Trauma - Very Painful Experiences

Trauma is when you have a bad experience or a horrible experience that causes you to feel physical pain or emotional pain that could last for days or sometimes years, especially when you recall that experience over and over again. Trauma is an emotional wound or a shock that often has long-lasting effects, especially when triggered from an exposure to violence, abuse and other traumatic events, or when experiencing burnout. Trauma is any physical damage to the body that is caused by violence or by an accident or a fracture. The memory of a bad experience could cause you to relive those stressful moments, and at the same time, create fears and phobias that seem to be uncontrollable and unpredictable at times. You can sometimes have feelings of distress and disbelief, and sometimes you can be stricken with horror or terror, like with PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.



Time heals all wounds, but not always, especially wounds of the heart. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger is not always true. Trauma could last for years, and some wounds can leave ever lasting scars. The body can naturally heal itself most of the time, but the injuries to our emotional self that causes our hearts and minds to break, may not always heal with time. These types of injuries that we endure will take a lot of self education and deep learning in order to heal these wounds effectively. And you will not just learn how to overcome and come to terms with a bad experience, you will also strengthen your resilience at the same time. So the next injury that you get, it will not cut so deep or leave you completely devastated. You'll be less effected by crisis and you will heal faster and recover faster too. This means that you will be back on your feet quickly and be ready to take on the world, again. Don't wait for wounds to heal themselves, take the initiative and work on repairing the damage to yourself by learning about yourself. Life is full of risks, but their is no greater risk than not learning or stopping your self education. You have to learn, there's no other way. Knowledge is the cure, but in order to vaccinate yourself against ignorance, you have to commit yourself to your learning journey. The path to knowledge is the path to freedom and the path to fulfill your dreams and your goals. There is no other path or other road to take than the road to knowledge. But remember, the road to knowledge is not a perfect road or a smooth road. You will take many turns and detours, but as long as you never lose sight of your goals, the road will reward you in many ways.

The after effects and the side effects that comes from having a bad experience can be overcome. A bad experience will diminish over time to eventually become only a bad memory. But you need to remember, what doesn't kill you doesn't necessarily make you stronger. We need to learn how to control and conquer the demons that chase us from time to time. Everyone goes through changes. But you have to start the process of learning and you have to put in the necessary time and effort. Some recoveries can be difficult. You have to exercise the mind and exercise body regularly, and seek good guidance. This takes a commitment to learning.

A bad experience doesn't have to be all that bad. All experiences have something to teach us. If you didn't learn anything from the experience, then what was the experience for? Don't let bad things drag you down or slow you done. You have to keep going. Life is short and you have many things to do. If you keep forgetting why you're here, then you may never get anywhere. You have to have goals and purpose and reasons to live. And you have to keep educating yourself, because knowledge is your power. You either become a little brighter everyday, or become a little dimmer everyday. And if you're not learning anything new, then you better be confirming what you already know and use your time maintaining the knowledge that you have already have. When we remind ourselves of our strengths, skills and our knowledge, we protect ourselves from our own ignorance. Knowledge is power and ignorance is a power drainer. Ignorance depletes the power of knowledge. This why you must continue to keep educating yourself. You either become a little brighter everyday, or become a little dimmer everyday. To make your knowledge glow bright, you need a constant supply of energy, and that energy comes from knowledge, and knowledge needs to be recharged like a battery. If you keep learning, the battery becomes more powerful, and more versatile.

Resiliency Center provides a safe and supportive healing environment for individuals, couples, and families seeking improved emotional and physical health and greater joy. The Resiliency Center of Greater Philadelphia is home to over ten independent practitioners who work mindfully to promote holistic wellness.

Pressure Makes Diamonds is the belief that when a person is under a lot of pressure in manageable doses, the experience of that pressure can make them more resilient and mentally stronger. It can also energize and motivate a person to perform and achieve at a higher level and demonstrate their potential. But, too much pressure without learning from the experience can cause a person to be less resilient and mentally weaker.

Treatments - Exposure Therapy 

Traumatic is relating to a physical injury or a wound to the body, or a psychologically painful experience.

Psychological Trauma is a type of injury to the mind that occurs as a result of a severely distressing event. which may include observing or experiencing a life-threatening event and being violated by people on whom you depend for your well-being. Trauma is often the result of an overwhelming amount of stress that exceeds one's ability to cope, or integrate the emotions involved with that experience. A traumatic event involves one's experience, or repeating events of being overwhelmed that can be precipitated in weeks, years, or even decades as the person struggles to cope with the immediate circumstances, eventually leading to serious, long-term negative consequences. However, the definition of trauma differs among individuals by their subjective experiences. People will react to similar events differently. In other words, not all people who experience a potentially traumatic event will actually become psychologically traumatized. This discrepancy in risk rate can be attributed to protective factors some individuals may have that enable them to cope with trauma. Some examples are mild exposure to stress early in life, resilience characteristics, and active seeking of help.

