Repetition Compulsion
"Why do you do it?" I am often asked, when discussing my involvement with helping victims of non-physical abuse. "Doesn't it set you off or trigger you?" "Yes. But only by going over the patterns myself and with others will I teach them to recognize it. And remind myself before I get targetted to be used and discarded ever again."
I try not to get into a discussion of Repetition Compulsion but so many people have asked me about it, I did some web searches until I found a good scientific article on what it is. I have posted a highly edited version below.
My other reason? Is Teshuva. It's important to me and my ethical core, that I do something to contribute to healing others. Especially since I got involved with a couple predatory people in my life, did everything I could to help them and some of that help was having them coerce me way over my boundaries & conscience. Many of my friends don't understand why I am not more angry at being targetted as a "sexual & emotional toy" and then tossed aside as non-human when the predators got bored. But I don't roll that way. Other people got hurt - something I didn't mean to happen. And even recently, I have been harrassed and derided for embracing the truth and making steps to heal. Helping others may never close that wound - but it will close a larger cosmic wound -- and bring some measure of peace to those who need it most.
Re-enactment & Revictimization
During the formative years of contemporary psychiatry much attention was paid to the continuing role of past traumatic experiences on the current lives of people. Charcot, Janet, and Freud all noted that fragmented memories of traumatic events dominated the mental life of many of their patient and built their theories about the nature and treatment of psychopathology on this recognition. Unbidden memories of the trauma may return as physical sensations, horrific images or nightmares, behavioral reenactments, or a combination of these. Janet showed how traumatized individuals become fixated on the trauma: difficulties in assimilating subsequent experiences as well. It is “as if their personality development has stopped at a certain point and cannot expand anymore by the addition or assimilation of new elements.” Freud independently came to similar conclusions. Initially, he thought all hysterical symptoms were caused by childhood sexual “seduction” of which unconscious memories were activated, when during adolescence, a person was exposed to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. The trauma permanently disturbed the capacity to deal with other challenges, and the victim who did not integrate the trauma was doomed to “repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience in instead or . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past.” In this article, I will show how the trauma is repeated on behavioral, emotional, physiologic, and neuroendocrinologic levels, whose confluence explains the diversity of repetition phenomena.
Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. These behavioral reenactments are rarely consciously understood to be related to earlier life experiences. This “repetition compulsion” has received surprisingly little systematic exploration during the 70 years since its discovery, though it is regularly described in the clinical literature. Freud thought that the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings.
Children seem more vulnerable than adults to compulsive behavioral repetition and loss of conscious memory of the trauma. However, responses to projective tests show that adults, too, are liable to experience a large range of stimuli vaguely reminiscent of the trauma as a return of the trauma itself, and to react accordingly.
Revictimization
Revictimization is a consistent finding.35,47,61 Victims of rape are more likely to be raped and women who were physically or sexually abused as children are more likely to be abused as adults. Victims of child sexual abuse are at high risk of becoming prostitutes. Russell,in a very careful study of the effects of incest on the life of women, found that few women made a conscious connection between their childhood victimization and their drug abuse, prostitution, and suicide attempts. Whereas 38 per cent of a random sample of women reported incidents of rape or attempted rape after age 14, 68 per cent of those with a childhood history of incest did. Twice as many women with a history of physical violence in their marriages (27 per cent), and more than twice as many (53 per cent) reported unwanted sexual advances by an unrelated authority figure such as a teacher, clergyman, or therapist. Victims of father-daughter incest were four times more likely than non-incest victims to be asked to pose for pornography.
RE-EXPERIENCING AFTER ADULT TRAUMA
There are sporadic clinical reports, but systematic studies on re-enactment and revictimization in traumatized adults are even scarcer than in children. In one study of adults who who had recently been in accidents, 57 per cent showed behavioral re-enactments, and 51 per cent had recurrent intrusive images. In this study, the frequency with which recurrent memories were experienced on a somatic level, as panic and anxiety attacks, was not examined. Studies of burned children and adult survivors of natural and man-made disasters show that, over time, recurrent symbolic or visual recollections and behavioral re-enactments abate, but there is often persistent chronic anxiety that can be interpreted as partial somatosensory reliving, dissociated from visual or linguistic representations of the trauma. There are scattered clinical reports of people re-enacting the trauma on its anniversary. For example, we treated a Vietnam veteran who had lit a cigarette at night and caused the death of a friend by a VietCong sniper’s bullet in 1968. From 1969 to 1986, on the exact anniversary of the death, to the hour and minute, he yearly committed “armed robbery” by putting a finger in his pocket and staging a “holdup,” in order to provoke gunfire from the police. The compulsive re-enactment ceased when he came to understand its meaning.
