CKLN 88.1 FM Ryerson Polytechnical University Toronto, Ontario
THE INTERNATIONAL CONNECTION
Producer/Host: Wayne Morris
Tape 44:  Gail Fisher-Taylor

Good morning and welcome to the International Connection. Today is show
number 44 in the radio series on mind control and we are bringing you Part
1 of an interview with Gail Fisher-Taylor, a psychotherapist working with
survivors of trauma. We are going to talk about the nature of memory, and
particularly traumatic memory. This will be the final interview in the
radio series on mind control in Canada and the U.S. To end off the series,
we are going to have a panel discussion on February 22, 1998 about ritual
abuse and healing for survivors with Alys Murphy, Caryn Stardancer and Gail
Fisher-Taylor. On March 1st, a panel on government military mind control
with Walter Bowart. And now the interview with Gail Fisher-Taylor:

WAYNE MORRIS:

I am here with Gail Fisher-Taylor, a psychotherapist who works with abuse
survivors. Welcome to the show Gail. I would like to start off with asking
you what is the current work you are doing?

GAIL FISHER-TAYLOR:

I am a psychotherapist, a consultant, and I also do training and education
particularly around trauma. I work with people who basically want change in
their lives, or they want to change something in their life. I work with a
whole range of issues that people have, but I definitely specialize in the
area of trauma. That includes adult survivors of sexual abuse and various
kinds of sadistic abuse, and some who have been survivors of mind control.

WM:

Throughout this radio series, the term "ritual abuse" has come up, both
within a cult setting and within a government mind control context. I know
in talking with you previously, you have some trouble talking with that
term, "ritual abuse".  How do you feel about how that is being used currently?

GFT:

Well let me talk a little bit about the trouble I have with the term. I
think it emphasizes the wrong thing. It emphasizes ritual, and what we are
really talking about here is criminal activity. We are talking about things
like sexual abuse, confinement, forms of mind control, child pornography
rings, child prostitution rings as well as adult pornography and
prostitution rings. We are also talking about rituals that involve criminal
activity such as murder and torture. I think what needs to be emphasized in
the abuse is that it is criminal activity often done by multi perpetrators,
multi victims in the crimes. Many times it is cult activity, much of which
is illegal, and I think that the term "ritual abuse" emphasizes the belief
system, which is part of it, but I think it's easy for the media and other
people to sensationalize that aspect of things. I think sadistic cult abuse
is a good term, but it's not totally comprehensive either. We have a
problem with language here, defining what we are talking about and
emphasizing the correct thing. In terms of this kind of abuse, I would just
like to point out that what is involved is crimes against humanity - the
kinds of crimes that we see in wars. The kinds of crimes that we know exist
and I think that when the ritual aspects are emphasized or sensationalized
in the media, that it distances people from the reality of what is really
going on.

WM:

You would prefer to be more specific about what is actually involved in a
particular case, whether it does involve child prostitution, pornography or
whatever kinds of criminal activities in terms of the context that abuse is
taking place in ...

GFT:

What I like to do is try to talk about these kinds of abuse that a lot of
people want to distance themselves from, and want to disbelieve, because
they are so horrific. I think if we ground our discussions in events and
incidents that we know exist, what we start doing is making it more
difficult for people to concentrate on the sensational aspects of the
crimes basically. What we need to do is - we both need to relate this kind
of abuse to what people know exists in our society, and we also need to
relate it to what everyone can relate to. I look at a lot of things on a
continuum and this kind of abuse is very much on a continuum -- it's not
separate from other kinds of abuse -- it is very much related to a lot of
phenomena that many people have some sort of experience with, and we all
have experienced this just by watching tv and reading the newspaper.

WM:

I think people, particularly the media, when they hear the term "ritual
abuse" automatically tend to think of satanic ritual abuse and it involves
some kind of satanic cults, which does exist out there but a lot of people
do have a hard time believing that goes on. As you mentioned, it takes away
from the actual criminal activities that are happening whether it's in the
context of that kind of belief system or not.

