5 novembre 2007 / November 5 2007

BASK Flashbacks

Before I read up on flashbacks, I thought they were like living the trauma all over again, in every single detail. Sights, sounds, smells, temperature, and touch all would combine to recreate the original experience in a special kind of hallucination.
Well, mine aren't like the least bit like that. I get little snippets of odd things: a smell of gasoline or perfume when I am swimming; mistaking a car's backfiring for a gunshot; bizarre intrusive thoughts.
I never thought much about these things until I learned about dissociation and flashbacks. They were just examples of the stuff that made me peculiar.
Now I understand that, during the trauma, I perceived the event in a dissociated state. I stored the memory in unconnected fragments, and when it surfaces, it comes back in fragments. So each little weird snippet is the memory of a small part of something I experienced years ago.
When I learned about Bennet Braun's BASK model of flashbacks, things started to make more sense. Braun made B stand for behavior, A for affect (emotion), S for sensations, and K for knowledge. Each of these modalities can come back separately. Let's go through them one by one.
Behavior, I think, is the hardest to understand as a flashback. We tend to repeat our traumas. If our Dad was distant, we fall for distant guys. If our Mom was alcoholic, we are attracted to alcoholic girls. But this feels like true love, not a flashback. And yet it is, really, because we are saying, in actions, something about our past. It feels familiar. It's a repetition of the past and is inappropriate in the present.
Here are some of my behaviors that I have come to see as flashbacks. I spend a lot of energy trying to please men and I am afraid of making them angry. I put myself down before others can put me down. I am perfectionistic, fearing that awful things will happen if I make a mistake.
The list goes on and on.
Emotional flashbacks (Braun's A for affect) are also confusing. Strong feelings sweep over me and I find myself crying, enraged, or full of fear.
My mind searches for a reason for these feelings. Since the reason, the original abuse, is still unconscious, I grab on to something in the present to explain my feelings. It's taken a lot of practice to recognize that I am having a flashback, and that I am not really afraid of this particular mailbox on the corner or this cute little harmless spider.
Sensation flashbacks are much easier for me to recognize. That piece of trash on the road is not a dead body. Loud noises are not gunshots.
Feeling cold in ninety-degree weather is a body memory. And so on.
Knowledge flashbacks feel really strange. I calmly say things I didn't know I knew, like the comparative cost of different animals my cult sacrificed. I describe code words that were used to trigger me more than fifty years ago. I just know these things. At the same time they seem improbable and surreal, like bad science fiction. I always have the reaction, "Where did that come from???"
Every now and then fragments come together and I know which event is paired with which sights or sounds or feelings. This seems like a photograph in my mind, or a short movie. Very occasionally I think the event is happening now and I have to work hard to separate the past from the present. These more complete flashbacks occurred more often shortly after I figured out I was ritually abused.
I know everybody is different. I realize that your flashbacks may not like mine at all. I know that some people may find it very helpful to intellectually understand what is going on, while others feel it's sort of beside the point. But I also know that many people have benefited, as I did, from using the BASK model to organize their thoughts about flashbacks. It can bring a little order into the chaos and can provide a degree of distance from the flashback experience. It can help you keep one foot in the present, so to speak, and that is very, very helpful.
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Repression of Unwanted Memories Has a Biological Basis

Just as Freud said, people are able to suppress unwanted thoughts and memories until they are no longer able to remember them. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers at Stanford and the University of Oregon have identified the parts of the brain involved in memory suppression. It is yet not known, however, whether suppression can produce complete and permanent amnesia for an unwanted memory.
Anderson, the first author, published the results of a behavioral study of suppression in a 2001 paper published in Nature titled "Suppressing Unwanted Memories by Executive Control." He took the research a step further at Stanford by using brain-imaging scans to identify the neural systems involved in actively suppressing memory.
The core findings showed that controlling unwanted memories was associated with increased activation of the left and right frontal cortex (the part of the brain used to repress memory), which in turn led to reduced activation of the hippocampus (the part of the brain used to remember experiences). In other words, the frontal cortex can prevent the creation of memory in the hippocampus. In addition, the researchers found that the more subjects activated their frontal cortex during the experiment, the better they were at suppressing unwanted memories.
Twenty-four people, aged 19 to 31, were given 36 pairs of unrelated nouns, and asked to remember them at 5-second intervals. The subjects were tested on memorizing the word pairs until they got about three-quarters of them right.
The participants then were tested while having their brains scanned using fMRI. The researchers randomly divided the 36 word pairs into three sets of 12. In the first set, volunteers were shown the first word in the pair and asked to recall and think about the second word.
In the second set, volunteers were asked to look at the first word of the pair and not recall or think of the second word. The third set of 12 word pairs served as a baseline and was not used during the brain scanning part of the experiment.
Afterwards, the subjects were retested on all 36 word pairs. The participants remembered fewer of the word pairs they had actively tried to not think of than the baseline pairs, even though they had not been exposed to the baseline group for a half-hour.
Anderson said the findings about the brain's ability to suppress memory could be used as a tool to better understand addiction and the ability of people to suppress unwanted thoughts related to cravings. It might also help provide a model to assess individuals at risk from suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and might suggest techniques to diminish the emotional response to trauma-related stimuli.
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Healing with Animals

You Did It!!!

