having addiction or having had to live with addiction?

Is trauma the main reason people relapse?

All these questions have become increasingly pressing and urgent.

What is the bilateral stimulation like? Well originally you think what the hell is a bit of finger and eye moving going to achieve but I have to say that, under my therapist’s expert guidance I seemed to go back and find roots of some of my traumas, the roots of the self loathing and low self esteem and concept, the reason for  not thinking I am lovable, some of the reasons why my family grew into the thorny bush of recrimination in the way it did, out of the rough ground of our shared family trauma.

All from sometimes singular events.

In revisiting and re-experiencing one particular trauma that involved my sisters and i it suddenly occurred to me in my heart why everyone in my family grew up to be how they are, how they were amazingly based to a large extent on how they reacted to the actual trauma incident. We all reacted to trauma in different ways and this could have led us to have views about ourselves in the present that are steeped in reactions from the past. It showed how brain mechanisms conjure neural ghosts that haunt us decades later.

Echos of the past are materialised in  jaundiced perceptions of ourselves in the succeeding minutes, hours, days and decades, throughout the rest of our lives.

It is a startling insight.

How reacting to an event leads to a distress so powerful that flows around in the brain memory networks to fester in our psyches ever since. It is like a splinter that one knows is there but can’t quite get at.

The splinter,  the more you try to get at it, the worse it festers and day on day it gets worse and worse, more poisonous. It pollutes how we feel about ourselves, for years and years.

All because of not emotionally processing what was going on at the time, in a time long long ago. How profound is that?

When you are tracking the fingers as they move, and thinking about a trauma it feels like your brain elevates as the brain is super stimulated by all the activity –  one can almost feel like one is free falling to quote Tom Petty , free associating and free falling through the past to childhood. Or it is coming up the other way?

Either way,  one is suspended in lived experience, the amgydala has been hypoactivated so it is not as stressful as it could be – the brain is not cognitively imprisoned in the moment but letting the brain free to be how it is. It felt like the Matrix losing it’s coding script.

I returned to events prior to a major trauma and left my amazingly fractured memory of the trauma to come to the surface of my mind. As I did so I discussed the emotions I was feeling, being mindful of the sensations, seeing the past in a new light.

Taking out or allowing the emotional poison to be poulticed. In scientific terms I was properly processing the emotion, exorcising the emotional ghost.

It is the negative emotion, the traumatic distress which screams it’s echo through our lives. In taking the sting out of the emotion and the emotion out of the memory, we can not only silence the scream but put it to bed.

As I left the therapy session I remembered what my wife had said about some part of her being plugged back in again. I felt that some part of me that had been replugged that hadn’t been plugged in properly plugged in  for 45 years.

Is this not the root of my troubles when it comes to relapse risk – this trauma.

Should we not treat co-morbidity as soon as possible in addicts with co-morbid conditions? Do the high relapse rates reflect also  untreated co-morbid conditions and the effect this lack of treatment has on relapse.

Alcoholics and addicts often relapse due to distress or overwhelming negative or crippling negative self concept, most of which are exacerbated by co-morbidity.

Doesn’t this co-morbidity simply makes one’s addictve behaviour more chronic more severe?

I left the therapy on cloud nine, all strangely at one and attached to the world and it’s people. It was a very similar feeling to the feeling I had after doing my step 5 when I had confronted some of the damage of my past by admitting my wrongdoing to another person. It had that same cleansing feeling. That feeling that something was being or had been put right.

It turns out that marvelous feeling was on the surface of one layer of this onion called me. No doubt there will be more peeling of the onion to come, more tears and more wonderful days like today.

I have a way to go for sure. But I have that wonderful precious gift of faith that this will work, that I will one day get past my past.

I walked for miles afterwards stopping to have full blown conversations with people I know and haven’t seen in years. The sun shun on our conversations.

It felt like my emotional thawing is well under way.

I noticed the majestic clouds you get when you live by the hills which roll to  a seaside. I was fascinated by clouds in early recovery. And there they were again – floating past like great fluffy elephants,  great to be looking up, not always looking down, your downward gaze heavy with the past.

So far so good. I am energised today, I  thought I would be exhausted – I may be tomorrow but that will be another day.

Wrapped up warm tonight in bed with the knowledge there is a solution! Like in the early days of recovery when the Big Book, near by sleeping head, reminded of that fact too.

