"We want to trigger their anxiety in a safe environment so we can help them overcome it."
http://www.buffalo.edu/reporter/vol35/v ... kPTSD.html
The mistake being that you don't have to trigger the anxiety to overcome it.
So many so-called detraumatisation techniques work along old behavioural lines, thinking that you have to 'hold' the person in the presence of the feared object or situation until they become calm enough to decondition the fear.
What they don't understand (and so cause much damage) is that you can keep people calm throughout.
Roger
P.S. Sorry for the rant but I just heard about a kid who was abused from the age of 18 months by his mother being taken into a room where someone was dressed like her in an effort to 'cure' him. I have rarely heard anything so disgusting, and this in the name of therapy.
They still don't get it about PTSD
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by Roger Elliott » Fri Nov 21, 2003 5:14 pm
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by Mark Tyrrell » Thu Nov 27, 2003 4:50 pm
Yes old ideas die hard sometimes! 
It may be that it is not just the behavioural influence working here. In the nineteenth century when Psychlogy was making it's first fledgling steps towards becoming respectable science hydraulics was the leading technology of the time. Psychology borrowed from this terminology as metaphor from the 'time of the steam engine.' So psychologists talked of 'pent up emotions, repressing memories, letting off steam' etc. Indeed during WW1 psychiatrists treating trench PTSD or 'shell shock' would get thier patients to 're-live' the traumatic expereinces. They discovered that the PTSD cure was affected during the calm phase during the 'collapse' (exhaustion) after the emotional arousal when the patient was given the chance to review the scary memory whilst calm. So if it worked it was for reasons other than than the pschiatrists assumed.
We have to remember that many approaches originated when brain research was almost non-existant. Now there is little excuse for ignorance.
Mark
It may be that it is not just the behavioural influence working here. In the nineteenth century when Psychlogy was making it's first fledgling steps towards becoming respectable science hydraulics was the leading technology of the time. Psychology borrowed from this terminology as metaphor from the 'time of the steam engine.' So psychologists talked of 'pent up emotions, repressing memories, letting off steam' etc. Indeed during WW1 psychiatrists treating trench PTSD or 'shell shock' would get thier patients to 're-live' the traumatic expereinces. They discovered that the PTSD cure was affected during the calm phase during the 'collapse' (exhaustion) after the emotional arousal when the patient was given the chance to review the scary memory whilst calm. So if it worked it was for reasons other than than the pschiatrists assumed.
We have to remember that many approaches originated when brain research was almost non-existant. Now there is little excuse for ignorance.
Mark
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