Survivorship lists events, services, connections, and resources for your information. We do not endorse resources listed and cannot guarantee that individuals, groups conferences, or books are pro-survivor. Unless you are already familiar with the organization or individual, please check it out in advance if you are interested.
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Resources

Shine the Light: Sexual Abuse and Healing in the Jewish Community by Rachel Lev has a variety of contributing authors, exploring different contexts of abuse. This book also has information on memory:

(Originally from Backtalk Mother Jones, March/April 1993) Northeastern University Press, Boston, Mass. Web Sites: http://www.nupress.neu.edu and http://www.shine-the-light.com/ .

Life Support:

Monthly Notes, formerly called Chart Notes, ISSN 1523-275, is published monthly. Copyright =A9 1999-2004 by Survivorship. All rights reserved. The entire contents of this issue are copyrighted by Survivorship or by the individual contributors. Contact Survivorship, PMB 139, 3181 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94110, or email info@survivorship.org for permission to reprint. Survivorship is a nonprofit organization.

Italian references and quotations

These files/chapters from this Web site - and book - which are partly in English:

METILFENIDATO E SINDROME DA DEFICIT DI ATTENZIONE E IPERATTIVITA' (ADHD)
MALATTIE RARE IN OFFERTA SPECIALE

And here below a persuasive - Italian - quotation:
Essential is to recognize the CONNECTIONS linking present to past!

Quanto è importante risonoscere i COLLEGAMENTI TRA PRESENTE E PASSATO

 - In tanto tempo non era riuscita a fare emergere la verità dentro di me. E’ stata lei  [la terapista] per prima a sospettare che avessi subito violenza da bambina, ma poi l’ha messo in dubbio. Un tira e molla che ha avuto effetti devastanti....
  - Noi ex bambini abusati non abbiamo certezza di ciò che proviamo e ricordiamo. Siamo i primi a dubitare di noi stessi perché quello che affiora alla mente è troppo spaventoso. Uno psicologo, uno psichiatra dovrebbero aiutarti ad avere fiducia dei tuoi sensi. Invece spesso ti dicono che i tuoi ricordi nascondono una pulsione, un desiderio sessuale inconscio verso un genitore. Scambiano un incesto con un complesso di Edipo”.
 - Lei quando ha cominciato a ricordare?
  - Quando ho avuto i primi rapporti con mio marito. Al suo posto vedevo un adulto senza volto. Un altro uomo”
- Come vive un bambino abusato?
  - E’ diverso dagli altri e non sa perché. Per sopravvivere spezzetta la sua personalità in ruoli diversi. Nel mio caso c’erano la Linda seduttiva, la Linda giudice, la Linda buona, quella cattiva. Ho tentato più volte il suicidio, senza capire le radici della mia sofferenza”.
  - Come è possibile?
  - La confusione è un tratto tipico di bambini abusati. Avevo dentro di me un tumore, un marchio misterioso di diversità, ma non sapevo vederlo. Mi dicevo: ho una casa, una famiglia, da mangiare e da vestire, e allora perché sono così infelice? Poi chiedevo perdono a Dio dei miei gesti assurdi. A 17 anni ho sofferto a lungo la depressione ho perso molti chili e miei, ipocritamente, si sono anche preoccupati.
 - Come ne è uscita?
 - Quando l’ho ammesso ho cominciato a stare già meglio. Poi due bravi psicologi mi hanno aiutato.
  - In che modo?
  - Mi hanno insegnato quanto fosse importante riconoscere i collegamenti tra il presente e il passato, solo così, piano piano, sono riuscita a ricostruire quello che mi era successo.
  - Si spieghi
  - Poteva accadermi in qualsiasi momento, senza preavviso. Piombavo in una sorta di stato catatonico, diventavo rigida, non riuscivo a muovermi, neppure per andare in bagno. Potevo restare così addirittura per un giorno intero.
Mi hanno insegnato quanto fosse importante riconoscere i collegamenti tra il presente e il passato, solo così, piano piano, sono riuscita a ricostruire quello che mi era successo.
  - Quali collegamenti?
  - Faccio un esempio. Ieri pomeriggio mi sono accorta di tremare al rumore dei passi di uno sconosciuto sul pianerottolo di casa.
  - Può accadere.
  - Di pomeriggio, ad una donna di quarant’anni? No, c’era qualcosa che non andava. Un tempo però avrei continuato a tremare senza chiedermi perché. Oggi mi fermo a riflettere. E riesco a trovare i collegamenti. I passi dello sconosciuto mi ricordavano i rumori che faceva mio padre quando tornava a casa, dopo la scuola. Era il ritorno dell’orco. Fino a poco tempo fa somatizzavo addirittura il terrore che provavo nei suoi confronti.
  - Anche in questo c’è un collegamento col passato?
  - Sì. Il mio psicologo mi ha spiegato che mi immobilizzavo per rendermi invisibile, come fa la preda per sfuggire al cacciatore. Probabilmente usavo lo stesso stratagemma da bambina. Purtroppo non mi ha salvata.