The first video is already up; an Informative look at attachment and the importance of relationships in the context of DID!
Some things have changed this time around, though...
The Kairos Collaborative is a project by our system to increase intra-system communication and give back to, and become more involved with, our community. We’re each taking our own approach to the kind of content we make, with five of us actively participating ((Bodhi (me) is doing educational content, Leo is vlogging, Devon is gaming, Sterling wants a podcast, and Sophie is interested in lifestyle-type content).
While this does shift some focus onto our differences as individuals, this isn’t the intention of our project. This resulted as a compromise in how we were to go about tackling these shared goals, to which we all had varying approaches to solving.
Atanu Banerjee, CEO of Spectrum Talent Management®, recently participated in the AEDP (Apprenticeship Embedded Degree Programme) implementation meeting held by the University Grants Commission (UGC) at its Head Office in New Delhi.
The session was chaired by Prof. Deepak Kumar Srivastava, Vice Chairman of UGC, and included UGC officials, members of the AEDP Implementation Committee, and industry experts. The discussion focused on collaborative steps towards integrating apprenticeship-based learning into higher education to better align academic outcomes with industry needs.
We’re proud to be part of this dialogue and contribute our perspective on bridging the gap between education and employability.
To deal with emotional trauma, we need to process disgust.
Emotion-focused trauma therapy can help patients heal.
As trauma psychotherapists, we know that helping patients process painful emotions is crucial for recovery. However, research shows that disgust is often overlooked in therapy, to the detriment of the patient. Disgust is important to understand for trauma treatment, especially in the face of current events like the pandemic, political unrest, the rise in hate crimes against people of color, and war.
Named by neuroscientists as one of humans’ first evolving emotions, disgust is a natural response to poisonous stimuli like rotten foods, infectious diseases, and unsafe environments. In this way, disgust helps us ward off illness and danger. However, what many people don’t realize is that this emotion also arises when we’re violated, oppressed, and abused—all forms of trauma that can lead to anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
For trauma survivors, disgust exerts a force to be experienced (named, felt, listened to, and released). But when people come in for therapy, they don’t disclose their disgust by name. They can’t, because it’s buried by defenses to block it from conscious awareness. All that the survivors feel are symptoms like anxiety, depression, and low self-confidence.
Had Irene’s father or another close family member validated her anxiety by acknowledging her mother was wrong and had behaved in abusive ways, Irene may have felt seen. But victim blaming and “minimizing” can cause survivors like Irene to criticize and shame themselves, leading them to internalize disgust. Unlike discarding spoiled food, disgust-induced trauma cannot be escaped, and the unspeakable sense of disgust often shows up in the body. Like Irene, many patients exhibit the “gape face.” Others disclose distressing compulsions like repeated hand-washing or showering. Still others just show up with anxiety and depression.
In some cases, patients will project their disgust toward others onto their therapists with statements like “You’re probably so grossed out by what I’m saying,” or “I don’t want to say anything else, because I don’t want to traumatize you.” These words are clues that they perceive disgust coming from their therapist, rather than within themselves. Behaviors like these are emotional armor, which works to protect us from overwhelming emotions.
To help patients like Irene, we use a trauma therapy called accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (known as AEDP). Developed in 2000 by psychologist Diana Fosha, this newer model of psychotherapy combines affective neuroscience, trauma theory, attachment theory, and rapid transformation theories. This type of emotion-focused therapy gets to the root problem, using the catalytic power of “core emotions” like disgust, sadness, anger, and joy to turbocharge brain change, also known as neuroplasticity. This stands in stark contrast with medicating symptoms of mood disorders or using behavioral tools to change thinking and behaviors.
Working with painful emotions can feel like being asked to touch a burning flame, which is why the first step in trauma therapy is to help patients feel safe and remind them that they’re in control. For instance, we say, “If there is something I ask that doesn’t feel right, will you let me know?”
To maintain safety, AEDP therapists watch for when anxiety is rising outside the patient’s “window of tolerance.” We track the patient’s physical movements, because as author and trauma psychotherapist Babette Rothschild says, “the body remembers.”
For instance, when patients like Irene sigh or wring their hands, we know anxiety is rising—and we need to bring it back down before continuing with any disgust processing. We might ask: “Can you tune in to that big sigh? What is it telling us? Can you notice your hands? If they could speak, what would they say?”
Trauma therapists listen with our eyes as well as our ears to seize glimmers of emotions and notice the defenses that patients are unaware of. When delivered with compassion and curiosity and without judgment, this type of emotional attunement fosters deep trust and confidence.
When patients like Irene share a painful memory, they may unknowingly laugh or talk very quickly. This is understandable; defenses like laughter helped us survive. Ultimately, though, processing the underlying core emotions can help people relinquish maladaptive—albeit protective—coping mechanisms.
To do so, we draw attention to patients’ nonverbal communication by gently pointing out the discrepancy between laughter and the upsetting memory. Then we invite them to slow down and notice the emotions that are rising to the surface. “As you slowly scan your body below the neck, what do you notice?” we ask.
Patients may point to their stomachs, aware that they’re nauseous or feel like throwing up. Such clues can help patients identify and name the disgust that’s driving their physical symptoms. Once the patient names a feeling like nausea, we ask, “Is there an emotion word that goes with that feeling?”
If the patient struggles to name the emotion, we thread together the clues they’ve provided by referencing how their bodies do the talking. We might say, “When you spoke about your mother, your nose wrinkled up like you were smelling something bad. It was a look of disgust on your face.” With prompting, patients can often uncover the emotion, arriving at an “aha” moment. “It is disgust!” they might say.
Not even all therapists receive a formal education in how emotions work in the mind and body, much less your average patient—so it’s unsurprising many patients believe that feeling sad, angry, or disgusted means they’re weak in some way or hurting the person responsible for their trauma, whom they may also love. However, the process of naming and describing emotions and sensations, which scientists call “affect labeling,” calms the nervous system, research has found. In one study, participants were shown various photos of people expressing negative emotions, and researchers used brain imaging to examine the impact of participants naming these emotions. The result? Labeling helped temper immediate emotional reactivity. Emotions researchers have also found that putting words to feelings fosters long-term benefits. For instance, people who completed 16 sessions of AEDP therapy had fewer symptoms—such as depression—and more positive emotions—such as self-compassion—and these effects held steady 12 months after treatment ended.
Pardon me while I talk with my child-me and figure out where my emotions weren’t considered valid in my life. This is only page 19. I feel like crying with each paragraph of insight. #itsnotalwaysdepression #hilaryjacobshendel #aedp