Trans-Generational Trauma

Acute Stress Reaction is a psychological condition arising in response to a terrifying or traumatic event, or witnessing a traumatic event that induces a strong emotional response within the individual.

One Though Leads to Another Thought - Triggers

Shock is the feeling of distress and disbelief that you have when something bad happens accidentally. An unpleasant or disappointing surprise. To be stricken with disgust or revulsion or stricken with horror or terror. Shock can also mean a reflex response to the passage of electric current through the body. Brain Injury Trauma.

Terror is an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety. Torture.

Horror is intense and profound fear.

Traumatized is to inflict trauma upon someone and subject a person to lasting shock as a result of an emotionally disturbing experience or physical injury. It's estimated in 2018 that 1 Million Soldiers have some form of PTSD.

Thousand-Yard Stare is a phrase often used to describe the blank, unfocused gaze of combatants who have become emotionally detached from the horrors around them. It is also sometimes used more generally to describe the look of dissociation among victims of other types of trauma.

Suffer is to feel ill or to be uncomfortable or to be in pain, either physical pain or emotional pain.

Suffering is the experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual. Suffering is the basic element that makes up the negative valence of affective phenomena. The opposite of suffering is pleasure, or happiness. Suffering is often categorized as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and frequency of occurrence usually compound that of intensity. Attitudes toward suffering may vary widely, in the sufferer or other people, according to how much it is regarded as avoidable or unavoidable, useful or useless, deserved or undeserved. Suffering occurs in the lives of sentient beings in numerous manners, and often dramatically. As a result, many fields of human activity are concerned with some aspects of suffering. These aspects may include the nature of suffering, its processes, its origin and causes, its meaning and significance, its related personal, social, and cultural behaviors, its remedies, management, and uses. Depression.

Psychological Pain is an unpleasant feeling and suffering of a psychological, non-physical origin. Mental suffering or mental torment. Hardship (crisis).

"Life will always have a little pain and a little suffering. We just need to minimize it, so that it's not so traumatic and damaging to the human spirit".

Scar is a mark left on the skin, or in the mind, that was caused by an injury that did not heal properly.

Primary Traumatic Stress is a primary stressor from an extreme event that was immediately experienced or witnessed that contributed to a traumatic response.

Crime Reporting - Victims of Crimes

Almost half of America's engineers have operated a train that killed someone on the tracks. Afterward, many suffer nightmares, anxiety, PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Stress on the young can cause lifelong vulnerabilities causing alterations in a specific brain reward region for transcriptional programming, which increased the risk for depression and other psychiatric syndromes. Developmental transcription factor orthodenticle homeobox 2 (Otx2) was suppressed. While Otx2 levels ultimately recovered by adulthood, the suppression had already set in motion gene alterations that lasted into adulthood, indicating that early life stress disrupts age-specific developmental programming orchestrated by Otx2. Gene alterations refer to changes in the normal DNA sequence of a particular gene. Genes provide the instructions to make proteins, such as tyrosine kinases, that signal and control how cells in the body function.

New study may broaden the picture of the consequences of childhood adversity. A research team has examined the link between adverse childhood experiences and the risk of mental health problems later in life. The researchers have found that the risk of suffering from mental illness later in life among those experiencing significant adversity in childhood can be partly explained by factors shared by family members, such as genetics and environment.

Abuse - Prison - Emotional Memories

Repeated exposure to major disasters has long-term mental health impacts. Repeated exposure to major disasters does not always make people mentally stronger, a recent study found. Individuals who have been repeatedly exposed to major disasters show a reduction in mental health scores.

Synapse-related genes in microglia are changed by contextual fear conditioning. Microglia acts as the first line of defense in the central nervous system, constantly scanning for pathogens and abnormalities. Scientists have now demonstrated that microglial genes associated with the synapse -- structures that allow neurons to pass signals to one another -- undergo changes in response to the brain processing traumatic memories.

Researchers reveal how trauma changes the brain. Researchers are learning more about how traumatic events may physically change our brains. Neurologists have revealed changes to a brain mechanism used for learning and survival may play a role in how someone responds to a threat following a traumatic experience. Another study found that another mechanism responsible for emotion and memory is impacted and may make it difficult for someone with PTSD to discriminate between safety, danger, or reward. It overgeneralizes towards danger. These findings could significantly advance future treatments.

Study examines why the memory of fear is seared into our brains. Experiencing a frightening event is likely something you'll never forget. But why does it stay with you when other kinds of occurrences become increasingly difficult to recall with the passage of time? If you are held up at gunpoint, your brain secretes a bunch of the stress neurotransmitter norepinephrine, akin to an adrenaline rush. This changes the electrical discharge pattern in specific circuits in your emotional brain, centered in the amygdala, which in turn transitions the brain to a state of heightened arousal that facilitates memory formation, fear memory, since it's scary. This is the same process, we think, that goes awry in PTSD and makes it so you cannot forget traumatic experiences. Exposure Therapy.

