BASK
Flashbacks
Jeannie
Riseman
Preamble
In case you hadn't heard, Survivorship is giving a series of Webinars
on various aspects of ritual abuse and healing. Webinars are seminars
on the Web -- basically, conference calls plus slides. All you need is
a phone and a computer. They are like presentations at a conference,
except there is no travel involved! Complete information on our
Webinars is at http://www.survivorship.org/webinars.html
There is still room in the August 15 Webinar.
I ( Jeannie Riseman) will be talking
on " Sensory and Emotional
Flashbacks". I'm a retired clinical
social worker and a ritual
abuse survivor who was used in early government/academic mind control experimentation.
I used to edit Survivorship’s Journal
and Notes and I
currently maintain the website and moderate the message board. My own website is http://www.ra-info.org.
In "Sensory and Emotional Flashbacks", I'll cover the following topics:
- Information about how memory works (presented in easily
understandable terms)
- Two models of flashbacks
- Dealing with sight, sound, small, pain, and emotional
flashbacks
- Constructing your own flashback work sheet
I have found that it helped me immensely to have an
intellectual understanding of what was happening as memories
surfaced. Although I had read a lot, psychological and medical terms
flew out the window in the middle of a flashback. Simple ideas were
easier to remember and helped to keep me grounded. I'm
hoping that sharing the framework I developed will make your
experiences a little less confusing.
File/chapter
excerpted
from
- Wed Mar 24 07:54:06
2004 newsletter
Subject: Survivorship
Monthly
Notes
March 2004 Volume 6, Number 2
3181 Mission Street, San
Francisco,
California USA 94110 info@survivorship.or
|
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. |
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. _____________________________________________________________
Repression
of Unwanted
Memories Has
a Biological Basis
Science 1/9/2004, Vol. 303
pp.232-5
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.
_____________________________________________________________
Healing
with Animals
Although
animals are abused in
many
ritual settings, they can be a profound source of healing. Daniel Hart
thinks that writing focussing on survivors' experiences in healing with
domestic or wild animals would be positive and inspiring.
He has volunteered to start a
regular
column in the Quarterly on this topic. Prose, poetry, and artwork
submissions
are all welcome.
You can e-mail submissions to
him
at rimbaudetal@yahoo.com.
If you don't have e-mail,
snail
mail them to:
Attention: Daniel,
Survivorship,
PMB 139, 3181 Mission St, San Francisco CA 94110.
_____________________________________________________________
You
Did It!!!
Tremendous
thanks to Kevin,
Daniel,
Becky, and the two Suzannes for their months of patience and
flexibility
in moving the back issues of the Quarterlies from one storage location
to another. A huge task, getting our schedules together, lifting,
heaving,
driving.... We very much appreciate everything our volunteers have done
to help the operation of Survivorship.
_____________________________________________________________
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.
_____________________________________________________________
Therapists:
please consider filling out a survey on your experience
working with clients healing from ritual abuse, mind control, and other
forms of extreme child abuse. For more information, click here.
Survivorship:
Check back
later for
Survivorship What's New
Within
this site you will find information on
ritual abuse (also called ritualistic abuse or
ritual-abuse-torture).
The difficult dates
page lists
holidays that are hard for survivors
of satanic ritual abuse (SRA), polytheistic cult abuse, and abuse by
nazi groups. The articles give background and deal with the effects of
ritual abuse, child pornography, and child prostitution, and
government/military mind control (MC). Many of the articles describe
living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD)
and Dissociative
Identity Disorder (DID, formerly called MPD.) There are many
links to
other pages on ritual abuse and to healing resources
The
purpose of S.M.A.R.T. is to help stop
ritual abuse and to help those who have been ritually abused. We work
toward this goal by disseminating information on the possible
connections between secretive organizations, ritual abuse, and mind
control, by encouraging healing from the extensive damage done by
ritual abuse and mind control, and by encouraging survivors to network.
We offer this web
site, a
bimonthly newsletter, an e-mail discussion list, and annual
conferences.
If you have
information about
ritual abuse and mind control,
especially information pertaining to secretive organizations, we would
be grateful if you could send it to smartnews@aol.com
for inclusion in the newsletter. Please also contact us if you have
comments about these pages or trouble with any of the links.
Resources
Greg
Reid, Christian
investigator,
educator, and author, writes: Things as
They Are
is our monthly
publication.
It contains news updates, topic commentary, and hard-hitting,
opinionated
stuff. It's the flagship publication of YouthFire
and is
free to anyone
who asks.
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:
Important
parts of the story may be missing, and survivors
may
have difficulty putting the pieces together to form a complete
narrative
with an accurate time sequence...although traumatic childhood memories
are deeply engraved, they are not stored or retrieved in the same way
as
ordinary memories.
Many survivors
have a period
of
amnesia during which they have no recollection of having been abused.
In
a careful follow-up study of two hundred women with documented
childhood
histories of sexual abuse, one in three did not remember the abuse
twenty
years later.
(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/
.
Ellen
Lacter has a web site
called
Advocacy
for Victims of Ritual Abuse. Kinds of Torture Endured in
Ritual
Abuse and Trauma-Based Mind Control: Brief Synopsis of the Literature
on
the Existence of Ritualistic Abuse: Overview of the Differences Between
Satanism and Witchcraft: Mind Control; Simple to Complex: Work with
"Abuser
Personalities:" Accuracy of Recovered Memories: Safety Tips for Ritual
Abuse Survivors: Deep Inner Decisions that Allow Survivors to Heal:
Advocating
for Ritualistically Abused Children: Child Indicators of Ritual Trauma
in Play and Art: Adult and Adolescent Indicators of Ritual Trauma:
Spiritual
and Psychological Resolution of the Pain and Torment of Having Abused
or
Killed: Treating Dissociative, Abused, and Ritually Abused, Children:
Relationships
Between Mind Control and Ritual Abuse and more
Life
Support:
The
child
prostitution
and pornography survivor writing collective has: poetry, prose,
testimony,
analysis, education, and action "we get the message from the world
around
us that no one really expects us to still be alive - and certainly not
to be creative, expressive human beings. in some ways, this message
makes
sense. what we have experienced as victims of child pornography and
prostitution
is so deeply destructive, so annihilating. we have experienced feeling
shattered, dead, unable to continue existing. We struggle with the
feeling
that it is impossible for such extremes of pain, torture and violation
to be - in any sense - survivable.
_____________________________________________________________
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
At first go to links related
to this subject: http://www.suite101.com/articles.cfm/ritual_abuse/21-40
and to files/chapters of this site to have some momentous
examples
of harmful deeds
A real
warning:
there
are
indeed
scientists who not only
declare such harsh convictions, but who try to
transpose them towards - harsher - aims (see Delgado
e Skinner )
These
files/chapters
from this
Web site
- and book - which are partly
in English:
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.
|
Questa rielaborazione
del famoso Sonno della
ragione
di Goya
- ufficialmente copyright - è resa molto
più
inquietante dell'originale per essere utilizzata come copertina
del libro e
spiegata dal DisegnatoreAndrzej (Andrew)
Suda / This
powerful, more puzzling creative
modification of
the Goya's
Sleep
of reason- marked by
the official
Copyright
- here is used as book
cover's image, and explained by
the Designer Andrzej (Andrew) Suda:
should look
just like many of the events described by the victims: they exist, are bothersome, and
we don’t
know exactly WHY they are there but they are there… [come molti dei fatti
descritti dalle
vittime: essi esistono, turbano e noi non riusciamo a
conoscere
esattamente il PERCHE' ci siano, ma ci sono...]