GFT:

I think there's another point here too. All repeated abuse is basically
ritualized. What I mean by that is that, for instance, if somebody is a
serial killer, they develop patterns of behaviour so that when a serial
killer murders a number of different people the police are able to at least
speculate that it's the same murderer because there are patterns within the
way that murder is done.
If somebody sexually abuses children, a pedophile, there are often
ritualized aspects to the way that they sexually abuse children and what it
relates to probably is the traumatic re-enactment of the actual
perpretrator who is committing those crimes. In other words, what I am
saying here is that when somebody has been traumatized as a child and
hasn't resolved that trauma, not everybody does this -- there are lots of
people who have been traumatized who don't re-enact that on other people.
But there are also a proportion of people who have been traumatized who
then go on to commit the same crimes against other people later on in their
lives.

WM:

I would like to talk about the process of 'processing' experience into
memory because as you know there is a big debate going on in public about
so-called memories which are linked to traumatic experience. I wonder if
you could talk just a bit about how the human mind does process experience.

GFT:

I would like to start by talking a little bit about one way that we think,
which is dissociatively. What I mean by that is, let's say we are walking
along the street and it starts to snow, and the snowflakes are really large
flakes, and we had an experience a long time ago, or even recently, we
might start to get feelings that we had in that experience. Say that we
start remembering a snowfort when we were young, and what happens is that
all of those feelings - say it was a wonderful experience - all those
feelings may start to come back just by the fact that we see those large
snowflakes that remind us of an experience. We may start to get all kinds
of sensory input from that previous time, even though the air might be
different in the present, we might remember what the air was like at that
particular time. We might smell certain smells that aren't there in the
present that were there at that particular time. We might hear sounds that
aren't there in the present that were there at that particular time. What
happens is that we remember in all kinds of ways and we encode our
experience in all kinds of ways and there is an implicit kind of
remembering, which is a sensory motor experience, emotional experience that
we remember, and there is the explicit which is more of a narrative kind of
remembering - sequential. Explicit is actually a less reliable kind of
remembering. We can get the details wrong, we can get the sequences wrong.
The implicit we might get confused because we have to interpret that
explicitly, but those body sensations, those sensory sensations, those
emotions will relate - we know they are from somewhere. We might get mixed
up about what they relate to, but we know that they relate to a specific
event or events in our lives.

WM:

How does traumatic experience affect that process of dissociation?

GFT:

It affects it in a number of ways. It depends on the traumatic experience
and it depends upon the emotional significance of the traumatic experience.
It also depends upon whether it is repeated traumatic experience, or one
time traumatic experience. Clinically what we start to see is that trauma
creates blocks. It can keep a person in certain areas of his or her lives
sort of locked into a certain belief system, certain ways of interpreting
things. What it can also do is that the associations are fragmented. In
other words what I mean is that if we remember in all of these different
ways and the experience is encoded in a sensory motor way, emotionally, and
in all of the senses - so that we hear certain sounds, smell certain
smells, taste certain tastes, and that this is also in a non-traumatic
experience - we would relate that to the narrative. We would have an idea
about the wholeness of the event. What can happen in trauma, especially if
it is repeated trauma, or really profound trauma, is that this gets
fragmented and it is really a protective device. If something terrible is
happening that the individual has a hard time coping with is that their
actual internal opiods which are chemicals inside our bodies that are like
opium and create an effect that is similar to opium and are related to the
shock people go into - let's say in an automobile accident or another
trauma - and they slow down the body and it seems that with other kinds of
neurochemicals in the nervous system - what happens is that there is a
fragmentation that occurs so that we may have a recollection - there may be
a lot of terror involved in a particular traumatic event. But we may block
out completely what that terror is related to. For instance, I think
psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk gave a really excellent example about how
it all works, and how it is different for different people. He was giving a
talk and he said, "now if I suddenly exploded here most of you in the
audience would have [what he calls] flashbulb memory." In other words a
very vivid memory, an enhanced memory for the rest of our lives for that
event occurring. But he also had with him colleagues with him who knew him
very well, with whom I imagine he was fairly close with. And he said, "now
to my colleague, probably what would happen is that she would have a very
vague memory if she had any memory at all," and that would be because of
the emotional significance of the event to her. It would be very different
for someone who knew him directly, it would be much more traumatic for her,
than it would be for those of us who were in the audience who didn't have
an emotional relationship with him.

