Download When the Past is Always Present Emotional Traumatization, Causes, and Cures by Ronald A. Ruden

Sinopsis

A single concept is destined to dominate the field of psychotherapy for the rest of this century. That concept—emerging from profound breakthroughs in our understanding of the biological foundations of human emotion, thought, and motivation—is neuroplasticity. The brain is continually changing, learning, and evolving, and it is capable of changing itself in ways that could not even be imagined a few decades ago. As summarized by Columbia University neurologist Norman Doidge, MD: “The discovery that the human brain can change its own structure and function with thought and experience, turning on its own genes to change its circuitry, reorganize itself and change its operation, is the most important alteration in our understanding of the brain in four hundred years.”

Freud’s “talking cure” utilized insight and the uncovering of unconscious motivations, all within the container of the therapeutic relationship, with its transferences and countertransferences waiting to be analyzed. Sometimes this led to profound changes in behavior and life satisfaction. More often it just led to greater insight into the roots of one’s misery. A hundred years later, we are able to identify many of the neurological shifts that are required to overcome depression, phobias, generalized anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive behavior, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and a host of other psychiatric maladies. Being able to facilitate desirable changes in the brain’s chemistry trumps insight, willpower, and therapeutic rapport.

So the race is on. What therapies are able to most effectively, efficiently, and noninvasively shift the neurological underpinnings of problems people cannot overcome through willpower alone? Among the most promising of these new clinical modalities are descendents of Roger Callahan’s Thought Field Therapy (TFT). By simply tapping on acupuncture points on the skin of traumatized patients while they were bringing to mind a distressful memory or trigger, something amazing seemed to occur. The memory or emotional trigger lost its ability to activate the fight-or-flight response that keeps people trapped in traumatic stress disorders. While initial case reports were met with tremendous skepticism, recent controlled trials support the early claims. Forty-seven of 50 Rwandan orphans who scored within the PTSD range 12 years after their parents were slaughtered in the genocide of 1994 were no longer above the PTSD cutoff after a single session of TFT according to caregiver ratings. Nor were they plagued by unrelenting nightmares, flashbacks, concentration difficulties, aggression, withdrawal, bed-wetting, or other symptoms of posttraumatic distress. Their improvements held on one-year follow-up. Abused male adolescents showed comparable improvement after a single session of tapping on acupuncture points, with 100% of the treatment group starting in the PTSD range and dropping below it after one treatment session. A wait-list comparison group showed no changes. Other studies are reporting similar findings.

How is this possible? That question has been engaging the fertile mind of the author of this book for the past half-dozen years. Dr. Ruden, a physician with a PhD in organic chemistry, worked early in his career with Nobel laureate E. J. Corey at Harvard, pioneering computer models of chemical synthesis. Now after three decades of practicing internal medicine and having established himself, with his book The Craving Brain, as one of the leading authorities on how advances in the neurosciences can bolster the treatment of disorders such as addictions and obesity, Dr. Ruden’s career has taken an unconventional turn.

I met Dr. Ruden when he was newly into the approach discussed in this book. He confided to me that although he had established a substantial reputation for treating addictions rapidly and effectively, this new approach was producing stronger outcomes than anything else at his disposal. And it was deceptively simple to apply.

How can tapping on the body help people overcome long-standing, severe psychiatric disorders? The explanations that were being posed reached back thousands of years to acupuncture theory or postulated “thought fields” that cannot be detected or measured. Extraordinary results were being produced with no coherent scientific explanation. Dr. Ruden was deeply puzzled. This book is the fruit grown from that puzzlement.

With When the Past Is Always Present: Emotional Traumatization, Causes, and Cures, Dr. Ruden has done no less than to redraw the Eastern healing maps—written in the elusive ink of energy fields, energy centers, and energy pathways—with the neurologist’s precise concepts and language for understanding therapeutic change. This monumental accomplishment will stand as the pioneering reference on the relevant neurochemical mechanisms as we move into a future where the techniques presented here become mainstays of psychotherapy and healing. The first eight chapters provide a laudable first formulation of the neurological foundations of trauma-based disorders, their cure, and how the methods featured bring about that cure with unprecedented effectiveness.

The ways to apply these methods, the best protocols, and the necessary ingredients are all areas of controversy. The original approach used specific acupuncture points. It stimulated them by tapping them in a given order. Now more than two dozen discrete variations have been developed, each with its own proponents, literature, and training programs. Many still use acupuncture points, although not necessarily those originally prescribed, nor are they tapped in the order that was originally suggested. In fact, some no longer use tapping, or acupuncture points for that matter. Some focus on other energy systems familiar to Eastern healing and spiritual traditions, such as the chakras or the aura. Some believe that almost any innocuous sensory stimulation, combined with the mental activation of a problem or a goal, can lead to desirable neurological change. Dr. Ruden enters his preferred approach, called havening, into the ring with this book. It is built upon his experimentation with numerous formulations in treating literally thousands of patients. Perhaps the most interesting thing about these approaches, however, is not whether or not havening is better than the others, but that they all seem to obtain similarly strong results. One day research studies will have distinguished the most important elements in the almost unbelievable effectiveness of these methods, but this book already provides strong and illuminating hypotheses for how they impact the brain.

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