A Safe Place To Visit

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

Just finished my third EMDR terapy session and thought I would write now otherwise I probably will not get around to it. I find I am so exhausted the next day that it is difficult to blog.

I am finding that I have a lot of therapeutic benefit already from the treatment.

Today we got into the EMDR  protocol which mainly looked at mechanisms we will adopt if I dissociate while doing the actual eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) which we will tentatively start next week.

Essentially we spent 15-20 minutes learning the relaxing techniques and “safe place” techniques I will use if I dissociate as the result of the EMDR.

It is mainly to do with “safety of the client” protocols. I felt a great relaxing benefit from doing it today. I will practice the techniques once a day while I am doing this course of treatment.

We will also use smell as a way of coming out of dissociation if need be.

We may not need these techniques but they have to be put in place just in case.

My recent dissociation has been to do with feeling detached from “me” – my body and immediate environment. We discussed how we could deal with this possibility.

I have also dissociated to childhood on occasion and this was discussed too. This type of dissociation seems to take one back to the heart of the trauma. It is like a re-experiencing without having the memory associated  with it.  It is like being behind a wall on the other side of our life, aware of certain things but not able to see it clearly

I am not fearful of dissociating – I have a grasp now of what it is and how much I have been doing it over the course of my life.

I even research the brain regions involved in dissociation and it seems the parts that deal with self reference deactivate and there is a “coming away” from representations of self and associated memory.

I have the type of head that likes to know these things – you may have noticed!?

It is a disquieting, unsettling and stressful experience but is manageable I believe with these techniques.

I  have noticed how after only a few weeks my mind and behaviour has been tied to looking at photos of the past, my old friends and my family.

My nephew also contacted me out of the blue to say he wanted to visit  and I have resumed closer contact with one of my  sisters.

I have made it clear that I am doing therapy for trauma, whether my sisters need it too I am not sure. I am the youngest in the family and a boy so my circumstances might have meant I was more traumatised by events in my early childhood than others.

Interestingly I have found a school photo  of my sister and I which is a photo of us looking a bit shell shocked, in comparison to our smiling faces of the previous year’s school photo when we were beaming more confident, mischievous smiles at the camera. I am presuming this second photo was around the time of the major trauma(s) .

I also found a photo of me in my late 20s after a cocaine psychosis and I look haunted in the same way as the school photo.

I had presumed this was due to the psychosis which is not a very pleasant experience I can assure you. I now know where the phrase “climbing the walls” comes from after that experience I can assure  you!

Now, although the psychosis obviously affect me deeply I can also see trauma in this photo and many other photos of me. My wife told me I was very paranoid at the time too which is linked to psychosis but much of the paranoia linked clearly to what I had experienced in childhood.

It was not only alcoholism and addiction that ate into my soul like a parasite feeding on my troubled emotions,  in these photos of my emaciated drug using self but also complex post trauma.

Unresolved trauma too is like a parasite feed on one’s nerves too.

Then yesterday a person who married my cousin sent me a photo of me in a underage football team that  my dad and his friend organised. My dad is in the photo too of our team.   I suddenly realised how heart breaking it must have been for my dad, what happened to our family, my mothers breakdown and eventual Valium dependence. And the decades of consequence after.

My heart  went out o him. God bless him, he was a loving father, I miss greatly.

The plan now is to finish treatment – finish a novel I was writing for many years while drinking (which is 2/3s finished) and get my driving licence. I once passed the theory part but banged my head , got concussion and could not take the practical test.

So I will try again and then take time out, a month or so to travel back to Ireland and revisit my past and see some people I haven’t seen in many many  years.

Northern Ireland has been at peace for two decades but I have yet to call a complete ceasefire with myself and my past. Hopefully I will later this yer.

Recovery has given me so much and while others hit their mid life crisis I have barely begun living. I am a published scientific writer and want to follow that by the end of this year with a published novel too.

I have a very fragmented self, blow to bits by my traumatised mother and family and my traumatised, brutalised and war torn upbringing in Northern Ireland.

I can feel these disparate parts of self slowly and naturally drifting back into shape.

It will be a new me, the composite parts that make up me no doubt but it will have the same character I am sure.

I got lost thanks to trauma and chronic alcoholism and addiction. Ten years into recovery I am still beginning the amazingly exciting journey of uncovering, recovering, the person I am and the person I am supposed to become.

When the parts reunite I will be the fullness of me.