Trauma memories are stored differently than non-trauma memories. These memories are not recalled in the same ways as other, more typical, life events. In fact, memories associated with a traumatic experience are encoded in the brain differently than “normal” and more everyday memories. Trauma memories often only include feelings and somatic sensations, not coherent narratives. The lack of narrative combined with strong somatic sensations can lead some people to feel "crazy" for feeling as they do.

Unlocking the power of our emotional memory. Neuroscientists show that it's possible to turn the volume down on a negative memory by recalling the memory using a different perspective that tones down the negative experience of that memory. Each time you recall a memory, like your first time riding a bike or walking into your high school prom, your brain changes the memory ever so slightly, with details being filled in and information being updated or lost with each recall, mostly because you learned more and experience more, thus have more ways to process the information of that memory. Memories are stored in all different areas across the brain, and the individual memories themselves exist as networks of cells called engrams, and in the networks of memories located in the brain's hippocampus. Emotional memories, like a positive or negative memory, are physically distinct from other types of brain cells, and distinct from each other. Seeing and labeling positive and negative memories is only possible with the use of an advanced neuroscience tool, called optogenetics. This is a way to trick brain cell receptors to respond to light -- researchers shine a harmless laser light into the brain to turn on cells that have been given a receptor that responds to light. They can also color code positive and negative memories by inserting a fluorescent protein that is stimulated by light, so that positive memory cell networks glow green, for example, and negative cell networks glow red or blue.

Generational Trauma refers to the oppressive effects or the traumatic effects of a historical event that is passed down to younger generations, causing years of generational challenges within families. Trauma includes genocide and forced relocation.

Transgenerational Trauma is the psychological and physiological effects that the trauma experienced by people has on subsequent generations in that group. The primary modes of transmission are the uterine environment during pregnancy causing epigenetic changes in the developing embryo, and the shared family environment of the infant causing psychological, behavioral and social changes in the individual. The term intergenerational transmission refers to instances whereby the traumatic effects are passed down from the directly traumatized generation to their offspring, and transgenerational transmission is when the offspring then pass the effects down to descendants who have not been exposed to the initial traumatic event - at least the grandchildren of the original sufferer for males, and their great-grandchildren for females.

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome is a book that argues that the experience of slavery in the United States and the continued discrimination and oppression endured by African Americans creates intergenerational psychological trauma, leading to a psychological and behavioral syndrome common among present-day African Americans, manifesting as a lack of self-esteem, persistent feelings of anger, and internalized racist beliefs. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing is a 2005 theoretical work by Joy DeGruy Leary.

Weathering Hypothesis was proposed to account for early health deterioration as a result of cumulative exposure to experiences of social, economic and political adversity. It is well documented that minority groups and marginalized communities suffer from poorer health outcomes. This may be due to a multitude of stressors including prejudice, social alienation, institutional bias, political oppression, economic exclusion and racial discrimination. The weathering hypothesis proposes that the cumulative burden of these stressors as individuals age is "weathering," and the increased weathering experienced by minority groups compared to others can account for differences in health outcomes.

Minority Stress describes high levels of stress faced by members of stigmatized minority groups. It may be caused by a number of factors, including poor social support and low socioeconomic status; well understood causes of minority stress are interpersonal prejudice and discrimination.

Collective Trauma is when psychological trauma experienced by communities and identity groups is carried on as part of the group's collective memory and shared sense of identity. the "psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affect[s] an entire society." Collective trauma does not only represent a historical fact or event, but is a collective memory of an awful event that happened to that group of people. Reliving traumatic experiences as a collective can lead to a vast range on mental health problems, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, and disassociation. When collective trauma is experienced, there are neurological and neurophysiological impacts on the victims and those affected. Epigenetics is the influence your environment and behaviours have on how your genes work, and with more studies exploring how the epigenome is changed: collective trauma can also be considered. Cultural trauma is a form of collective trauma that is seen on a societal and macro-level. With collective trauma being experienced communally- psychological, and mental health consequences of cultural trauma can be explored from individual and community-level perspectives, factoring in family dynamics and geopolitical factors that can amplify the trauma experienced.

He who controls the past controls the future.

Historical Trauma refers to the cumulative emotional harm of an individual or generation caused by a traumatic experience or event. Historical Trauma Response refers to the manifestation of emotions and actions that stem from this perceived trauma. The term is used by psychotherapists social workers, historians, and psychologists.

National Trauma is a concept in psychology and social psychology. A national trauma is one in which the effects of a trauma apply generally to the members of a collective group such as a country or other well-defined group of people. Trauma is an injury that has the potential to severely negatively affect an individual, whether physically or psychologically. Psychological trauma is a shattering of the fundamental assumptions that a person has about themselves and the world. An adverse experience that is unexpected, painful, extraordinary, and shocking results in interruptions in ongoing processes or relationships and may also create maladaptive responses. Such experiences can affect not only an individual but can also be collectively experienced by an entire group of people. Tragic experiences can collectively wound or threaten the national identity, that sense of belonging shared by a nation as a whole represented by tradition culture, language, and politics.

