Trauma and the Body Flashcards
(32 cards)
“In ordinary consciousness, we tell the story. In mindful awareness…
… we watch the experience of the story unfold in the present moment”
The two purposes of experiments
- Make discoveries about the organization of experience
- Bring awareness to the effects of trauma and ensuing action tendencies
Four examples of types of experiments
Study what happens when…
- The client senses or performs something physical
- Client erbalizes a particular word, phrase or sentence.
- Therapist performs a physical action
- Therapist says a certain statment or repeats a phrase.
What is linking and when is it used
Linking different core organizers. It is used to help the client gather more information and not used when or if it would take the client out of their window of tolerance. Also linked when client feels positve affect as a way or reinforcing and expanding.
What is the “coal” that warms the heart of change?
Love
The central idea of interpersonal neurobiology is..
that integration is at the heart of well-being. Integration is the linking of differentiated elements into a functional whole. With an integrated system, our lives become flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized and stable. Without this integration, the flow of our minds moves towards rigidity or chaos.
What is the alternating pattern associated with trauma?
The propensity of traumatized individuals to alternate between 1) Emotional and bodily numbing and avoidance of cues reminiscent of the trauma and 2) Intrusive reliving of the trauma via flashbacks, dreams, thoughts and somatic symptoms
Somatoform dissociative symptoms
Lack of body sensation, pain, movement disorders and reexperiencing the trauma in somatosensory fragments.
Three different kinds of knowledge resulting from triune brain
Reptilian Brain: Innate behavioral knowledge- basic instinctual action tendencies and habits related to primitive survival issues. Exploration, feeding, aggressive dominance displays, sexuality.
Paleomamillian (limbic system): Affective knowledge: subjective feelings and emotional resposes to world events
Neocortex: Declarative knowledge. Higher cognitive functions, reasoning, and logical thought.
Each brain thus has its own “understanding” of the environment and responds accordingly.
Sensorimotor definition and what part of the brain is it processed in
of or relating to motor activity caused by sensory stimuli. Repitilian brain loosely relates to the sensorimotor level of information processing. Includes the physical changes in response to sensory input; the fixed action patterns seen in defenses; changes in breathing and muscular tone; and autonomic nervous system activation.
Higher level integrative functions evolved from and are dependent on the integrity of
lower-level structures and on sensorimotor experience. Lower levels develop and mature before higher level structures.
Computer analogy to higher vs lower functions
Lower functions– like regulate breathing and heartrate and like the “operating system” and harder to change. Higher functions resemble software and are easier to change
Definition of cognitive processing and how it can affect lower levels (or not)
Cognitive processing refers to the capacity for conceptualizing, reasoning, meaning making, problem solving and decision making.
As adults, we can ignore emotions and sensations in favor of maintaining cognitive processing tasks. Once trauma comes into the picture, it can hinder the ability of top-down processing to dominate subcortical activity.
What are somatic markers and how do they influence emotional and cognitive processing?
They are bodily feelings and are always biasing decision making process – logic, speed, and content of thought. As well as influencing all self-experiences. How we think and what we feel are literally shaped by the body and vice versa.
There is no ability for our concepts to be a direct reflection of external, objective mind-free reality as our sensorimotor system (the embodiment of reason) plays a crucial role in shaping them.
How the body impacts the capacity for insight and cognitive self-reflection and what alternatives means we have for exploration
It is limited by the body’s influence. Thus reflecting on, exploring and changing the posture and movement of the body may be as valuable as cognitive self-reflection
“The emotional brain directs us towards…
…experiences we seek and the cognitive brain tries to help us get there as intelligently as possible,
Two roles of emotional processing
1) Add motivational coloring to cognitive processing – either drive or deter most of our actions
2) Direct us to notice and attend to particular cues in our internal and external environment
How trauma affects trust in emotions and ability for adaptive response
Trauma causes people to lose the capacity to draw upon emotions as guides for actions. Emotions may be lacking presence (E.g. lack of motivation) or overly present (constant urgency). Emotional arousal is often not an adaptive response to the present (nontraumatic) environment but was adaptive for the original trauma.
How trauma affects normal emotions coming and going
Emotional responses to trauma can become fixed and a never-ending re-experiencing of trauma-related emotions.
Difference between emotional processing and sensorimotor processing, why in therapy it is important to distinguish between the two and which one to start with if the client is escalated
Emotional processing pertains to experiencing, articulating and integrating emotions
Sensorimotor processing refers to experiencing, articulating and integrating physical/sensory perception, body sensation and physiological arousal and motor functioning.
Distinguishing between the two is important because clients often fail to discriminate because the two arise simultaneously and when left clumped together, tend to escalate each other. Start with sensorimotor and once arousal returns to within the window, you can look at the emotional contents.
What is interoception and what are some different kinds of interoceptors
It is the inner-body sensations. Examples include proprioceptors which provide the kinesthetic sense of the movement of the body and its position in space. Enteroceptors tell us about the movements occurring within our internal organs and provide that “gut feeling” as a whole and i
How our beliefs and emotional reactions condition our relationship with current stimuli
We fit incoming sensory information into categories based on past experience to avoid being overwhelmed by constantly novel experiences. We are constantly priming our perceptions to match the world to what we expect to sense and thus make it what we perceive it to be.
How the five-sense priming function becomes maladaptive for traumatized individuals
Individuals give extra weight and attention to cues reminiscent to past trauma while giving less weight or not noticing cues which would be indicative of safety. Then these real-time trauma-related cues from both the environment and the body are compared to internal sensorimotor images, beliefs and emotions and ultimately fuel behavior that would be appropriate for threatening situations but not for current situations.
How body posture and movement patterns are impacted by trauma and how they sustain trauma
Humans are constantly refining their movement based on feedback from environment. Movement patterns can become engrained and form repetitive movements and postures that contribute to the maintenance of cognitive and emotional tendencies by creating a position from which only select emotions and physical actions are possible.
