Posted by fires on July 26, 2004, at 16:25:57
In reply to Re: I'd like to discuss something, posted by AuntieMel on July 26, 2004, at 15:29:17
> Good articles. I'm not denying that this stuff happens. But I am contending that it is not the norm - or they wouldn't be writing articles, would they?
>
> I think that method of therapy aside, we can agree that the therapists themselves in these articles failed the 'ability' part of my premise.
>
> I'm not even sure I'd call the out-of-the-womb type of "therapy" psychotherapy. Or any other "therapy" that is mostly physical in nature. And smothering wouldn't be called a good outcome, no matter how much attachment the girl felt before she died. BUT, the same article had therapists that said true rebirthing can be therapudic. And I don't have enough data to dispute that.
>
> And I'll certainly agree that a lot of the 'recovered memory' cases that hit the news probably aren't true memories. Especially the ones involving a therapist like the therapist in the article you posted. In fact, I would say it is downright unethical to plant suggestions in a client's head. My family has had people in it with what I believe to be bogus recovered memories, so I know how bad it can be.
>
> But that doesn't mean there aren't any recovered memories. I know I've successfully blocked out memories of things that were traumatic. At least temporarily - they come back on their own when someone else in the family is talking about the situation. Is that a recovered memory? I would say yes.
>
> I will grant you some methods are used more frequently than others, due to them working best on the largest population. But I won't rule out that any method, properly used, doesn't have a place for at least a small percentage of the population.
>
> So, again, what I posed still seems to be valid to me. It contains 1) a client 2) a compatible AND experienced therapist 3) a method, whatever it is - or no method at all, and 4) the other three combine to something that works.
>
> And I still say that if you have all these ingredients which method you use is moot.As I've posted before, most people would love to be able to forget or repress traumatic memories, but it just doesn't happen, according to those who study memory. Most trauma victims, whether it be Equake victims or 9-11 survivors are troubled by their memories. I've yet to read one scientific report of any 9-11 survivors "forgetting" the experience(obviously those with head injuries may have permanent memory loss).
From skepdic.com:
"There is a great deal of supportive evidence for the claim that the more traumatic an experience, the more likely one is to remember it. Novel visual images, which would frequently accompany traumas, stimulate the hippocampus and left inferior prefrontal cavity and generally become part of long-term memory.
Current studies in neuroscience strongly support the notion that a memory is a set of encoded neural connections. Encoding can take place in several parts of the brain. Thus, neural connections are likely to go across various parts of the brain. The stronger the connections, the stronger the memory. Recollection of an event can occur by a stimulus to any of the parts of the brain where a neural connection for the memory occurs. If part of the brain is damaged, access to any neural data that was there is lost. On the other hand, if the brain is healthy and a person is fully conscious when experiencing some trauma, the likelihood that they will forget the event is nearly zero, unless either they are very young or they experience a brain injury."
bye
poster:fires
thread:368717
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040723/msgs/370815.html