SOCIAL ATTACHMENT AND THE TRAUMA RESPONSE
Human beings are strongly dependent on social support for a sense of safety, meaning, power, and control. Even our biologic maturation is strongly influenced by the nature of early attachment bonds. Traumatization occurs when both internal and external resources are inadequate to cope with external threat. Physical and emotional maturation, as well as innate variations in physiologic reactivity to perceived danger, play important roles in the capacity to deal with external threat. The presence of familiar caregivers also plays an important role in helping children modulate their physiologic arousal. In the absence of a caregiver, children experience extremes of under-and over arousal that are physiologically aversive and disorganizing. The availability of a caregiver who can be blindly trusted when their own resources are inadequate is very important in coping with threats. If the caregiver is rejecting and abusive, children are likely to become hyperaroused. When the persons who are supposed to be the sources of safety and nurturance become simultaneously the sources of danger against which protection is needed, children maneuver to re-establish some sense of safety. Instead of turning on their caregivers and thereby losing hope for protection, they blame themselves. They become fearfully and hungrily attached and anxiously obedient. Bowlby calls this “a pattern of behavior in which avoidance of them competes with his desire for proximity and care and in which angry behavior is apt to become prominent.”
Thus, the cognitive preparedness (development) of an individual interacts with the degree of physiologic disorganization to determine the capacity for mental processing of potentially traumatizing experiences.
THE SEPARATION RESPONSE
As people mature, hey develop an ever-enlarging repertoire of coping responses, but adults are still intensely dependent upon social support to prevent and overcome traumatization, and under threat they still may cry out for their mothers.57 Sudden, uncontrollable loss of attachment bonds is an essential element in the development of post-traumatic stress syndromes. On exposure to extreme terror, even mature people have protest and despair responses (anger and grief, intrusion and numbing) that make them turn toward the nearest available source of comfort to return to a state of both psychological and physiologic calm. Thus, severe external threat may result in renewed clinging and neophobia in both children and adults. Because the attachment system is so important, mobilization of social supports is an important element in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
INCREASED ATTACHMENT IN THE FACE OF DANGER
People in general, and children in particular, seek increased attachment in the face of external danger. Pain, fear, fatigue, and loss of loved ones and protectors all evoke efforts to attract increased care. and most cultures have rituals designed to provide it. When there is no access to ordinary sources of comfort, people may turn toward their tormentors.
Walker and Dutton and Painter have noted that the bond between batter and victim in abusive marriages resembles the bond between captor and hostage or cult leader and follower. Social workers, police, and legal personnel are constantly frustrated by the strength of this bond. The woman’s longing for the batterer soon prevails over memories of the terror, and she starts to make excuses for his behavior. This pattern is so common that women engaged in these sorts of relationships become the recipients of intense anger for social service personnel. They are then called masochistic, and like other psychiatric terms, this can be employed pejoratively rather than conveying an understanding of the underlying causes and treatment of the problem. Walker first applied ethnology to the study of traumatic bonding in such couples. A central component is captivity, the lack of permeability, and the absence of outside support or influence. The victim organizes her life completely around pleasing her captor and his demands. As Dutton and Painter point out, “her compliance legitimates his demands, builds up a store of repressed anger and frustration on her part (which may surface in her goading him or fighting back during an actual argument, leading to escalating violence), and systematically eliminates opportunities for her to build up a supportive network which could eventually assist her in leaving the relationship.”