Bad Memories

Traumatic Memories is intense psychological stress caused by unwanted, troublesome memories can cause brain structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus and frontal cortex to become activated, as they process the memory.

Memory and Trauma is described by psychology as the ability of an organism to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. When an individual experiences a traumatic event, whether physically or psychologically traumatic, his or her memory can be affected in many ways. For example, trauma might affect his or her memory for that event, memory of previous or subsequent events, or thoughts in general.

Emotion and Memory can have a powerful effect on humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events.

Memory Failures - Addictions - Triggers - Bad Dreams

Don't be a prisoner of your own past experiences. Practice not living in fear of your own painful memories. Your memories are not of the present moment and need not influence your present time. Our ability to remember is our greatest strength, but our memory can also be our greatest weakness when we remember the wrong things in the wrong way.

Manipulation of Specific Neurons can help Erase Bad Memories and maybe Enhance the Good Ones.

Programming

Remember It All Too Well is a phrase that means that someone remembers a particular difficult or unpleasant experience in detail, so much so, that it is hard to forget or stop remembering.

Extinguishing Fear Memories relies on an unusual change to DNA. Researchers have discovered a DNA modification that enhances our ability to extinguish fear. The findings could help guide the development of new treatments for fear-related anxiety disorders.

Study Expands Understanding of How the Brain Encodes Fear Memory. UC Riverside study could lead to novel therapeutics aimed at reducing pathological fear in PTSD. To survive in a dynamic environment, animals develop adaptive fear responses to dangerous situations, requiring coordinated neural activity in the hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and amygdala -- three brain areas connected to one another. A disruption of this process leads to maladaptive generalized fear in PTSD, which affects 7 percent of the U.S. population. As much as 17 percent of hippocampal neurons that projected to the amygdala or the mPFC were, in fact, double-projecting neurons. The acquisition (encoding) and retrieval of contextual fear memory requires coordinated neural activity in the hippocampus, amygdala and mPFC. The hippocampus encodes context cues, the amygdala stores associations between a context and an aversive event, and the mPFC signals whether a defensive response is appropriate in the present context. Context is broadly defined as the set of circumstances around an event. study suggests that double-projecting hippocampal neurons can facilitate synchronized neural activity in the mPFC and amygdala that is implicated in learned fear. Multiple projections from single neurons appear to be a general feature of the neural circuits in the brain and could promote synchronized neural activity and long-term changes in the efficiency of neural communication.

Traumatic memories can rewire the brain. Researchers found that fear conditioning led to learning-specific changes in neuronal-network activity in the dorsal part of the medial prefrontal cortex of mice. This study demonstrates the use of combined methods for detailed visualization of the dynamics of neural networks, and describes techniques that could be used to uncover additional information about the neurological changes associated with learning and memory. The medial prefrontal cortex is critical for the retrieval of associative fear memory in rodents. However, the way in which the neurons in this region encode and retrieve associative memory is not well understood, which the research team aimed to address. The dmPFC shows specific neural activation and synchrony during fear-memory retrieval and evoked fear responses, such as freezing and heart rate deceleration. Animals learn to adapt to changing environments for survival. Associative learning, which includes classical conditioning, is one of the simplest types of learning and has been studied intensively over the past century.

How does the Brain Link Events to Form a Memory? The scientists uncovered a surprising mechanism by which the hippocampus, a brain region critical for memory, builds bridges across time: by firing off bursts of activity that seem random, but in fact make up a complex pattern that, over time, help the brain learn associations. By revealing the underlying circuitry behind associative learning, the findings lay the foundation for a better understanding of anxiety and trauma- and stressor-related disorders, such as panic and post-traumatic stress disorders, in which a seemingly neutral event can elicit a negative response.

Forgetting can use more Brain Power than Remembering. Reducing attention to the unwanted information through redirecting attention away from unwanted experiences or suppressing the memory's retrieval. We may want to discard memories that trigger maladaptive responses, such as traumatic memories, so that we can respond to new experiences in more adaptive ways. Memories are not static. They are dynamic constructions of the brain that regularly get updated, modified and reorganized through experience. When it comes to intentional forgetting, prior studies focused on locating "hotspots" of activity in the brain's control structures, such as the prefrontal cortex, and long-term memory structures, such as the hippocampus. The latest study focuses, instead, on the sensory and perceptual areas of the brain, specifically the ventral temporal cortex, and the patterns of activity there that correspond to memory representations of complex visual stimuli. findings not only confirmed that humans have the ability to control what they forget, but that successful intentional forgetting required "moderate levels" of brain activity in these sensory and perceptual areas -- more activity than what was required to remember.

