psyche-ology

borderedlines

beachdeath

During one of our meetings, a patient named Liz happened to mention a brief list of things she wanted to do in the upcoming week. Although I had neither asked her to make the list nor suggested she do the things on it, the following week she sheepishly confessed, “I didn’t do all the things I was supposed to do this past week, so I don’t feel I have much to talk about.” She spoke to me as though I had expected her to accomplish the things on the list and as though she had to answer to me, even though I had nothing to do with the plan.
Between the moment when she first conceived of the list and our next meeting, an important change took place in Liz’s thinking. At some point - probably almost immediately after she made the list - her perception became distorted. Instead of seeing the listed activities as things she wanted to do, she began to view them as tasks imposed upon her, which she had some sort of moral obligation to fulfill.
I see this transformation over and over in my OCPD patients. Somehow, “I want” turns into “I should.” In fact, the phrase “I want” is a rarity in their thinking and their vocabulary. Instead of “I want to,” they usually experience and say, “I ought to,” “I must,” or “I should.” Volition is replaced by obligation. And similarly, rather than saying, “I don’t want to,” they say, “I can’t.”
The unconscious conversion of “I want” into “I should” is a childhood safety-seeking maneuver that becomes ingrained in the OCPD patient’s character… thinking and speaking in such terms as “I should” or “I have to” feels and sounds less selfish and somehow more moral and responsible than “I want” or “I’d like.” In the OCPD worldview, where conscientiousness is king, it’s better to be fulfilling one’s duty than satisfying one’s own needs.

Too Perfect, Allan E. Mallinger and Jeannette DeWyze

Source: beachdeath

currentsinbiology

Source: neurosciencenews.com

neoliberalismkills

The more psychotherapy an abusive man has participated in, the more impossible I usually find it is to work with him. The highly “therapized” abuser tends to be slick, condescending, and manipulative. He uses the psychological concepts he has learned to dissect his partner’s flaws and dismiss her perceptions of abuse. He takes responsibility for nothing that he does; he moves in a world where there are only unfortunate dynamics, miscommunications, symbolic acts. He expects to be rewarded for his emotional openness, handled gingerly because of his “vulnerability,” colluded with in skirting the damage he has done, and congratulated for his insight. Many years ago, a violent abuser in my program shared the following with us: “From working in therapy on my issues about anger toward my mother, I realized that when I punched my wife, it wasn’t really her I was hitting. It was my mother!” He sat back, ready for us to express our approval of his self-awareness. My colleague peered through his glasses at the man, unimpressed by this revelation. “No,” he said, “you were hitting your wife.”
I have yet to meet an abuser who has made any meaningful and lasting changes in his behavior toward female partners through therapy, regardless of how much “insight”—most of it false—that he may have gained. The fact is that if an abuser finds a particularly skilled therapist and if the therapy is especially successful, when he is finished he will be a happy, well-adjusted abuser—good news for him, perhaps, but not such good news for his partner. Psychotherapy can be very valuable for the issues it is devised to address, but partner abuse is not one of them; an abusive man needs to be in a specialized program.
Therapy focuses on the man’s feelings and gives him empathy and support, no matter how unreasonable the attitudes that are giving rise to those feelings.
An abusive man’s therapist usually will not speak to the abused woman, whereas the counselor of a high-quality abuser program always does.
Therapy typically will not address any of the central causes of abusiveness, including entitlement, coercive control, disrespect, superiority, selfishness, or victim blaming.
It is also impossible to persuade an abusive man to change by convincing him that he would benefit from it, because he perceives the benefits of controlling his partner as vastly outweighing the losses. This is part of why so many men initially take steps to change their abusive behavior but then return to their old ways. There is another reason why appealing to his self-interest doesn’t work: The abusive man’s belief that his own needs should come ahead of his partner’s is at the core of his problem. Therefore when anyone, including therapists, tells an abusive man that he should change because that’s what’s best for him, they are inadvertently feeding his selfish focus on himself: You can’t simultaneously contribute to a problem and solve it.
Women speak to me with shocked voices of betrayal as they tell me how their couples therapist, or the abuser’s individual therapist, or a therapist for one of their children, has become a vocal advocate for him and a harsh and superior critic of her. I have saved for years a letter that a psychologist wrote about one of my clients, a man who admitted to me that his wife was covered with blood and had broken bones when he was done beating her and that she could have died. The psychologist’s letter ridiculed the system for labeling this man a “batterer,” saying that he was too reasonable and insightful and should not be participating in my abuser program any further. The content of the letter indicated to me that the psychologist had neglected to ever ask the client to describe the brutal beating that he had been convicted of.
As a routine part of my assessment of an abusive man, I contacted his private therapist to compare impressions. The therapist turned out to have strong opinions about the case:
THERAPIST:
I think it’s a big mistake for Martin to be attending your abuser program. He has very low self-esteem; he believes anything bad that anyone says about him. If you tell him he’s abusive, that will just tear him down further. His partner slams him with the word abusive all the time, for reasons of her own. His wife’s got huge control issues, and she has obsessive-compulsive disorder. She needs treatment. I think having Martin in your program just gets her what she wants.
BANCROFT: So you have been doing couples counseling with them?
THERAPIST: No, I see him individually.
BANCROFT: How many times have you met with
her?
THERAPIST: She hasn’t been in at all.
BANCROFT: You must have had quite extensive phone contact with her, then.
THERAPIST: No, I haven’t spoken to her.
BANCROFT: You haven’t spoken to her? You have assigned his wife a clinical diagnosis based only on Martin’s descriptions of her?
THERAPIST: Yes, but you need to understand, we’re talking about an unusually insightful man. Martin has told me many details, and he is perceptive and sensitive.
BANCROFT: But he admits to serious psychological buse of his wife, although he doesn’t call it that. n abusive man is not a reliable source of information about his partner.
What the abuser was getting from individual therapy, unfortunately, was an official seal of approval for his denial, and for his view that his wife was mentally ill.

