Flash back.
Everything has been made immeasurably more difficult...
Unpack that...
Keeping my emotional balance has been made immeasurably harder because I'm in replay.
The only good thing to say about this is that I've had years of experience in dealing with my own stress levels, and have accumulated quite a lot of useful theory.
Replay - from my point of view as a sufferer - has to be considered as if it is a type of migraine.
After what has happened I considered deleting my blog.
After all...
Why write.
As I said - mood disturbance, vision and thinking are affected.
But last night the mental health nurse sat well within our circle around Josh's hospital bed last night - usually they go out of the room or sit by the window...
I was thinking, is this because of what my daughter said?
Not for the first or last time I ask myself why write?
Answer - I write because I would like to read the blog of someone going through what we as a family are going through.
I have never been alone in any experience I've ever had, there is always someone else going through what I'm going through..
So, what do I know?
Just that traumatic memories are hard to deal with...
Here are my notes, taken from the work of from Bessel Van der Kolk.
Characteristic symptoms, behaviors and coping strategies of people with severe psychological trauma.
1.It may be intolerable to consciously return to the memory of the event.
2.Flashbacks and hallucinations are a projection of fragmented (real) experience. Flashbacks and the less obvious projections are superimposed on everything around the sufferer. The actual event had duration, a beginning a middle and an end. Flashbacks and nightmare can happen anytime and don't diminish, causing. hyper-vigilance an acute sensitivity to threat.
3. People suffering from severe trauma can experience uncontrollable rage, with a loss of the skill of self control and self regulation.
4.Healing is blocked by the intensity of deep emotions from the past event. The sufferer tries fake it, hoping it gets better, tries to just get on with life whilst feeling dead inside, withdrawn and detached (except for moments of hyper-vigilance).
5.Dissociation; the conscious mind can go blank in response to the replay going on within one's body. The sufferer can learn to ignore the replay, but the stress hormones are still there; leading to illness, and physical pain.
6.Self medication: this takes several forms:
A/ 'The compulsion to repeat' Freud. Need for challenge, the sufferer seeks challenge and danger. Only then can the sufferer feel truly alive and may be an unconscious attempt to gain control over a painful situation. The traumatized person strives to regain mastery and resolution to feel safe.
B/ Taking drugs that numb the pain, or create a rush making the world feel exciting and vivid.
7.A loss of mental flexibility, failure in imagination. Trauma can become the sole source of meaning for the self leading to an exile from the present, living, vivid world. But repetition leads to pain and self hatred. Reliving trauma in therapy may reinforce preoccupation and fixation.
8.It is enormously difficult to organise traumatic experience into a coherent account. Nevertheless the sufferer needs to and inevitably will find meaning in his or her symptoms and creates a cover story. The cover story offers explanation of the sufferers symptoms and behavior for public consumption. The story rarely captures the truth of the situation.
9.The traumatic event changed everything, it is as if the good self died (often represented by a fellow victim of the traumatic event who did not survive).
10.Traumatic memory replays when it is triggered by a stimulus in the environment that is automatically linked by the sufferer to the original trauma. The stimulus is read as a warning which is interpreted through a traumatic memory. A traumatic memory functions differently to normal memory, it hijacks emotional processing. There may be no conscious experience of this happening, but the outcome will be a rise in stress levels and the sufferer will be in a state of anxiety, actually in an altered state of consciousness. The sufferer is no longer in the present but relieving feelings as if the memory is a real event.
11.The traumatic memories do not have a memory of resolution because during the traumatic event the flight / fight response was blocked. This experience underpins traumatic stress.
Unpack that...
Keeping my emotional balance has been made immeasurably harder because I'm in replay.
The only good thing to say about this is that I've had years of experience in dealing with my own stress levels, and have accumulated quite a lot of useful theory.
Replay - from my point of view as a sufferer - has to be considered as if it is a type of migraine.
- There will be mood disturbance
- Vision cannot be trusted
- And thinking about anything will hurt.
- Self medicate with meditation and visualizations that address the wound.
After what has happened I considered deleting my blog.
After all...
Why write.
As I said - mood disturbance, vision and thinking are affected.
But last night the mental health nurse sat well within our circle around Josh's hospital bed last night - usually they go out of the room or sit by the window...
I was thinking, is this because of what my daughter said?
Not for the first or last time I ask myself why write?
Answer - I write because I would like to read the blog of someone going through what we as a family are going through.
I have never been alone in any experience I've ever had, there is always someone else going through what I'm going through..
So, what do I know?
Just that traumatic memories are hard to deal with...
Here are my notes, taken from the work of from Bessel Van der Kolk.
Characteristic symptoms, behaviors and coping strategies of people with severe psychological trauma.
1.It may be intolerable to consciously return to the memory of the event.
2.Flashbacks and hallucinations are a projection of fragmented (real) experience. Flashbacks and the less obvious projections are superimposed on everything around the sufferer. The actual event had duration, a beginning a middle and an end. Flashbacks and nightmare can happen anytime and don't diminish, causing. hyper-vigilance an acute sensitivity to threat.
3. People suffering from severe trauma can experience uncontrollable rage, with a loss of the skill of self control and self regulation.
4.Healing is blocked by the intensity of deep emotions from the past event. The sufferer tries fake it, hoping it gets better, tries to just get on with life whilst feeling dead inside, withdrawn and detached (except for moments of hyper-vigilance).
5.Dissociation; the conscious mind can go blank in response to the replay going on within one's body. The sufferer can learn to ignore the replay, but the stress hormones are still there; leading to illness, and physical pain.
6.Self medication: this takes several forms:
A/ 'The compulsion to repeat' Freud. Need for challenge, the sufferer seeks challenge and danger. Only then can the sufferer feel truly alive and may be an unconscious attempt to gain control over a painful situation. The traumatized person strives to regain mastery and resolution to feel safe.
B/ Taking drugs that numb the pain, or create a rush making the world feel exciting and vivid.
7.A loss of mental flexibility, failure in imagination. Trauma can become the sole source of meaning for the self leading to an exile from the present, living, vivid world. But repetition leads to pain and self hatred. Reliving trauma in therapy may reinforce preoccupation and fixation.
8.It is enormously difficult to organise traumatic experience into a coherent account. Nevertheless the sufferer needs to and inevitably will find meaning in his or her symptoms and creates a cover story. The cover story offers explanation of the sufferers symptoms and behavior for public consumption. The story rarely captures the truth of the situation.
9.The traumatic event changed everything, it is as if the good self died (often represented by a fellow victim of the traumatic event who did not survive).
10.Traumatic memory replays when it is triggered by a stimulus in the environment that is automatically linked by the sufferer to the original trauma. The stimulus is read as a warning which is interpreted through a traumatic memory. A traumatic memory functions differently to normal memory, it hijacks emotional processing. There may be no conscious experience of this happening, but the outcome will be a rise in stress levels and the sufferer will be in a state of anxiety, actually in an altered state of consciousness. The sufferer is no longer in the present but relieving feelings as if the memory is a real event.
11.The traumatic memories do not have a memory of resolution because during the traumatic event the flight / fight response was blocked. This experience underpins traumatic stress.
Comments
Post a Comment