Doctors could benefit from support to help them cope with the trauma of patient death, says a psychologist speaking at the Death, Dying & Disposal conference organized by the University of Bath in the UK.

In a preliminary study, Dr Elaine Kasket from London Metropolitan University carried out detailed interviews with eight US physicians about their experiences of death. Half of those she spoke to wept as they recounted stories of traumatic death they had experienced as physicians, even though some of these events had occurred as much as 30 years ago.

“There is an unwritten rule for doctors that suggests it is not wise or possible for them to feel emotions over a patient’s death because there is always another patient to help,” said Dr Kasket.

“Whilst this detachment might help when presented with a patient with a severe injury, I question how well it serves them in the longer term.

“This emotional detachment is socially ingrained through medical school, and the cultures in both the UK and US medical establishments would see a physician’s emotional response to death as a sign of weakness and even incompetence.

“It feeds into this popular image of the physician as some kind of superhuman ultimate rescuer of human life; unable to do his or her job if they give in to or even acknowledge their emotions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Toddlers perceive our intentions better than we may think.

“Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

And so, it seems do toddlers. A study out of Queen’s University has demonstrated that children as young as 21 months can differentiate the intentions of those around them.

Psychology professor Valerie Kuhlmeier and PhD student Kristen Dunfield found that toddlers are more likely to help someone who has made an effort to help them, even if that person was unable to accomplish the toddler’s desired outcome. In a series of three experiments, the researchers discovered that it was the thought that counted for the toddlers, not the end result.

What does this mean to those of us who are past our toddler stage? (a purely subjective call in my case at least)

I think it means that clients investigating early childhood “memories” (in hypnosis, for example), might be served to also investigate the intentions of those around them. This can easily be accomplished through surrogate or proxy healing in which the client/subject imagines being the other person involved in the early childhood event(s) being investigated. In Rapid Eye Technology it is common for RET Technicians to invoke proxy, especially during the Inner Child Stages work to capture the thoughts of those around the client during early childhood – I recommend to RET Technicians that they focus some attention to the intentions of those others rather than just on what they thought or did.

“Intention is everything.” (might be truer than we think)

Study source: Psychological Science

Fearful memories can be rewritten.

Researchers at New York University have demonstrated scientifically that a specific fearful memory can be rewritten in the brain without the use of drugs – purely behaviorally. Of course, alternative practitioners like hypnotherapists and Rapid Eye Technicians have seen this over and over and are sold on the fact that fearful memories can be rewritten (in NLP it’s called “Reframing”).

Basing their theories on mouse and rat subjects, the researchers, led by Elizabeth Phelps, Ph.D., and Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., of NYU, grantees of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have demonstrated their training process on human subjects with positive results. The hope is to replace drug therapies with behavioral ones for anxiety and PTSD specifically – and perhaps others after some trials.

The research shows that there is a critical window of opportunity for change – within 6 hours of the recall of a traumatic memory. Once the “file” is open, specific behavioral techniques can be used to rewrite the memory back into the brain without the fear portion – with long-lasting results. The researchers also found that it was not necessary to recall specifics within a memory – just the emotional elements and the “gist” of the traumatic memory – in order to rewrite it. That’s the phenomenological findings of thousands of Rapid Eye Technicians, who basically tell their clients, “It’s not necessary to relive the events in order to release their energy and reframe [rewrite] those memories…”

Read the rest of this entry »

This research strongly suggests that the emotional content of long-term memories can be removed by interrupting the labile phase of long-term memory storage.

Another study, this time from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, demonstrates that memories – most particularly long-term fear memories – are encoded when they first happen and then again whenever we re-store those memories. There is a short period of time in which the brain must chemically “prepare” and then “store” the memory. Whenever we bring the memory back to mind, it must go through the same process to re-store it in the brain. In both of these labile phases, the memory is vulnerable to change.

This research strongly suggests that memories are not, therefore, permanent structures in the brain. Their emotional content can be removed by interrupting the labile phase of long-term memory storage.

I wrote about the brain’s file cabinet in another post (Click here to read). Basically, the brain requires a chemical to access memories and to code them back after accessing them. It’s as though we take each memory, like a file, out of the long-term memory cabinet, close the cabinet, look at the file, use it, then open the cabinet again to put the file back in. If I understand Kindt’s research correctly, interrupting that process at the “putting back in” phase can, in theory, stop the perpetuation of the effects of fear memories by eliminating the fear in the memories.

Read the rest of this entry »

Teenagers tend to pick up the “vibes” of their friends more strongly than do younger children or adults.

It is a well-studied and known phenomenon – teenagers pick up the “vibes” of their friends more strongly than do younger children or adults. During adolescence, we bond very closely to friends. We pick up on their hurts and joys, sharing them in a much more psychologically intimate way than at other times in our lives.

I believe we may also pick up our friends’ traumas and make them our own. More than once have I worked with a client reporting childhood, teen, or young adult trauma that later turned out to be “ghosts” – imaginings based on a friend’s childhood trauma introduced to the shared sensitivities of an intimate group of young friends.

In other words – a false memory. Still, a memory with all the power and influence of a real trauma. And I, as the clinician, treated the symptoms of that trauma as though the original trauma belonged to my client. My client “owned” it, so why not treat it as thought it belonged to my client? Made sense to me. The mind is unable to differentiate between real and imagined when it comes to trauma.

Read the rest of this entry »