“Why does he do that ? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling men”

by Lundy Bancroft

(via ontopofgravity)

Source: femsolid

moving-trauma-hero

PTSD and the physical effects.

hollowedskin

So, as I explained in this post on the basics of how early trauma affects us, abuse and neglect during our formative years add extras into our experience of PTSD and one of those is physical illness. (a reminder that ‘formative’ is in terms of brain development; so up until the age of 25)

One of the big reasons for this is hypervigilance and the limbic system. How being constantly surrounded by an abusive environment makes you highly sensitive to sensory input (hypervigilance), and how this affects you physically.

Basically “why am I so fucking sick all the time and why doesn’t it seem to have a cause”
or
“what does it mean when they say that my PTSD is causing these physical symptoms”.

First you’ll have to bear with me while I explain some things about your brain and it’s parts, because otherwise this won’t make any sense.

Your amygdala is part of the limbic system that controls instinct and the panic response. It’s sometimes referred to as your “lizard brain”.
And because you don’t really need to know how the whole thing is rigged, I’m going to keep calling it that. (Like you can look it up if you want, i’m not going to stop you).
It’s the instinctive part and also where your core beleifs about the world are (called schemas; which is another topic).

This is the part of your brain that tries to keep you alive at any cost, where the ‘flight, fight, freeze or feign’ response lives.

Your amygdala develops very early, which is why babies can experience fear. But it develops before the conscious thinking part.
Much like an actual lizard, your lizard brain doesn’t ‘think’ or reason, it just watches and notes what is dangerous, and what has worked to save you and stores that information.
Because what your lizard brain’s main function is is to keep you alive in a crisis.

Don’t know what I’m talking about?
This is the part of your brain that has already slammed on the brakes before you decide to when you’re cut off in traffic, or that gives you that feeling that ‘this is dangerous’ when you can’t really figure out why, but later find out that WOW you were so right.
It is activated when it sees that you are in danger, and it is going to take too long for you to decide what your response will be.

Ok so now we know what it is, but how does this relate to PTSD or hypervigilance and how can this make me sick?

In an untraumatised brain, the limbic system (specifically the amigdala) will dump stress hormones into your brain and body when you are in extreme danger. One of these we already know is adrenaline, but the hormone that is most important here is a steroid called cortisol.

Cortisol basically cuts off all the regular limits your body sets so you don’t get injured, because when you’re in danger it doesn’t matter if you get injured so long as you survive.
This means you can run faster and longer, you’re stronger, your senses are sharper, you’re hyperaware of your surroundings and you don’t feel pain.

