;)

TW: Rape, abuse, femicide, torture, pedophelia, racism and slurs, etc.

TW: Rape, dismemberment, femicide, racism, slurs, abuse, incest, pedophelia

A moment of silence for this person I just blocked.

But if anybody else is wondering:

Immersion therapy is a phobia treatment, i.e. it’s used to control irrational, disproportionate anxieties whose objects are in fact harmless. Variations on it may sometimes be used to manage triggers or avoidance issues descending from trauma—if certain loud noises cause panic attacks in a bombing survivor, or if a car crash survivor develops a fear of car travel, for example. To treat PTSD closer to its core, patients are encouraged to talk about or retell their trauma; “immersion” in this sense is immersion in one’s memory. The goal is to help curb distress during future instances of involuntary recall. The patient isn’t subjected to more bombings or car crashes.

This is from Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Bessel is a psychiatrist focused on PTSD and trauma, and has done this since the 90s. Emphasis mine. Note that, shockingly, there’s not one positive implication of directly re-experiencing traumatic stimulus:

CBT was first developed to treat phobias such as fear of spiders, airplanes, or heights, to help patients compare their irrational fears with harmless realities. Patients are gradually desensitized from their irrational fears by bringing to mind what they are most afraid of, using their narratives and images (“imaginal exposure”), or they are placed in actual (but actually safe) anxiety-provoking situations (“in vivo exposure”), or they are exposed to virtual-reality, computer-simulated scenes, for example, in the case of combat-related PTSD, fighting in the streets of Fallujah.

The idea behind cognitive behavioral treatment is that when patients are repeatedly exposed to the stimulus without bad things actually happening, they gradually will become less upset; the bad memories will have become associated with “corrective” information of being safe. (33) … It sounds simple, but, as we have seen, reliving trauma reactivates the brain’s alarm system and knocks out critical brain areas necessary for integrating the past, making it likely that patients will relive rather than resolve the trauma.

Prolonged exposure or “flooding” has been studied more thoroughly than any other PTSD treatment. Patients are asked to “focus their attention on the traumatic material and … not distract themselves with other thoughts or activities.” (35) … Exposure sometimes helps to deal with fear and anxiety, but it has not been proven to help with guilt or other complex emotions. (37)

In contrast to its effectiveness for irrational fears such as spiders, CBT has not done so well for traumatized individuals, particularly those with histories of childhood abuse. Only about one in three participants with PTSD who finish research studies show some improvement. (38) Those who complete CBT treatment usually have fewer PTSD symptoms, but they rarely recover completely: Most continue to have substantial problems with their health, work, or mental well-being. (39)

…

Patients can benefit from reliving their trauma only if they are not overwhelmed by it. A good example is a study of Vietnam veterans conducted in the early 1990s by my colleague Roger Pitman. (44) … Roger would show me the videotapes of his treatment sessions and we would discuss what we observed. He and his colleagues pushed the veterans to talk repeatedly about every detail of their experiences in Vietnam, but the investigators had to stop the study because many patients became panicked by their flashbacks, and the dread often persisted after the sessions. Some never returned, while many of those who stayed with the study became more depressed, violent, and fearful; some coped with their increased symptoms by increasing their alcohol consumption, which led to further violence and humiliation, as some of their families called the police to take them to a hospital.

I really, sincerely hope anyone capable of firing about ten neurons of critical thought can piece together, from that last paragraph, the implications of trying to reenact a rape or other sexual trauma through kink when even talking about experiences makes people shut down jesus fucking christ.

Here are Bessel’s citations:

33. E. Santini, R. U. Muller, and G. J. Quirk, “Consolidation of Extinction Learning Involves Transfer from NMDA-Independent to NMDA-Dependent Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 21 (2001): 9009–17.

35. C. R. Brewin, “Implications for Psychological Intervention,” in Neuropsychology of PTSD: Biological, Cognitive, and Clinical Perspectives, ed. J. J. Vasterling and C. R. Brewin (New York: Guilford, 2005), 272.

37. E. B. Foa and R. J. McNally, “Mechanisms of Change in Exposure Therapy,” in Current Controversies in the Anxiety Disorders, ed. R. M. Rapee (New York: Guilford, 1996), 329–43.

38. J. D. Ford and P. Kidd, “Early Childhood Trauma and Disorders of Extreme Stress as Predictors of Treatment Outcome with Chronic PTSD,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 18 (1998): 743–61. (There are 3 other articles lumped into this one.)

We have every reason to feel fear, it’s a natural response to dangerous environments. It’s designed to protect us.

The rest of society echoes this idea that women’s fear is unjustified constantly, normalising predominantly male violence and making women more vulnerable to abuse by teaching us to ignore our gut instincts and red flags.

BDSM is never going to heal trauma, in my opinion, BDSM functions on trauma bonding to make it feel “healing”. BDSM plays directly on making people bond (”aftercare”) after they are put through heightened stress responses. It follows the same pathways as things such as rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence strengthening those neural pathways that formed through the violence. By repeatedly working those pathways it does nothing to break someone out of trauma instead ingrained it harder into them. The body as well is made to understand this because obviously the body and brain are connected, so putting the body through the same patterns further ingrains this into the whole person. 

Furthermore, it desensitizes the person to things like body memories (or somatic flashbacks) trying to associate the feelings of sexual violence with pleasure, which to me is rather dangerous. This further dissociates the person from their body, which is horrible for survivors who need to reconnect with themselves. 

When children are sexually, emotionally and/or physically abused by loved ones the whole brain development is affected and part of the is from a young age the brain is connecting pain and love. Implicit memory is also a factor here if someone expects pain + love to be connected nothing about BDSM or any other way of replaying trauma changes this. Then adult survivors of trauma don’t experience the developmental effects but PTSD does act as an injury to the brain making it still susceptible to re-traumatization because the function has been changed. I’m very confused why reactivating all of the same neural networks would somehow heal this! It reinforces the implicit memories and the bodies broken way of processing information.

As @theregoesthemainframe said it primes people for more abuse because the brain and body can’t heal. Abuse victims are already highly likely to get into abusive relationships repeatedly. If being abused again somehow healed abuse then would the second time somehow fix the first one?

Watch the whole talk here>>

Dog saves cat from an altercation