And I think this is really significant in terms of children and adult
survivors who as children have been abused by particularly
a parent, or some other person who has a strong relationship with them. So
if say a child was abused by a father, or a mother, because we are finding
more and more that there is abuse by women, and if that children is
dependent upon that individual for survival there is a real dilemma for
that child. Because she [and I will just say "she" because it happens to
"he's" a lot too] she will need to remain attached to that individual for
survival and yet the fact that this person who might be reading her bedtime
stories is then sexually abusing her later on is extraordinarily confusing,
and there's a tremendous amount of betrayal involved there. So one thing
that we see clinically is that these are the kinds of traumatic experiences
that get dissociated quite frequently, and it is the element of betrayal
that is often a very important factor in how much somebody will or will not
remember about a particular sexual or other kind of abuse by a parent.

WM:

What is your understanding of the phenomenon of dissociation and the
different levels of dissociation that can happen? You brought up betrayal
as a significant factor, and repeated extreme forms of trauma, but can you
talk about, from the victim's point of view, what is going on there.

GFT:

Let me start first with dissociation because again I think is very much on
the continuum, and everybody dissociates to a certain extent. If somebody
is reading a book or playing an instrument, doing artwork - there is often
a fair bit of dissociation involved in those activities. What that is is a
form of hyper-concentration and in that hyper-concentration there is a
splitting off and splitting away from other things that are going on in the
environment. And what also happens - everybody has ego states which are
basically parts of our selves that take on different roles and that feel
different ways, so we all have child ego states that are there from
childhood and have certain experiences and those experiences remain in that
kind of age within us. So for instance when someone who let's say hasn't
been traumatized at all is in a particular situation and let's say a
particular ego state has had some injustice in his life. What may happen is
in another situation in the present day that child ego state may be
basically triggered to come out and maybe react in a very strong way to an
injustice
in 1977. What happens is when somebody has been traumatized the splits
between the ego states become much more distinct and what happens is that
they become the dissociation in the way that somebody can split off and
maybe not be as conscious of things in the external environment but other
kinds of things inside that person. We all have places in ourselves where
we aren't aware of why, when we say 'I am not going to do that ever again'
and suddenly we find ourselves doing that right away. The way that I
explain that is that basically one ego state says 'I am never going to do
that again' and out pops another one who says 'oh you aren't? I am going to
do it right now!' It's a phenomenon that occurs in everybody.

WM:

Is this happening more on a subconscious level?

GFT:

Yeah, it would be happening on a subconscious or an unconscious level. But
what happens when somebody is traumatized is that these ego states become
more and more distinctive and more and more operative as distinctive
personalities basically, or identities ...

WM:

On a conscious level ...

GFT:

Well what happens is that sometimes the person is totally not conscious
this is going on. The extremes of this would be when somebody has what used
to be called Multiple Personality which is now Dissociative Identity
Disorder in the medical field. That person may not be aware there are these
different identities that are coming out and acting in certain ways,
dressing in certain ways, and there is a kind of sensation that somehow
time has jumped ahead, or that there is a confusion about what day it is.
When somebody is traumatized there will be a part, or ego state or identity
that will come forward and handle certain aspects of their trauma, and
during one particular trauma - let's say the person is being abused in some
kind of way - there might even be a number of different identities that
come out and handle different aspects of the abuse. It is again a very
important protective mechanism when this is happening. The person is not
having to handle everything and be totally overwhelmed, there is a
fragmentation of experience in the different identities. One identity might
be handling ie. the demand to act like that identity is enjoying the sexual
abuse. So there might be one identity who comes out and learns to enjoy the
sexual abuse and then there might be another identity that is in a rage
about the sexual abuse and holds the rage, and those two identities don't
have any co-consciousness with each other. They don't know that each other
exists, and they don't know that the feelings are there. It would work like
that. There might be another part that feels very vulnerable and wants to
cry during it, and again there wouldn't be the co-consciousness with the
other identity. 

WM:

I guess the difference I was trying to get at with the normal ego states
that we all have on a subconscious level don't ever really come out to the
forefront usually - whereas in people with the extreme end of that -
Dissociative Identity Disorder - can have different identities come out to
the forefront where they take on the voice and mannerisms of a child and so
forth ...

GFT:

In a way it's not so clearcut as that. Certainly if somebody who has
Dissociative Identity - there are very noticeable changes and with somebody
who has normal ego states that aren't so distinctive - if you start
understanding ego states you can start identifying that a particular ego
state is there. They might not have exactly that childlike voice in an
extreme way, but what they may have is that they may be saying things that
make sense in a 3 year old context, from a 3 year old's point view, but
don't make sense in that adult's point of view. When somebody is sounding
that way what is really happening is that there is another ego state there
that's operating at a different stage of development. When you start to
understand these mechanisms you start to see them, and they do come to the
forefront. It's just that they are more subtle than in somebody who has
Dissociative Identity.