This is how mothers can lift cars off their babies in a crisis.
Or how come you don’t notice that you’ve broken your arm in a car accident until later.

Cortisol is great when your brain functions properly.

However; when you’ve been exposed to extreme and ongoing trauma, you become hypervigilant. You have to be constantly aware of every tiny change in facial expression, every sound, every change in tone or every slight movement.
You are always prepared for danger and always trying to pre-guess what and when is going to happen.
In an abusive environment, you have to do this to stay safe.

The thing is that when you’re constantly in this state of hypervigilance and hyperarousal (not sexual arousal but sensory; where you could hear a cricket fart next door), your limbic system is constantly wired up. And it’s constantly activating your FFFF (Fight, flight, freeze and feign) response, and constantly dumping your cortisol to keep you ready.

What ends up happening is that your limbic system eventually stops being able to turn OFF your cortisol tap. So instead of a dump, its a leak. Constantly dripping into your system as it’s created - even after you’ve escaped the abuse.

But cortisol is good isn’t it? It makes us stronger and faster and feel less pain?

Yes; but if it didn’t have a downside we wouldn’t only have it as an emergency plan.

Cortisol is a steroid and an immunosuppressant, in a dump it forces more blood sugar production and shuts down the digestive system. Long term it decreases cartilage and bone formation, affects glucose levels along with a whole swag of of other things.

People with this ‘cortisol leak’ can experience

Lupus
Fibromyalgia
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Osteoarthritis
decreased bone density leading to osteoporosis
gastrointestinal problems (nausea, vomiting, bowel problems, difficulty digesting food or absorbing nutrients leading to nutritional deficiencies, IBD, constipation, and diarrhea)
Asthma
Eczema
diabetes
Sensory Processing Disorders (inc extreme sensitivity to light, noise, touch, sensory overload etc)
Severe allergic reactions and other autoimmune disorders
decreased immune response causing slower healing times and more infections
heart disease
memory issues; short term memory, and issues relating to the maintaining or accessing of memories
and on top of all that are 300% more likely to self harm.

It also has the fun circular effect of… making you hypervigilant.

*sigh*.

So, much in the same way that anxiety stops us from doing things which then gives us more anxiety which means we can’t do even MORE things, over and over, the limbic system makes us hypervigilant which breaks the limbic system which then makes us even more hypervigilant.
And also sick.

PTSD is, as you’ve probably already realised, pretty good at cycling into awfulness like that.

But this is why the effects of traumatic abuse when our brains are forming is so profound, and so hard to heal. We quite literally have been given a form of brain damage, and our brains no longer function physically in the way they are designed.

Next up; I’ll be talking about the psychological effects of this; Maladaptive Schemas. (Which means that the things you learn as ‘’life truths’’ in an abusive environment while you’re developing can end up being warped, and that affects our ability to process information; including therapeutic information.

Till then, stay safe and know you’re not alone in this shit.
Hollow

Source: hollowedskin

moving-trauma-hero

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the tasks of early adulthood–establishing independence and intimacy–burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.

Judith Herman (via disabledbyculture)

Source: disabledbyculture

quietmydear

healingschemas:
“ DBT Self-Help Resources: The DBT Skills Handbook is one of the best dbt self-help resources currently available on the web - and it is free by following this link: DBT Skills Handbook
”

Source: healingschemas

quietmydear

queendopamine:
“ “ Life After Trauma: A Workbook for Healing by Dena Rosenbloom, PhD and Mary Beth Williams, PhD
” ”

Source: queendopamine

neoliberalismkills

emotionalabuseawareness:
“ we-r-survivors:
“ We Are Survivors
”
Reblogging again because someone asked for citation. It’s not a direct quote from a study report.
There are several studies that have found out that the areas of the brain that get...

Source: we-the-survivors

veryfemmeandantifascist

thechanelmuse:
“ the-real-eye-to-see:
“ Finaly now is the time when black people started to take first places!
”
I’m not even gonna front. As soon as I read the caption, I immediately thought “wth is that?” If that too was your initial reaction,...

trapcard

Important facts about DID

dinosaursindisarray

DID is caused by repeated childhood trauma before the child has gained a personal sense of self. Most children gain this sense of self around 6-9 years old. Therefore, DID cannot form after the ages of 6-9.