Walkerhas clarified the operation of intermittent reinforcement paradigms in such relationships, applying the animal model of punishment-indulgence patterns. In child abuse or spouse battering, this mechanism is accentuated by the extreme contrast of terror followed by submission and reconciliation. When such negative reinforcement occurs intermittently, the reinforced response consolidates the attachment between victim and victimizer. During the abuse, victims tend to dissociate emotionally with a sense of disbelief that the incident is really happening. This is followed by the typical post-traumatic response of numbing and constriction, resulting in inactivity, depression, self-blame, and feelings of helplessness. Walker describes the process as follows: “tension gradually builds” (during phase one), an explosive battering incident occurs (during phase two), and a “calm, loving respite follows phase three). The violence allows intense emotional engagement and dramatic scenes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and physical contact that restores the fantasy of fusion and symbiosis.87,140 Hence, there are two powerful sources of reinforcement: the “arousal-jag” or excitement before the violence and the peace of surrender afterwards, Both of these responses, placed at appropriate intervals, reinforce the traumatic bond between victim and abuser. To varying degrees, the memory of the battering incidents is state-dependent or dissociated, and thus only comes back in full force during renewed situations of terror. This interferes with good judgment about the relationship and allows longing for love an reconciliation to overcome realistic fears.
VULNERABILITY TO DEVELOP TRAUMATIC BONDING
At least four studies of family violence have found a direct relationship between the severity of childhood [] abuse and later marital violence.
People who are exposed early to violence or neglect come to expect it as a way of life. They see the chronic helplessness of their mothers and fathers’ alternating outbursts of affection and violence; they learn that they themselves have no control. As adults they hope to undo the past by love, competency, and exemplary behavior. When they fail they are likely to make sense out of this situation by blaming themselves. When they have little experience with nonviolent resolution of differences, partners in relationships alternate between an expectation of perfect behavior leading to perfect harmony and a state of helplessness, in which all verbal communication seems futile. A return to earlier coping mechanisms, such as self-blame, numbing (by means of emotional withdrawal or drugs or alcohol), and physical violence sets the stage for a repetition of the childhood trauma and “return of the repressed.”
STATE-DEPENDENT LEARNING
Both Janet and Freud observed that early memory traces can be activated by later events that cause partial reliving of earlier traumas in the form of affect states, anxiety, or re-enactments. Their patients generally had a poor memory for traumatic childhood events, until they were brought back, by means of hypnosis, to a state of mind similar to the one they were in at the time of the trauma. In the past few decades, these notions have gained scientific confirmation with the discovery of state-dependent learning; for example what is learned under the influence of a particular drug tends to become dissociated and seemingly lost until return of the state similar to the one in which the memory was stored. State dependency can be roughly related to arousal levels. For example, state-dependent learning in humans is produced by both psychostimulants and depressants: alcohol, marijuana, barbituates, and amphetamines as well as other psychoactive agents. Reactivation of past learning is relatively automatic: contextual stimuli directly evoke memories without conscious awareness of the transition. The more similar are the contextual stimuli are to conditions prevailing at the time of the original storage of memories, the more likely the probability of retrieval. Both internal states, such as particular affects, or external events reminiscent of earlier trauma thus can trigger a return to feeling as if victims are back in their original traumatizing situation. Thus, battered women who otherwise behave competently may experience themselves within the battering relationship like the terrified child they once were in a violent or alcoholic home. Similarly, war veterans may be asymptomatic until they become intimate with a partner and start reliving feelings of loss, grief, vulnerability, and revenge related to the death of a comrade on the battlefield but that are now incorrectly attributed to some element of the current relationship. Disinhibition resulting from drugs or alcohol strongly facilitates the occurrence of such reliving experiences, which then may take the form of acting out violent or sexual traumatic episodes.
“RETURN OF THE REPRESSED” OCCURS IN SITUATIONS OF THREAT
Under ordinary conditions, most previously traumatized individuals can adjust psychologically and socially. Studies have shown this to be true of victims of rape, battered women, and victims of child abuse.
ADDICTION TO TRAUMA
Some traumatized people remain preoccupied with the trauma at the expense of other life experiences and continue to re-create it in some form for themselves or for others. War veterans may enlist as mercenaries, victims of incest may become prostitutes and victims of childhood physical abuse seemingly provoke subsequent abuse in foster families or become self-mutilators. Still others identify with the aggressor and do to others what was done to them. Clinically, these people are observed to have a vague sense of apprehension, emptiness, boredom, and anxiety when not involved in activities reminiscent of the trauma. There is no evidence to support Freud’s idea that repetition eventually leads to mastery and resolution.
