The client will make a tape recording of their voice, recounting what happened, and this will be utilized for the desensitizing process. This tape will be played repeatedly to the client during their sessions with the doctor until it loses all meaning to them. It is hoped that on some level or another, the client will cease to be affected by the trauma because it will no longer have the same level of impact.
The human memory is an amazingly complex system that serves more than just the obvious purpose of letting us remember what to pick up at the grocery store. Memory and pain receptors share the same neurological paths in our brain, allowing the body to learn how to keep itself safe.
One of the more obvious examples of this is the child and the hot burner on a stove. A child touches the hot element of the stove, his hand tells him it hurts, his brain remembers the pain, and the next time the child goes to do the same thing, he remembers the pain and will stop himself.
This connection between memory and pain is also responsible for the condition known as phantom limb. A person who has had a limb amputated will swear they can still feel their toes or their fingers even though it may have been years after the surgery or accident that caused the loss of limb. The memory of it being there is imbedded so deeply that the mind is unable to forget its former presence.
Memory plays a role in other learned, but unconscious behaviours like breathing and other involuntary body systems. Some Alzheimer patients, or dementia sufferers of one kind or another, have died because they have literally forgotten how to breathe or swallow. (My father choked to death on his saliva in his sleep because he forgot how to use those muscles.)
With memory affecting so many different aspects of the body and its functions, you'd think it would be the last place you'd want to start messing around, but somebody has come up with the bright idea of utilizing a pill to do the same work on flashbacks that existing therapies already do.
Researchers at McGill University in Montreal Canada have begun human trials utilizing the beta blocker propranolol, currently in use for treating high blood pressure, as a means of dampening an emotional reaction to an event. Patients were asked to write out their stories of trauma and were then given either the propranolol or a placebo.
Article comments