WM:

So from what I am hearing in terms of ego states in people who have not had
a traumatic history or been severely traumatized, there is a certain amount
of communication going on there between ego states. What accounts for the
amnesia between identities or the non-communication or non-awareness of the
other identities within somebody that is dissociative.

GFT:

I am not sure I can answer what accounts for it but we can guess at it and
we can basically say that one of the determining factors for the diagnosis
of Dissociative Identity Disorder, as it is called, is that somebody has to
be amnestic - they have to have amnesia for certain blocks of time and from
my experience and those of us who are working in this field I think would
agree with this is that the amnesia (and particularly survivors would agree
with this) really does protect in lots of ways. Somehow it seems to be a
survival mechanism and this protective mechanism that allows the
fragmentation of experience to happen so that the individual isn't
overwhelmed right in the midst of it, nor is the individual overwhelmed
when these memories may be coming back, or the ego states or the identities
start getting together and start giving some of the knowledge of this
experience.

WM:

The term "disorder" is really a misnomer - it's really a natural defense
mechanism  ...

GFT:

I think it is. I think a better word would be "dynamic". It's a very
dynamic coping strategy and I think that sure  it can be maladaptive
in adulthood and can cause problems, but in a lot of ways what it does in
the midst of the trauma it can allow someone to survive who might not
otherwise survive.

WM:

With people who have been severely traumatized and are dissociative, I
understand that there isn't that kind of move between implicit memory and
explicit - there isn't somehow a processing of that experience fully. They
can't in their conscious state or their main persona - they can't
narratively tell what happened in an abusive situation. Why isn't that
implicit memory processed?

GFT:

There are basically some theories about this and there is research 
that seems to be backing some of these theories. It seems that what is
happening when somebody is being traumatized is that in the limbic systems
in our brains, the amygdala which basically gives emotional significance to
things (at least that's the theory) is very, very key in traumatic
experience. Implicit memory, sensory/motor/emotional will be there - the
person may feel terror in this particular circumstance. It seems that the
hippocampus bypasses this - at least that's the hypothesis and that the
hippocampus is what is needed to give order to things, to create a narrative.

WM:

Or to create the associations?

GFT:

Well, there are going to be associations without the hippocampus. I am
over-simplifying here. It seems that what happens in overwhelming trauma is
that people often do not remember the specific narrative.
Let's say that someone is mugged - let's go with something as simple as
this - what they may remember about the event is not the face. They may not
have been looking at the face. They may be able to remember what the weapon
looked like - let's say it was a gun.
They certainly will be able to remember the terror that they felt. They may
not be able to remember all the events around it, that may be completely
dissociated away. Or if it wasn't that terrifying it seems to have to do
with the adrenalin level. When the adrenalin is at a certain level the
memory will be, as Bessel Van Der Kolk talks about, a flashbulb memory. In
other words it will be remembered very vividly. But it's almost as if when
the adrenaline level gets too high what happens is that the memory will get
vague - or there will be that fragmentation involved. Somebody knows that
something terrible happened. They may know something of the event, or they
may know nothing of the event, particularly if it is repeated trauma.
It gets dissociated away.


WAYNE MORRIS:

There seems to be a lot of confusion in the debate about recovered memories
about the nature and the difference of traumatic memory versus memory that
can be recalled in a narrative way. We have been talking about some of the
factors about why that happens and the physical and physiological workings
of the brain not being able to process that through the hippocampus, or the
hippocampus being overwhelmed by the experience and not being able to take
that in, and give sense to it.

GAIL FISHER-TAYLOR:

One thing that is very interesting is that some of the research has
demonstrated that in Vietnam Veterans for instance - they have smaller
hippocampi which doesn't prove the theory, but it supports the theory. I
think what is significant here, and what is really important in the debate
about recovered memory is that traumatic memory seems to be quite different
from ordinary memory. There's that difference Bessel Van Der Kolk talks
about between implicit memory and explicit memory. I believe people are
remembering their traumas in certain ways probably almost every second of
their lives and they are reliving it emotionally, their belief system is
affected by them. They may feel as if they have been abused, they may feel
totally worthless and that comes out of how they have been treated as a
child. That is being relived all the time. The terror may be relived
practically every second of their lives and in some ways all that has to
happen is that the various fragments have to come together, and the
awareness has to be connected.

