When the Memories & Affects Start to Break Through

While I do want to tread cautiously for those who are still "tender & triggerable," the memories of the traumatic event and the affects (roughly "sensations and emotions") attached thereto will start trying to "break through" into consciousness. Which is what tends to happen in the second of the five stages of therapeutic recovery after the various defense mechanisms like manic rat racing, repression or even dissociation begin to sort of "wear out" the autonomic nervous system through prolonged overuse of the Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses.

If I had had a better understanding of all that and the exposure therapies -- as well as how to tolerate them -- back in the '90s when I was doing everything I could to "outrun" the memories and affects the best way I knew how, I'd have dived far more deeply into that sort of thing then and there. But a) I didn't at the time, and b) it was probably just as well, even if it was very costly.

The post-millennial advances in both the techniques of exposure and the techniques of preparing patients to tolerate the temporary increases in anxiety that can occur in exposure therapy since then are considerable. Of the therapies listed in section 7c of this earlier Reddit post (skip all the borderline personality disorder stuff unless it seems relevant), DBT was the first to formalize such preparation (via "grounding" more or less this way) by using the methods developed in the therapies listed in section 7b of that same earlier post. Since then, SEPt and SP4T (for my money, the best deal out there because it is the most firmly rooted in autonomic physiology, but "results may vary," of course) have come along, and EMDR has added a pre-exposure grounding protocol.

One can be assisted by adroit use of the therapies in sections 7a and 7b to get firmly into the third of those five stages. From which, of course, stage four is then pretty much fully accessible. The end of section seven, btw, gets into how to locate therapists who are familiar with the people listed in the very first paragraph of that same earlier post, which, IMO, is really a necessity for trauma survivors.

For a sort of "review" of all this, see A Recovery Program for Someone with Untreated Childhood Trauma and How Self-Awareness Works to "Digest" Emotional Pain.

Additionally useful, from a personal body of experience: The 10 StEPs + SP4T.

References & Resources (see the continuously updated list in A CPTSD Library)