Isolation in psychology is characterized as a mental process involving the creation of a gap between an unpleasant or threatening cognition, and other thoughts and feelings. By minimizing associative connections with other thoughts, the threatening cognition is remembered less often and is less likely to affect self-esteem or the self concept. Introvert.

Stress Heightens Fear of Threats from the Past. When older memories are coupled with stress, individuals are likely to perceive danger in harmless circumstances.

Why are memories attached to emotions so strong? Multiple neurons in the brain must fire in synchrony to create persistent memories tied to intense emotions, new research has found.

Triggers

Trauma Trigger is an experience that causes someone to recall a previous traumatic memory, although the trigger itself need not be frightening or traumatic and can be indirectly or superficially reminiscent of an earlier traumatic incident. Trauma triggers are related to posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD, a condition in which people often cannot control the recurrence of emotional or physical symptoms, or of repressed memory. Triggers can be subtle and difficult to anticipate, and can sometimes exacerbate PTSD. A trauma trigger may also be referred to as a trauma stimulus or a trauma stressor, which is a chemical or biological agent, environmental condition, external stimulus or an event that causes stress to an organism.

Loud Noises - Media Shock - Addiction Triggers - Trigger Warnings - Fight or Flight

Crisis Mode is the thing that shifts our brain from higher functions and long term planning to immediate threat response.

If you need to warn people about certain words that are perceived to be offensive, then you should include that in your message.

TV shows, Movies, Books, Magazines, News Papers and Music can give trigger warnings?  Just like when we alarm people about drug warnings and side effects. Consumers have a right to know what kind of sh*t they're being fed, whether it's physical or non-physical.

Treatment Techniques

Crisis Intervention is emergency psychological care aimed at assisting individuals in a crisis situation to restore equilibrium to their biopsychosocial functioning and to minimize the potential for psychological trauma. Crisis can be defined as one’s perception or experiencing of an event or situation as an intolerable difficulty that exceeds the person’s current resources and coping mechanisms. Survival Guilt.

Trauma-Informed Approach - Trauma-Specific Interventions.

Trauma Informed Care Project is a framework that involves understanding, recognizing, and responding to the effects of all types of trauma. Trauma Informed Care also emphasizes physical, psychological and emotional safety for both consumers and providers, and helps survivors rebuild a sense of control and empowerment

Need for Trauma-Informed Care.

Emergency Mobile Psychiatric Services (EMPS)
Connecticut Health I-Team - 211

Trauma Informed Classrooms (PDF)

Somatic Experiencing is a form of alternative therapy aimed at treating trauma and stress-related disorders, such as PTSD. The primary goal of SE is to modify the trauma-related stress response through bottom-up processing. The client's attention is directed toward internal sensations, (interoception, proprioception and kinaesthesis), rather than to cognitive or emotional experiences. The method was developed by Peter A. Levine. Thinking about the back of your head, your spine, and your calves may help distract you from what's happening in the frontal cortex. Mindfulness - Aesthetic Experiences.

Exposure Therapy

Polytrauma System of Care is an integrated network of specialized rehabilitation programs dedicated to serving Veterans and Service Members with both combat and civilian related Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and polytrauma. Services available through PCS include: interdisciplinary evaluation and treatment, development of a comprehensive plan of care, case management, patient and family education and training, psychosocial support, and application of advanced rehabilitation treatments and prosthetic technologies. Polytrauma occurs when a person experiences injuries to multiple body parts and organ systems often, but not always, as a result of blast-related events. TBI frequently occurs in polytrauma in combination with other disabling conditions, such as amputation, burns, spinal cord injury, auditory and visual damage, spinal cord injury (SCI), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other medical conditions. Due to the severity and complexity of their injuries, Veterans and Service Members with polytrauma require a high level of integration and coordination of clinical care and other support services.

Early Childhood Consultation Partnership.

Drama Therapy is the use of theatre techniques to facilitate personal growth and promote mental health. Drama-therapy is used in a wide variety of settings, including hospitals, schools, mental health centers, prisons, and businesses. Drama therapy, as a form of 'expressive therapy' (also known as creative arts therapies'), exists in many forms and can be applicable to individuals, couples, families, and various groups. What is Drama Therapy?

Controlling Lucid Dreams (reduce bad dreams)

Group Dynamic Game is an experiential education exercise that helps people to learn about themselves, interpersonal relationships, and how groups function from a group dynamics or social psychological point of view. Group dynamics can be understood as complex from an interpersonal relationships point of view because it involves: relationships between two people, relationships between a person and a group and relationships between groups. Group-dynamic games are usually designed for the specific purpose of furthering personal development, character building, and teamwork via a group-dynamic milieu. The group leader may sometimes also be the game leader, or between peers, the leadership and game-rules can change. Some games require large spaces, special objects and tools, quietness or many before-game and after-game needs. When aged, frail or disabled people ("special needs") are involved, existing games may need modification to be used. The use of group dynamic activities has a history of application in conflict resolution, anger management and team building and many other areas such as drug rehabilitation and drama therapy.