But let's say they are having particular recurring dreams or images that
actually relate to traumatic experience when they were a child, and let's
say there are certain fantasies and they don't know why they have these
fantasies. Let's say they are feeling a high level of panic or fear or
grief or rage that is related to what happened to them. What has to happen
is that they have to understand, somehow be able to connect all of these
implicit kind of experiences with the explicit knowledge of what it is
connected to. The fact that we have to interpret implicit experience with
explicit knowledge can get problematic because our narrative memories are
not that accurate in certain ways. For instance ten people witness a car
accident. Everybody knows that a car accident happened but they may have
ten completely different versions of how it happened and who was at fault
and what the sequence of events was. There are inaccuracies and confusion
in explicit memory and there can be misinterpretations because we have to
use explicit means to interpret the implicit information. That can be
difficult but it is important to try and make those connections and it is
also has to do with making connections between the right and left brain -
that more intuitive, sensory, emotional experience in trauma has to be
reunited with verbal processing and understanding the beliefs that have
come out of that traumatic experience.

WM:

Even though somebody may be living with the implicit memories of a
traumatic experience that happened even decades before ... throughout the
series I have been talking to the more extreme forms of trauma in terms of
government mind control which is very systematic and repeated. Often the
people will be amnesic in terms of being able to say 'I was involved in
this experiment' but at some point in their lives something triggers this
memory back, and they are able to put the pieces of the implicit memory
back together. I wonder if you could talk about that process - of
remembering things that had happened decades before.

GFT:

I think first we need to talk about "triggering" which is basically very
much related to the associations we make. Let's say that someone was abused
in a room of a particular colour - blue - a particular shade of blue. What
may happen is that every time they walk into a room or every time they see
that colour in somebody's clothing, they might start feeling sick, they
might feeling the rage, they might start having all kinds of reactions that
they don't understand because the explicit memory of that event has been
dissociated. Basically what they are doing is getting certain kinds of
implicit memory back in relation to that traumatic event. They just have a
fragmentation that occurred so they don't know what it actually relates to.
In fact what they may then do is think that it relates to something in the
present and they may try to find an explanation in the present day for all
of those intense feelings that have just been triggered off - in other
words - that have been associated with that colour blue. What happens is
that it is kind of a process where the amnestic barriers are starting to
come down or the dissociative barriers are starting to not be so strong,
and there is more co-consciousness among states. When the dissociation
happened, there will be states that know what happened. Colin Ross talks
about the fact that it is not really because of memory - because some part
of the individual has retained that memory all along which is very
interesting. What happens is that identity may not have let that
information become co-conscious with other identities within the community
of identities within that one person. What starts to happen if that person
is involved in some sort of life circumstance or often when they are in
psychotherapy there is more of an awareness of what is going on internally.
That's what psychotherapy is about - to look at what is going on inside and
what prevents the changes they want to make and then how do you work
towards making those changes so their life can become better.

What then starts to happen is that once these dissociations get recognized
and once the person starts to understand the way these mechanisms are
working inside him or herself - it can actually be an opening for
developing more and more awareness and give some of those identities or ego
states (because not everyone who has traumatic experiences has Dissociative
Identity). A lot of people have a kind of dissociation where they have very
active ego states that are holding these kinds of experiences inside them,
but they are not operating as what we used to call multiples. When the
recollection of this person starts it is really a process of increased
awareness. There is connecting, so there is less fragmentation among what
the sensory experiences are and what the emotional experiences are, and the
explicit knowledge of the experiences. In other words if these experiences
are related to a particular kind of abuse and a particular kind of
experience, that may start to come back. We can misremember something that
happened last week. We get the general drift of what happened, but we can
get the details wrong. We have to be very careful with how we do that
recollection process. There are certain aspects of the recollection, that
yes, that's right - and aspects of it because of the implicit information
we can have, and then it's yes, this really did happen in this way. If you
know the smell of your father and that smell was in the room when the abuse
was happening you can be pretty certain that's who it was. Or if you have a
flashbulb memory of his face, you can probably pretty accurately explicitly
interpret that. But there are other aspects that can get confused in that
explicit interpretation of the implicit information.

WM:

How does abreaction play a part in that in terms of remembering and making
sense of the implicit memory - how is that related to having flashbacks in
terms of eg. Vietnam Vets?

