Hungry Ghosts

“Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.”
Naguib Mahfouz



The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20

"The three things people are afraid of are, death, other people, and their own minds"
R. D. Laing


Addiction is any behaviour that gives you temporary relief, temporary pleasure, but in the long term causes harm That has some negative consequences and you can't give it up."
Gabor Maté

Memórias de território

O corpo, um território com memórias (cicatrizes), histórias...
E a distância óptima será definida pelas histórias que ele encerra (o corpo).
Arrisco dizer...

The body keeps the score / Memórias de Território

"Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation — from medication, drugs like alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others."

"The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions."

"The natural state of mammals is to be somewhat on guard. However, in order to feel emotionally close to another human being, our defensive system must temporarily shut down. In order to play, mate, and nurture our young, the brain needs to turn off its natural vigilance. Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while others are too numb to absorb new experiences — or to be alert to signs of real danger."

"Such posttraumatic reactions make it difficult for survivors to connect with other people, since closeness often triggers the sense of danger."

"Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless. It’s not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits."

Mais aqui.

"… He had nightmares. And so the story's about… I knew about nightmares because I've always been a part time scientist and I worked in a sleep lab and I studied the electrophysiology of nightmares. And so I heard his nightmares and gave him a drug to make his nightmares go away.

He comes back a week later and I, triumphantly, as doctors do, expected him to be profusely grateful for the wonderful drugs I gave him. And I said: So how did the drugs work? How did my drugs work? And he said: I did not take your drugs, because I realized that I need to have my nightmares because I need to be a living memorial to my friends who died in Vietnam. And that statement […] was the opening of my career, because I was so astounded because he was a person who was just like his father, got stuck on love. And we barely think about love as being an antecedent of trauma. This is something that we see pervasively throughout peoples lives. If the people who you love as a little kid (and we are all programmed to love our parents) hurt you, this whole relationship to our parents, who we love, who hurt us becomes extremely complex. And it becomes very hard to move away.

And so, as time went on, and we learned more and more by biology, people started talking more and more about trauma as a fear reaction. And indeed, the fear sensors in the brain do get changed and do get activated. But what we tend to leave out is that, as human beings, we are a connected species. As we all are interacting with each other and that love is actually the glue that keeps our lives together. And that life without love has no meaning. And that love is also a very important part of traumatic stress. And it gets very messed up in traumatic stress.

So you get to love people who do terrible things to you. You get to hate people who are very nice to you. And you get sexually excited about things that hurt you. And you get numbed out to things that are pleasurable. And all of these things get very messed up.

And many of these dimensions are being left out of our over simplistic stupid diagnostic system that we basically built up to firm up our relationship with the drug companies. […] And we forgot about human beings."

Bessel Van der Kolk

A conferência aqui.



EMDR, aqui

Stress e constipações

"Do mesmo modo, os casais de um grupo que durante três meses fizeram uma lista diária de incidentes perturbadores, como, por exemplo, discussões matrimoniais, acabaram por apresentar um padrão revelador: três ou quatro dias depois de uma perturbação particularmente intensa, adoeciam com uma constipação ou uma infecção das vias respiratórias superiores. Este período de três ou quatro dias é precisamente o tempo de incubação de numerosos vírus da constipação, sugerindo que o facto de terem sido expostos numa altura em que estavam especialmente agitados e perturbados os tornou mais vulneráveis."
Daniel Goleman, in Inteligência Emocional