[G]roups also teach that in order to avoid repetition, one has to give up the behavior, drug, or person involved in the addiction. Acknowledging the addictive quality of the involvement is known as overcoming denial. Avoiding acknowledging the feelings promotes acting out. Traumatized people need to understand that acknowledging feelings related to the trauma does not bring back the trauma itself, and its accompanying violence and helplessness.
SUMMARY
Trauma can be repeated on behavioral, emotional, physiologic, and neuroendocriniologic levels. Repetition on these different levels causes a large variety of individual and social suffering. Anger directed against the self or others is always a central problem in the lives of people who have been violated and this is itself a repetitive re-enactment of real events from the past.
Uncontrollable disruptions or distortions of attachment bonds precede the development of post-traumatic stress syndromes. People seek increased attachment in the face of danger. Adults, as well as children, may develop strong emotional ties with people whe intermittently harass, beat, and, threaten them. The persistence of these attachment bonds leads to confusion of pain and love. Assaults lead to hyperarousal states for which the memory can be state-dependent or dissociated, and this memory only returns fully during renewed terror. This interferes with good judgment about these relationships and allows longing for attachment to overcome realistic fears.
People who have been exposed to highly stressful stimuli develop long-term potentiation of memory tracts that are reactivated at times of subsequent arousal. This activation explains how current stress is experienced as a return of the trauma; it causes a return to earlier behavior patterns. Ordinarily, people will choose the most pleasant of two alternatives. High arousal causes people to engage in familiar behavior, regardless of the rewards. As novel stimuli are anxiety provoking, under stress, previously traumatized people tend return to familiar patterns, even if they cause pain.
Victims can become addicted to their victimizers; social contact may activate endogenous opioid systems, alleviating separation distress and strengthening social bonds. High levels of social stress activate opioid systems as well.
Victimized people may neutralize their hyperarousal by a variety of addictive behaviors, including compulsive re-exposure to victimization of self and others.
Click Source below for the entire article including references:
SOURCE
RELATED POST: THE BOX
I try not to get into a discussion of Repetition Compulsion but so many people have asked me about it, I did some web searches until I found a good scientific article on what it is. I have posted a highly edited version below.
My other reason? Is Teshuva. It's important to me and my ethical core, that I do something to contribute to healing others. Especially since I got involved with a couple predatory people in my life, did everything I could to help them and some of that help was having them coerce me way over my boundaries & conscience. Many of my friends don't understand why I am not more angry at being targetted as a "sexual & emotional toy" and then tossed aside as non-human when the predators got bored. But I don't roll that way. Other people got hurt - something I didn't mean to happen. And even recently, I have been harrassed and derided for embracing the truth and making steps to heal. Helping others may never close that wound - but it will close a larger cosmic wound -- and bring some measure of peace to those who need it most.
Re-enactment & Revictimization
During the formative years of contemporary psychiatry much attention was paid to the continuing role of past traumatic experiences on the current lives of people. Charcot, Janet, and Freud all noted that fragmented memories of traumatic events dominated the mental life of many of their patient and built their theories about the nature and treatment of psychopathology on this recognition. Unbidden memories of the trauma may return as physical sensations, horrific images or nightmares, behavioral reenactments, or a combination of these. Janet showed how traumatized individuals become fixated on the trauma: difficulties in assimilating subsequent experiences as well. It is “as if their personality development has stopped at a certain point and cannot expand anymore by the addition or assimilation of new elements.” Freud independently came to similar conclusions. Initially, he thought all hysterical symptoms were caused by childhood sexual “seduction” of which unconscious memories were activated, when during adolescence, a person was exposed to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. The trauma permanently disturbed the capacity to deal with other challenges, and the victim who did not integrate the trauma was doomed to “repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience in instead or . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past.” In this article, I will show how the trauma is repeated on behavioral, emotional, physiologic, and neuroendocrinologic levels, whose confluence explains the diversity of repetition phenomena.
Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. These behavioral reenactments are rarely consciously understood to be related to earlier life experiences. This “repetition compulsion” has received surprisingly little systematic exploration during the 70 years since its discovery, though it is regularly described in the clinical literature. Freud thought that the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings.
Children seem more vulnerable than adults to compulsive behavioral repetition and loss of conscious memory of the trauma. However, responses to projective tests show that adults, too, are liable to experience a large range of stimuli vaguely reminiscent of the trauma as a return of the trauma itself, and to react accordingly.