DID is caused by repeated childhood trauma. Trauma can include physical, mental, emotional, or sexual abuse, invasive medical procedures, repeated natural disasters, severe neglect, and/or war. The trauma must have been repetitive. Without trauma, DID cannot form.

To have DID, amnesia must occur. Amnesia is defined as gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information and/or traumatic events.

If someone does not fit all of the criteria for DID, they’re diagnosed with OSDD (Other Specified Dissociative Disorder.) For instance: If someone does not experience amnesia, they do not meet the diagnostic criteria for DID, and will be diagnosed with OSDD.

Fictives (or Fictional Introjects) exist in some systems. Fictives are fictional characters that become alters. They are formed like any other alter, from trauma, either at a young age, or stress happening to someone who ALREADY has DID. They do not develop just from a love of a character, or from wanting that character to be real. They are not the same as imaginary friends, or roleplay characters.

DID is not the same as being kin with someone/something. Being kin with a character means relating to that character. This is not the same as an alter. Some people may believe they are the character that they are kin with, but this is not DID either.

Alters are not roleplay characters. People who roleplay and create characters might feel like their characters have their own personalities, to the point that the character ‘doesn’t listen to them’ about certain things, but this is a fairly normal thing for writers. It is not DID, and they are not alters. EDIT: Roleplay characters, like any other character, can be introjected into the system in some cases, if the person already has DID.
(You can still do whatever you’d like with that character, even if it feels like they would disagree. Knowing how they would feel about certain actions, or feeling like they wouldn’t agree or approve of you doing something when writing what they would do is not the same as an alter. Take it from someone who has both alters and roleplay characters: they are not even remotely the same.)

Alters are made inside the person’s mind. Therefore, alters cannot come from outside someone’s mind. Some alters believe that they came from elsewhere, and even have memories of lives before being an alter, but this is part of DID, and is an illusion. (I have an alter who has memories of a life before becoming an alter. I am not belittling any alters who have these memories or beliefs.)

Alters cannot travel between people. No one can send an alter into someone else’s mind, or send one of their alters out of their own minds. (This is in fact a very dangerous idea that can be used by abusers to further hurt or control people with DID.)

Alters cannot die or be erased. They can be sectioned off so much that they are no longer felt, or put in a hibernation state, but they are not gone. Integrating is an option some systems choose to pursue, but even then, the alter is not gone, they’ve just become part of another alter or the system as a whole.

Alters are parts of a single person that has been kept from being able to gain a full sense of self or identity because of trauma as a child. This does not make the alters fake, and does not mean that the host or core (if there is one) can control them. Alters are not the same person, and do not identify as each other or the host or core. This is the entire point of DID, to not identify as each other in order to compartmentalize traumatic events so the person is able to go on living.
(It’s completely normal and in fact part of the disorder for alters and the core/host to not see themselves as the same person. For all intents and purposes, they are not the same person.)

DID is a serious mental condition caused by trauma. It is not a fad, or a game.

Everyone experiences the symptoms of DID differently. This does not mean that if someone does not meet the DSM criteria for DID, they have it anyway.

DID is not accurately represented in media. If you see a show, book, movie or game that says it’s about DID, or seems to have aspects of DID, assume that it’s wrong, or take it with a grain of salt. (The exceptions being recent case studies, books from people who have DID, and the like. Sybil and other such media is not an accurate representation.)

DID has been around for a very long time, and has been recorded all the way back to the 1400′s. Just because they didn’t have the same terminology or understanding of it that we do today, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.

thelabyrinthsystem

Good info~Scarlet

Source: dinosaursindisarray

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Nicotine Normalizes Brain Activity Deficits That Are Key to Schizophrenia

PTSD and the physical effects.

Basically “why am I so fucking sick all the time and why doesn’t it seem to have a cause” or “what does it mean when they say that my PTSD is causing these physical symptoms”.

Ok so now we know what it is, but how does this relate to PTSD or hypervigilance and how can this make me sick?

But cortisol is good isn’t it? It makes us stronger and faster and feel less pain?

Important facts about DID

Basically “why am I so fucking sick all the time and why doesn’t it seem to have a cause”
or
“what does it mean when they say that my PTSD is causing these physical symptoms”.