Theatre Games is a method of training commonly used as warm-up exercises for actors before a rehearsal or performance, in the development of improvisational theatre, and as a lateral means to rehearse dramatic material. They are also used in drama therapy to overcome anxiety by simulating scenarios that would be fear-inducing in real life.

Focus on Context diminishes memory of negative events, researchers report. Focusing on the neutral details of a disturbing scene can weaken a person's later memories -- and negative impressions -- of that scene.

Reconsolidation Therapy

Behavior - Addictions - Controls - Brain Plasticity - Sleeping

Emotional Support Animal is a type of animal that provides comfort to help relieve a symptom or effect of a person's disability. Under U.S. law, an emotional support animal is not a pet and is generally not restricted by species. An emotional support animal differs from a service animal. Service animals are trained to perform specific tasks such as helping a blind person navigate, while no training is required for emotional support animals and they need not be formally trained to perform any tasks to mitigate mental illness. Any animal that provides support, well-being, comfort, or aid, to an individual through companionship, unconditional positive regard, and affection may be regarded as an emotional support animal. In the U.S., people with mental health disabilities can be exempted from certain federal housing and travel rules if they own an emotional support animal. To receive that exemption, they must meet the federal definition of disabled, and the animal must provide emotional support that alleviates some symptom or effect of the disability. The person must usually present a letter from a certified healthcare provider, stating that the animal provides emotional support that alleviates one or more of the symptoms or effects of the disability.

Pet Therapy

Animal-Assisted Therapy is therapy that uses contact with animals to improve a patient's social, emotional, or cognitive functioning.

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - Refugee (youtube) - Everybody's had to fight to be free, you see, Don't have to live like a refugee.

Treating Trauma: Integrating Neuroscience to Rewire the Brain.

Surviving abuse or trauma can have long lasting effects on a persons emotional wellbeing. Bad memories can be triggered and can reemerge as anger or depression at anytime. It's hard to forget the pain and the suffering that a person endured in their life. But it's not about forgetting something bad, it's more about remembering the things that are good, and it's not allowing yourself to relive traumatic moments or remember past experiences that were a living nightmares. You need to be mindful and choose to remember the good in the past, remember the good in the present and remember the good in the future. You will not forget the bad, but when you stay busy remembering all that is good, all that is bad will diminish over time. And during that time, you will realize how strong you are and how resilient you are, and that your incredible journey is far from over.

Exposure Therapy

Exposure Therapy is a technique in behavior therapy used to treat anxiety disorders. It involves the exposure of the patient to the feared object or context without any danger, in order to overcome their anxiety and/or distress. Procedurally it is similar to the fear extinction paradigm in rodent work. Numerous studies have demonstrated its effectiveness in the treatment of disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, and specific phobias.

Treatment for combat-related PTSD advances with method shown to be fast, effective. A randomized controlled trial in 234 military personnel and veterans from four Texas locations found clinically significant reductions in PTSD symptoms in more than 60 percent of patients and long-term remission of the diagnosis in more than 50 percent after three weeks of outpatient Prolonged Exposure therapy.

Fear Extinction is defined as a decline in conditioned fear responses or CRs following non-reinforced exposure to a feared conditioned stimulus (CS). However, there also is evidence to suggest that extinction is an “unlearning” process corresponding to depotentiation of potentiated synapses within the amygdala.

Motivated Forgetting is a theorized psychological behavior in which people may forget unwanted memories, either consciously or unconsciously. It is not a defense mechanism, since these are unconscious coping techniques used to reduce anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful impulses. Defense mechanisms are not to be confused with conscious coping strategies.

Paradoxical Intention is a cognitive technique that consists of persuading a patient to engage in his or her most feared behavior. Paradoxical Intention is used to treat recursive anxiety by repeatedly rehearsing the anxiety-inducing pattern of thought or behavior.

Reverse Psychology - Programming - Self Education - Hypnosis - Brain Washing - Grossing Out

Defense Mechanism is an unconscious psychological mechanism that reduces anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful stimuli.

Thought Suppression is when an individual consciously attempts to stop thinking about a particular thought.

Repression is the psychological attempt made by an individual to direct one's own desires and impulses toward pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one's consciousness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious. It ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, which would arouse anxiety if recalled, is prevented from entering into it.

Sometimes it's hard to run a way from a brain that you have not yet learned how to control.

Counterconditioning is a form of respondent conditioning that involves the conditioning of an unwanted behavior or response to a stimulus into a wanted behavior or response by the association of positive actions with the stimulus.

Coping means to invest own conscious effort, to solve personal and interpersonal problems, in order to try to master, minimize or tolerate stress and conflict.