Revictimization
Revictimization is a consistent finding.35,47,61 Victims of rape are more likely to be raped and women who were physically or sexually abused as children are more likely to be abused as adults. Victims of child sexual abuse are at high risk of becoming prostitutes. Russell,in a very careful study of the effects of incest on the life of women, found that few women made a conscious connection between their childhood victimization and their drug abuse, prostitution, and suicide attempts. Whereas 38 per cent of a random sample of women reported incidents of rape or attempted rape after age 14, 68 per cent of those with a childhood history of incest did. Twice as many women with a history of physical violence in their marriages (27 per cent), and more than twice as many (53 per cent) reported unwanted sexual advances by an unrelated authority figure such as a teacher, clergyman, or therapist. Victims of father-daughter incest were four times more likely than non-incest victims to be asked to pose for pornography.
RE-EXPERIENCING AFTER ADULT TRAUMA
There are sporadic clinical reports, but systematic studies on re-enactment and revictimization in traumatized adults are even scarcer than in children. In one study of adults who who had recently been in accidents, 57 per cent showed behavioral re-enactments, and 51 per cent had recurrent intrusive images. In this study, the frequency with which recurrent memories were experienced on a somatic level, as panic and anxiety attacks, was not examined. Studies of burned children and adult survivors of natural and man-made disasters show that, over time, recurrent symbolic or visual recollections and behavioral re-enactments abate, but there is often persistent chronic anxiety that can be interpreted as partial somatosensory reliving, dissociated from visual or linguistic representations of the trauma. There are scattered clinical reports of people re-enacting the trauma on its anniversary. For example, we treated a Vietnam veteran who had lit a cigarette at night and caused the death of a friend by a VietCong sniper’s bullet in 1968. From 1969 to 1986, on the exact anniversary of the death, to the hour and minute, he yearly committed “armed robbery” by putting a finger in his pocket and staging a “holdup,” in order to provoke gunfire from the police. The compulsive re-enactment ceased when he came to understand its meaning.
SOCIAL ATTACHMENT AND THE TRAUMA RESPONSE
Human beings are strongly dependent on social support for a sense of safety, meaning, power, and control. Even our biologic maturation is strongly influenced by the nature of early attachment bonds. Traumatization occurs when both internal and external resources are inadequate to cope with external threat. Physical and emotional maturation, as well as innate variations in physiologic reactivity to perceived danger, play important roles in the capacity to deal with external threat. The presence of familiar caregivers also plays an important role in helping children modulate their physiologic arousal. In the absence of a caregiver, children experience extremes of under-and over arousal that are physiologically aversive and disorganizing. The availability of a caregiver who can be blindly trusted when their own resources are inadequate is very important in coping with threats. If the caregiver is rejecting and abusive, children are likely to become hyperaroused. When the persons who are supposed to be the sources of safety and nurturance become simultaneously the sources of danger against which protection is needed, children maneuver to re-establish some sense of safety. Instead of turning on their caregivers and thereby losing hope for protection, they blame themselves. They become fearfully and hungrily attached and anxiously obedient. Bowlby calls this “a pattern of behavior in which avoidance of them competes with his desire for proximity and care and in which angry behavior is apt to become prominent.”
Thus, the cognitive preparedness (development) of an individual interacts with the degree of physiologic disorganization to determine the capacity for mental processing of potentially traumatizing experiences.
THE SEPARATION RESPONSE
As people mature, hey develop an ever-enlarging repertoire of coping responses, but adults are still intensely dependent upon social support to prevent and overcome traumatization, and under threat they still may cry out for their mothers.57 Sudden, uncontrollable loss of attachment bonds is an essential element in the development of post-traumatic stress syndromes. On exposure to extreme terror, even mature people have protest and despair responses (anger and grief, intrusion and numbing) that make them turn toward the nearest available source of comfort to return to a state of both psychological and physiologic calm. Thus, severe external threat may result in renewed clinging and neophobia in both children and adults. Because the attachment system is so important, mobilization of social supports is an important element in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
INCREASED ATTACHMENT IN THE FACE OF DANGER
People in general, and children in particular, seek increased attachment in the face of external danger. Pain, fear, fatigue, and loss of loved ones and protectors all evoke efforts to attract increased care. and most cultures have rituals designed to provide it. When there is no access to ordinary sources of comfort, people may turn toward their tormentors.
