#presentification

Core presentification takes a lot of mental energy and efficiency. It is not easy to pay attention to the stimuli and actions that really matter to us in the present moment without wandering off into the past or future, or losing an adaptive balance between conscious awareness of our internal and external world. And being fully present requires that we have a sufficient mental level to sustain our attention and to control serious maladaptive alterations in consciousness. It takes even more mental effort to concentrate reflectively on present action.

Survivors as ANP are often not able to fully be in the moment either, because they are avoiding internal and external reminders of trauma, again resulting in difficulties with synthesis. When intrusions of traumatic memories (and EPs) occur, their ability to be present becomes more limited. When survivors cannot tolerate certain stimuli, such as a feeling or memory, or the sight of someone who reminds them of their perpetrator, they will not be able to include these in their core and extended personification and presentification. Instead, these stimuli are avoided and survivors will engage in substitute actions to continue the avoidance: This is nonrealization.

It is also impossible to be present when survivors are fixated in the past. EPs often have such a severe lack of presentification that they are not even aware of the real present, much less able to act adaptively in response to it. They have their own, anachronistic sense of the present that involves too much of the past. Simultaneously, they also have a sense of self that excludes or only partially includes the sense of self experienced by other parts of the personality: A failure in personification. When survivors as EP reexperience a traumatic memory, they have a sense of personal existence across a limited stretch of time, fixated in the past that they perceive as the present. But neither that experience nor that sense of self is integrated with the present.

Core presentification is the action of being present in the moment. It includes making an account of our present action and experience (Janet, 1903, 1928a, 1935a) as being here and now, and as being real. Another component of core presentification involves adapting our immediate actions to this account. The account can be nonverbal, but putting it in words will give it a higher degree of reality. Our account of the present, a mental action in itself, is influenced by other mental and behavioral actions, and in turn, influences our behaviors in constant perception– motor action cycles. We do not then confuse the past with the present, or the internal with the external, but stay connected to the synthesis of our reality of the moment. It is often essential for patients to make conscious, verbal accounts of their core presentifications in therapy, because this helps solidify integration and thus stimulates higher level, more adaptive actions. For example, a patient might say, “I am sitting here on this blue couch in the therapy room and my therapist is sitting across from me, listening to what I’m saying. I am safe, and no one is going to hurt me.”