Psychological Resilience is defined as an individual's ability to successfully adapt to life tasks in the face of social disadvantage or highly adverse conditions. Adversity and stress can come in the shape of family or relationship problems, health problems, or workplace and financial worries, among others. Resilience is one's ability to bounce back from a negative experience with "competent functioning". Resilience is not a rare ability; in reality, it is found in the average individual and it can be learned and developed by virtually anyone. Resilience should be considered a process, rather than a trait to be had. It is a process of individuation through a structured system with gradual discovery of personal and unique abilities.

Posttraumatic Growth refers to positive psychological change experienced as a result of adversity and other challenges in order to rise to a higher level of functioning. These sets of circumstances represent significant challenges to the adaptive resources of the individual, and pose significant challenges to individuals' way of understanding the world and their place in it. Posttraumatic growth is not about returning to the same life as it was previously experienced before a period of traumatic suffering; but rather it is about undergoing significant 'life-changing' psychological shifts in thinking and relating to the world, that contribute to a personal process of change, that is deeply meaningful.

Amygdala primary role is the processing of memory, decision-making, and emotional reactions. Neurotransmitter (neurons).

Magnetic fields to alleviate Anxiety. People suffering from a fear of heights experience the anxiety also in virtual reality – even though they are aware that they are not really in a dangerous situation. Brain stimulation improves response.

Desensitization Psychology is defined as the diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative or aversive stimulus after repeated exposure to it. It also occurs when an emotional response is repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary. Desensitization is a process primarily used to assist individuals unlearn phobias and anxieties. Gross yourself out

Calm Your Fear Reactions - 1 Hour Break Everyday Stress Anxiety Relief Spray

Reconsolidation Therapy - Memory Failures

Cognitive behavioral therapy for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder: a review

Separating your emotions from your memories or thoughts

Stress - Pain - Experience Learning

No Pain No Gain is more about exercise, then it is about Post-Traumatic Growth. No pain no gain, no brain no sane.

Trials and Tribulations are when experiences test our patience or endurance.

Not to say that suffering is necessary for Learning, It’s just that so far humans do not know enough about how much suffering, tragedy, struggle, abuse, Torment and trauma, and to what degree, is actually needed for learning. This is because everyone reacts to suffering a little differently. Some may become traumatized, some may become more cautious, some may become more aggressive and some may even inflict on others what they have experienced. Cautious people may become more aware of the danger while the aggressive people become more aware of their limits in reference to their abilities. So what reaction is more correct and the most logical? Just experiencing something does not guarantee that you will understand it, or learn from it, or benefit from it.

Could we correctly measure the difference between Physical Suffering (pain) and Mental Suffering (trauma)?

What are the different types of suffering?  Bullying

What are the lessons learned from each type of suffering?

Can resilience be learned without suffering? Confidence - Forgiveness

Deluge is a narrative in which a great flood, usually sent by a deity or deities, destroys civilization, often in an act of divine retribution. Parallels are often drawn between the flood waters of these myths and the primeval waters found in certain creation myths, as the flood waters are described as a measure for the cleansing of humanity, in preparation for rebirth. Most flood myths also contain a culture hero, who "represents the human craving for life".

Risks to Civilization. A global catastrophic risk is a hypothetical future event that has the potential to damage human well-being on a global scale. Some events could cripple or destroy modern civilization. Any event that could cause human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity's potential is known as an existential risk.

"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."

"It's is not so much that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, it's learning about your strengths and your weaknesses so that they become a blessing instead of a curse."

"You don't have to go through hell to get to heaven, but you have to know what hell is in order to appreciate heaven."

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going" is a popular proverb.

Emotional Conflict is the presence of different and opposing emotions relating to a situation that has recently taken place or is in the process of being unfolded. They may be accompanied at times by a physical discomfort, especially when 'a functional disturbance has become associated with an emotional conflict in childhood', and in particular by tension headaches 'expressing a state of inner tension...[or] caused by an unconscious conflict'.

Fear - Counseling - Anxieties - Memory

Emergency Preparedness - Failures and Mistakes

Surviving a Crime (victim)

Depression - Grieving - Stress

Animating Learning by Integrating and Validating Experience (ALIVE) 

Memories can become stronger when your senses are heightened during a traumatic event.

How do you remember a relative or a friend who has died without being sad or crying? You have to learn how to remember people and events without evoking sadness or pain. Like when giving a Eulogy. Tell the story in a better light as an observer, scientifically and historically. Learn how to modify your memories, like when you modify bad habits into good habits.

Free the Mind (2012, 1:20 min. Documentary) experiments with meditation and yoga as a means of helping soldiers with PTSD and children with ADHD.

Insular Cortex is believed to be involved in consciousness and plays a role in diverse functions, usually linked to emotion or the regulation of the body's homeostasis. These functions include perception, motor control, self-awareness, cognitive functioning, and interpersonal experience. In relation to these, it is involved in psychopathology.

You don't have to attach your emotions to your memories. Our memories can still be important and precious to us without attaching our emotions to them. Replaying our past experiences and memories without emotion can help us to understand our experiences a lot better, which will allow us to enjoy new memories and new experiences, with greater meaning. Valence.