GFT:

Basically that is reliving traumatic events, and it is reliving in probably
a much less fragmented way, getting a piece of it - say getting a visual
flashback.  An abreaction can involve many of the senses - it often
involves very strong emotional responses. It can involve body sensations
where the person can be feeling the pressure on their chest or can be
feeling the electric current (let's say they have been electroshocked)
going through their body. Those are very powerful ways of remembering. They
are basically a reliving of the experience. It means that there is some way
it can be much more whole than just getting a piece of the memory here, a
piece of the memory there. Getting a smell here, getting just one image
almost as if it is a photographic image. Often people will get images of
something they may have focused on when something traumatic was happening.
Something a lot of survivors have done is when something unbearable was
happening, they focused on a picture on the wall, or a crack in the floor,
a crack in the ceiling. That might be an image that is always with them but
they don't know what the significance of it is. In an abreaction what would
happen is they might be looking at that crack in the abreaction, but what
they are experiencing is what was happening to their body and what they
were feeling inside themselves - all the powerful emotional experience.

WM:

Is the process of abreaction just accessing a certain identity or a part of
yourself that does remember what actually happened during the trauma, or is
it the process of creating that co-cognition between the core self and
those dissociated parts?

GFT:

I think it can be either, but it depends what part of the self actually
experienced the original trauma. If the original trauma is experienced by a
number of different identities, then the co-cognition would be necessary in
order to have a full abreaction - the co-cognition of all the identities
who were there during the original experience. If the original experience
was basically experienced by one identity, then there isn't any
co-cognition that is necessary.

WM:

But in terms of bringing that into say, that experience happened within the
one identity, does the abreaction somehow allow the person to be able to
understand what happened in terms of being able to explicitly explain it
after the abreaction? Is there some kind of recognition in the person of
what caused the trauma?

GFT:

Often yes. It is amazing to witness abreactions because if somebody is
going through abreacting an oral rape - as a witness in the room it is
pretty definite that's what is going on. I am never suggesting that or
never ask a leading question. My questions are always open-ended, something
like "can you tell me something about what you have just gone through?" It
is frequently, if not always, that I have had a pretty guess as to what was
happening to that person when they were going through the abreaction. When
they then report what their experience was, it is usually very much what I
guessed it was from what their body was doing in that abreaction.  They may
come out of an abreaction and say 'what I was going through was an oral
rape' but they may not know who did it at that point, and they may then
explictly try to guess, or they may wait for other kinds of abreactions and
flashbacks and other aspects of memory to get clues as to who it was. Or
they may never know who it was.

WM:

You mention body memories as being one of the kinds of implicit types of
memory. Some of the people I have interviewed have talked about the body
actually physically having eg. reappearing burn marks or marks right on the
body that relate to a memory of an experience that happened in the past.
Have you come across this?

GFT:

Yes I have. There's some research going on in this area speculating that
there is such a thing as cellular memory. It is very interesting to think
about, but we don't know exactly what is going on here. Certainly, this
experience of having eg. a burn mark reappear, it does happen. I have
witnessed that happening, and it is quite profound. Somebody walks in the
room and they don't have that mark on them and then they go through an
abreaction or they start a memory (they may not even be in abreaction) and
suddenly this mark appears. Maybe that's the beginning of an abreaction or
it may take weeks or months to get the memory that goes along with that. I
think it's part of that same experience of how memory has been coded in
many different ways. It seems to be encoded in some way in our bodies so
that when we have an abreaction of something that happened 20, or 30 or 40
years back - our bodies re-experience it in an abreaction as if it is
happening right there and then in that moment. Somebody can think they
can't breathe because part of what happened to them was they were smothered
- or somebody feels a pressure on their chest, or is choking ... the way
the body is going  during an abreaction is something that the person
probably couldn't  make themselves do consciously. It's a very different
kind of phenomenon than when somebody is just acting something out.

WM:

It is amazing to think - just in terms of your example of someone who
experienced electroshock and to feel the feelings of the electricity again.
So that may be not just a memory in their brain - there may actually be
something going on in their nervous system that they can actually feel that
electricity again, or their cells of their body is re-experiencing that
reaction again ...

GFT:

Our reactions, our emotions - there is a neurochemical change. Different
neurotransmitters are activated when we are burned. It may be - it would be
interesting to look at this. If somebody was going through an abreaction or
they are having a body memory, eg. a burn mark appears, it would be very
interesting to look at what biochemically is happening in that person's
body to see if the kinds of neurotransmitters are being stimulated or
activated and their levels are being elevated.