Adults as well as children may develop strong emotional ties with people who intermittently harass, beat, and threaten them.Hostages have put up bail for their captors, expressed a wish to marry them, or had sexual relations with them; abused children often cling to their parents and resist being removed from the home; 80 inmates of Nazi prison camps sometimes imitated their captors by sewing together clothing to copy SS uniforms.11 When Harlow observed this in nonhuman primates, he stated that “the immediate consequences of maternal rejection is the accentuation of proximity seeking on the part of the infant.”
Walker and Dutton and Painter have noted that the bond between batter and victim in abusive marriages resembles the bond between captor and hostage or cult leader and follower. Social workers, police, and legal personnel are constantly frustrated by the strength of this bond. The woman’s longing for the batterer soon prevails over memories of the terror, and she starts to make excuses for his behavior. This pattern is so common that women engaged in these sorts of relationships become the recipients of intense anger for social service personnel. They are then called masochistic, and like other psychiatric terms, this can be employed pejoratively rather than conveying an understanding of the underlying causes and treatment of the problem. Walker first applied ethnology to the study of traumatic bonding in such couples. A central component is captivity, the lack of permeability, and the absence of outside support or influence. The victim organizes her life completely around pleasing her captor and his demands. As Dutton and Painter point out, “her compliance legitimates his demands, builds up a store of repressed anger and frustration on her part (which may surface in her goading him or fighting back during an actual argument, leading to escalating violence), and systematically eliminates opportunities for her to build up a supportive network which could eventually assist her in leaving the relationship.”
Walkerhas clarified the operation of intermittent reinforcement paradigms in such relationships, applying the animal model of punishment-indulgence patterns. In child abuse or spouse battering, this mechanism is accentuated by the extreme contrast of terror followed by submission and reconciliation. When such negative reinforcement occurs intermittently, the reinforced response consolidates the attachment between victim and victimizer. During the abuse, victims tend to dissociate emotionally with a sense of disbelief that the incident is really happening. This is followed by the typical post-traumatic response of numbing and constriction, resulting in inactivity, depression, self-blame, and feelings of helplessness. Walker describes the process as follows: “tension gradually builds” (during phase one), an explosive battering incident occurs (during phase two), and a “calm, loving respite follows phase three). The violence allows intense emotional engagement and dramatic scenes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and physical contact that restores the fantasy of fusion and symbiosis.87,140 Hence, there are two powerful sources of reinforcement: the “arousal-jag” or excitement before the violence and the peace of surrender afterwards, Both of these responses, placed at appropriate intervals, reinforce the traumatic bond between victim and abuser. To varying degrees, the memory of the battering incidents is state-dependent or dissociated, and thus only comes back in full force during renewed situations of terror. This interferes with good judgment about the relationship and allows longing for love an reconciliation to overcome realistic fears.
VULNERABILITY TO DEVELOP TRAUMATIC BONDING
At least four studies of family violence have found a direct relationship between the severity of childhood [] abuse and later marital violence.
People who are exposed early to violence or neglect come to expect it as a way of life. They see the chronic helplessness of their mothers and fathers’ alternating outbursts of affection and violence; they learn that they themselves have no control. As adults they hope to undo the past by love, competency, and exemplary behavior. When they fail they are likely to make sense out of this situation by blaming themselves. When they have little experience with nonviolent resolution of differences, partners in relationships alternate between an expectation of perfect behavior leading to perfect harmony and a state of helplessness, in which all verbal communication seems futile. A return to earlier coping mechanisms, such as self-blame, numbing (by means of emotional withdrawal or drugs or alcohol), and physical violence sets the stage for a repetition of the childhood trauma and “return of the repressed.”