"Life is Difficult", but not always. The most important thing is to know how to handle difficult situations in your life. Skills and knowledge need to be learned.

When I was young there were those tragic days, I would pray that I would just wake up and find out that it was all a bad dream. But the next day always came, and I would wake up and realize that yesterday was real, and that sleeping didn't make that tragedy go away. Those were some of the toughest moments being a kid, realizing things didn't last forever, including me. And as the memories of those tragedies fade, sadly so does the knowledge and the lessons learned. But it doesn't have to be that way. Saving that lost knowledge may help save someone else from having tragic moments in their life steal precious time away from more important memories, important memories that they will accumulate in their life time.

People shouldn’t have to fill in this missing information for themselves. This is where knowledge and information becomes an incredible tool. Everyone should at least know most of what suffering does to the human mind.

"Know the difference between suppressing and learning. Understanding an experience is better then a repressed memory."

I see a lot of people suffering, but they're not learning from that experience. So from this evidence you could say that suffering is not the only factor needed for learning. So ending suffering is logical. Even knowing that you could never stop suffering 100%, but if it can be proven that we could achieve stopping 99% of suffering, then I believe we should do this.

"You don’t drown by falling in the water. You drown by staying there."

One of the most beautiful dreams a person could have is to be able to relive your life without the all the struggles and tragedies. But if this has to be my first experience with life then this is the way I would want it. If you never experienced suffering how could you ever appreciate a beautiful and pleasant life? The dangers of utopia.

Asylum Seekers with Apathetic Children. Refugee children who sought asylum in Sweden had become apathetic. They also became the object of great media interest and extensive political debate and a state investigation. Various TV programs showed the children suffered, however (apparently) of catatonic state, a failure of will. Similar condition seen in various forms of poisoning with elemental bromine as the base. There are differing views on the cause of the phenomenon. Today apathy is considered to be a genuine response to depression, despair and stress originating in a combination of the asylum process uncertainty and past violence and abuse at home. When the phenomenon began to attract attention in the media claimed, however, certain that it is not a question of a psychiatric condition and that there is imitation, manipulation, malnutrition and simulation behind apathy.

Pervasive Refusal Syndrome is a rare but serious psychiatric disorder in children, first described by Bryan Lask and his colleagues in 1991. As late as 2011 included it in the psychiatric classification system. PRS is characterized by a refusal to eat, drink, talk, walk or take care of herself, and a strong resistance to the treatment. PRS is very rare and its cause is unclear, but the disturbance severity makes it fatal. The disorder often begins with a ' virus ' or the child feel ' pain ', resulting in a need to consult a doctor or go to hospital. PRS starts slowly, but the child worsens rapidly and becomes unwilling or not able to do anything on their own. They refuse to let others take care of them, or help them to eat, and very depressed. It is not guaranteed that the recovery will take place, and it is a long and complicated process, involving specialized care. But the patient is healthy happens very rarely relapse. A family psychiatric history or environmental stress factors can also play a role. Hospitalization is almost always necessary, and the recovery period is long, about 12.8 months. During the recovery period, the symptoms disappear in the reverse order in which they occurred. So this means that if the hunger strike was the first symptom, it will disappear eventually. 67% of cases show full recovery. (also known as Pervasive arousal Withdrawal Syndrome (PAWS).

Pediatric PTSD-Related Subnetwork
Every node denotes a brain region, and every line denotes a connection. Different-color nodes represent different brain regions: purple, salience network; dark blue, central executive network; blue, default mode network; yellow, visual regions. ACC = anterior cingulate cortex, AG = angular gyrus, IFG = inferior frontal gyrus, INS = insula, ITG = inferior temporal gyrus, L or L. = left, LG = lingual gyrus, MOG = middle occipital gyrus, PUT = putamen, R or R. = right, SFG = superior frontal gyrus, SPG = superior parietal gyrus, THA = thalamus. 

Radiological Society of North America

Certain traumatic moments could eat you alive from the inside. And certain traumatic events have a tendency to stay with you for a longer period of time when compared to other experiences. People waste a lot of time thinking about traumatic experiences. We have to teach children early how to manage thoughts when trying to understand why horrible things happen. A child needs to learn from their experiences, and not suffer from them. We can stop the suffering in two ways, learn to understand suffering to minimize its damage internally, and two by correcting the external causes of suffering. The source of the suffering must be corrected, and the effects from suffering and trauma must be known and understood so that they can be less overwhelming, and less debilitating to our development..

One day you're going to wake up and you will not know where you are. And then someone is going to say to you, "you were in an accident", and then you will say, "what kind of an accident?", and then the person will answer and say, "life was the accident, and it looks like you had a head on collision with life", and you answer, "oh my god, will I be OK?", and then the person answers, "that's up to you. Life sometimes takes you by surprise and seems to come out of no where. So being prepared is a good idea, and the only way to be prepared is to learn how to prepare yourself with 21st Century Skills."