WM:

For somebody who has had repeated experiences of abuse and are
dissociative, what is the process of healing, in terms of your understanding?

GFT:

I think one of the important things that has to happen is that the person
has to overcome the fragmentation. If there isn't co-consciousness, if the
emotions aren't related to that visual flashback, the whole of that memory
hasn't been processed and it is still a block, almost like a neurological
block that operates like a scratch in a record. It just seems to make that
experience repeat and repeat and repeat in some sort of form, that
fragmented experience. What has to happen in the healing process is the
person needs to overcome the fragmentation - bring the implicit memory
together with explicit, process verbally so the experience is not just a
traumatic experience locked in implicit memory, but there is a processing
and an understanding. I think there is some serious cognitive work that
needs to be done too. Look at how that trauma affected the person's belief
system. What patterns developed that caused that person to act in certain
ways? What kinds of interferences are there in relationships? There needs
to be some real working on understanding the effect of the trauma
throughout their lives, and also looking at 'how do I then move forward?'
and change this in our lives now.  I think we are realizing now it's a
process that can be done in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of new
therapies coming out that different people have had different kinds of
success with.  For instance something like EMDR (eye movement
desensitization and reprocessing)- there are many ways to do it - but
basically somebody moves their eyes back and forth.
It is similar to how someone's eyes move in rapid eye movement sleep. For
some reason, and there are theories about why this works, it really seems
to open up memory. It can also help the person reprocess beliefs they have
in relation to those memories. It seems to overcome certain kinds of
dissociative barriers. It is a therapy you have to be very careful with,
because it is very powerful. There are other kinds of therapies like
thought-feel therapy that are based on the energy, like the meridians that
Chinese medicine acknowledges in our bodies - that manipulates the fields
in relation to people's history.

I think that we don't know completely how the healing needs to take place.
We have certain techniques, we have certain kinds of things we have varying
success rates with, but I think that there are approaches that we know if
they are used in conjunction with other approaches, can be very successful.
For instance too much abreaction can mean that somebody gets overwhelmed
and has trouble functioning in their lives, but a certain amount of
abreaction can be very powerful. Also paired with other kinds of therapy -
looking at cognitive therapy, psychodynamic therapy, different kinds of
ways of really processing what happened to the person and what is the
meaning of it. Ego state therapy is very important to try to get the
various identities to know each other. There is a kind of group therapy you
have to do in ego state therapy basically - so that the identities who are
in conflict can learn how to navigate the world together and build
alliances with each other so they are operating in the world in harmony not
in adversity.

WM:

Do you feel different people have to have different ways of healing and do
you feel it is related to how people process information, either visually
or orally or kinesthetically?

GFT:

Very much so. What I find fascinating, and wonderful, and challenging as a
psychotherapist is that each person's process is individual. I draw from my
knowledge and draw from various modalities, but really the individual
herself or himself is going to have specific needs and specific knowledge
about what they need to do in the process.

WM:

I would like to talk about how you understand mind control versus more
innocuous forms of social influence.

GFT:

For me it's not a versus - it's a continuum again. Let's go back to Pavlov
and his dogs. Pavlov played a metronome before he fed a dog food.
Eventually after doing this a number of times, the dog would start to
salivate any time he heard the metronome to the point where even when he
didn't get food, when he heard the metronome he would start salivating.
What's happening here is there is an association the dog is making between
the metronome and getting food, and so it becomes a physiological mechanism
that is triggered off so the dog starts to salivate. Learning and
socialization is based on this. For instance if a child, every time he or
she gets angry, is told that she's misbehaving because she is angry and say
she is punished or maybe even abused when she gets angry, what she is going
to start learning is that her anger or what she is starting to express or
how she is behaving is not all right - maybe then fear comes in because she
is abused horribly when she gets angry. She may learn then to dissociate
away from the anger. What's happening is a phenomenon that is exactly the
same as Pavlov's dog salivating. When somebody learns there are
associations that are made. Say they are learning to read - when they learn
words they get rewarded for those words - so they are motivated to read. Or
somebody has a learning disability and they try to read but they get very
frustrated, then the association is made that 'I try to read and I am
frustrated'.
These are just regular processes that everyone goes through. We learn
certain things by our experiences when they occur.