STATE-DEPENDENT LEARNING
Both Janet and Freud observed that early memory traces can be activated by later events that cause partial reliving of earlier traumas in the form of affect states, anxiety, or re-enactments. Their patients generally had a poor memory for traumatic childhood events, until they were brought back, by means of hypnosis, to a state of mind similar to the one they were in at the time of the trauma. In the past few decades, these notions have gained scientific confirmation with the discovery of state-dependent learning; for example what is learned under the influence of a particular drug tends to become dissociated and seemingly lost until return of the state similar to the one in which the memory was stored. State dependency can be roughly related to arousal levels. For example, state-dependent learning in humans is produced by both psychostimulants and depressants: alcohol, marijuana, barbituates, and amphetamines as well as other psychoactive agents. Reactivation of past learning is relatively automatic: contextual stimuli directly evoke memories without conscious awareness of the transition. The more similar are the contextual stimuli are to conditions prevailing at the time of the original storage of memories, the more likely the probability of retrieval. Both internal states, such as particular affects, or external events reminiscent of earlier trauma thus can trigger a return to feeling as if victims are back in their original traumatizing situation. Thus, battered women who otherwise behave competently may experience themselves within the battering relationship like the terrified child they once were in a violent or alcoholic home. Similarly, war veterans may be asymptomatic until they become intimate with a partner and start reliving feelings of loss, grief, vulnerability, and revenge related to the death of a comrade on the battlefield but that are now incorrectly attributed to some element of the current relationship. Disinhibition resulting from drugs or alcohol strongly facilitates the occurrence of such reliving experiences, which then may take the form of acting out violent or sexual traumatic episodes.
“RETURN OF THE REPRESSED” OCCURS IN SITUATIONS OF THREAT
Under ordinary conditions, most previously traumatized individuals can adjust psychologically and socially. Studies have shown this to be true of victims of rape, battered women, and victims of child abuse.
ADDICTION TO TRAUMA
Some traumatized people remain preoccupied with the trauma at the expense of other life experiences and continue to re-create it in some form for themselves or for others. War veterans may enlist as mercenaries, victims of incest may become prostitutes and victims of childhood physical abuse seemingly provoke subsequent abuse in foster families or become self-mutilators. Still others identify with the aggressor and do to others what was done to them. Clinically, these people are observed to have a vague sense of apprehension, emptiness, boredom, and anxiety when not involved in activities reminiscent of the trauma. There is no evidence to support Freud’s idea that repetition eventually leads to mastery and resolution.
In fact, reliving the trauma repeatedly in psychotherapy may serve to re-enforce the preoccupation and fixation.Many observers of traumatic bonding have speculated that victims become addicted to their victimizers. Erschak asks why the batterer does not stop when injury and pain are apparent and why does the victim not leave? He answers that “they are addicted to each other and to abuse. The system, the interaction, the relation takes hold; the individuals are as powerless as junkies.”
[G]roups also teach that in order to avoid repetition, one has to give up the behavior, drug, or person involved in the addiction. Acknowledging the addictive quality of the involvement is known as overcoming denial. Avoiding acknowledging the feelings promotes acting out. Traumatized people need to understand that acknowledging feelings related to the trauma does not bring back the trauma itself, and its accompanying violence and helplessness.
SUMMARY
Trauma can be repeated on behavioral, emotional, physiologic, and neuroendocriniologic levels. Repetition on these different levels causes a large variety of individual and social suffering. Anger directed against the self or others is always a central problem in the lives of people who have been violated and this is itself a repetitive re-enactment of real events from the past.
Uncontrollable disruptions or distortions of attachment bonds precede the development of post-traumatic stress syndromes. People seek increased attachment in the face of danger. Adults, as well as children, may develop strong emotional ties with people whe intermittently harass, beat, and, threaten them. The persistence of these attachment bonds leads to confusion of pain and love. Assaults lead to hyperarousal states for which the memory can be state-dependent or dissociated, and this memory only returns fully during renewed terror. This interferes with good judgment about these relationships and allows longing for attachment to overcome realistic fears.
People who have been exposed to highly stressful stimuli develop long-term potentiation of memory tracts that are reactivated at times of subsequent arousal. This activation explains how current stress is experienced as a return of the trauma; it causes a return to earlier behavior patterns. Ordinarily, people will choose the most pleasant of two alternatives. High arousal causes people to engage in familiar behavior, regardless of the rewards. As novel stimuli are anxiety provoking, under stress, previously traumatized people tend return to familiar patterns, even if they cause pain.
Victims can become addicted to their victimizers; social contact may activate endogenous opioid systems, alleviating separation distress and strengthening social bonds. High levels of social stress activate opioid systems as well.
Victimized people may neutralize their hyperarousal by a variety of addictive behaviors, including compulsive re-exposure to victimization of self and others.
Click Source below for the entire article including references:
SOURCE
RELATED POST: THE BOX
Comments
All the best,
jordanka.