A Theory and Treatment of Your Personality. Garry Flint
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to create survival behavior. The memory of the trauma part includes all thoughts and behavior from the start of the trauma to some point near the end of the trauma. The amnesic or trauma part forms while the Main Personality is out of the Active Experience. When the intensity of the trauma winds down at some point, the Main Personality rushes back into the Active Experience and pushes the trauma part out of the Active Experience. Most of the behavior of the amnesic part is assembled from all the same behaviors available to the Main Personality at the time of the trauma. I will explain this in detail.
Let us look at the process from the point of view of the Active Experience. We have the Active Experience at “Before the Trauma” (see Figure 3-9). The line at “Trauma Starts” is the beginning of the traumatic experience.
When the trauma begins, the novel, intensely painful sensory experience and the absence of relevant memory in Memory III triggers a massive response of adaptive behaviors (1). This massive response is independent of the Main Personality when Basic Neurostructure creates behavior in a survival emergency. Because of this intense behavior in the Active Experience, the Main Personality is rapidly pushed out of the Active Experience to a dormant state (2). The Main Personality (MP) is shown outside, beneath the Active Experience. During the trauma, from the start of the trauma at “Trauma Starts” to the end of the trauma at “Trauma Stops,” behavior is managed by the executive function and is remembered. A new memory structure is formed at the start of the trauma when the brain mobilizes and becomes an amnesic trauma part (TP). Amnesic parts includes the executive function and any of the behavior usually seen in the Main Personality. The memories reflect the age of the person. At the end of the trauma, when the pain has decreased in intensity (3), the Main Personality rushes back into the Active Experience and the trauma part is pushed out to be dormant in memory (4). It is interesting that unless trauma parts become active in the Active Experience, dormant trauma parts do not change. The trauma part is an amnesic part.
The amnesic part is created when the Main Personality rapidly moves out of the Active Experience and rapidly returns to the Active Experience. This causes amnesia between the Main Personality and the trauma part because, when it is created, few or no neural connections are made between the Main Personality and the trauma part. This is how amnesic memories and parts are formed.
Figure 3-10 shows how an amnesic part is represented in the Main Personality. When the Main Personality tries to remember the trauma, it cannot access or remember the trauma experience because of the amnesia — for example , the absence of neural connections. The absence of neural connections to the trauma parts is the reason it is more difficult to discover and treat amnesic parts as opposed to dissociative parts. With dissociative parts, a dissociative process alters the neural response so it will not be conscious to the Main Personality.
Now, amnesic parts are normal and present in most people. Amnesic parts can be created before birth, during birth or later. For example, severe colic, a severe earache as an infant, abuse, automobile or industrial accidents, and so forth, can create amnesic parts. The result is that many people who have these parts do not recognize the muscle movements, or visual or auditory intrusions, as behavior caused by parts. Other people might have co-conscious parts or parts that run the body. It can get complex (see Appendix II).
There are other ways amnesic parts can be formed. Often, amnesic parts are formed before birth, resulting in prebirth parts. Prebirth parts can be formed in utero by a medical crisis in the mother, an accident, physical abuse, rape, a loud noise, high blood alcohol, and so forth (see Figure 3-11). There can be more than one prebirth part. It is interesting that prebirth parts usually work to communicate information between the subconscious and the Main Personality. Because prebirth trauma causes the prebirth part, the information given to the Main Personality can be inaccurate because of distortions caused by filters or inaccurate memories created during a trauma. This may result in distorted insights or premises about reality that lead to a mental disorder or personality issue.
When a life-threatening event occurs in the first four years of life, damage to specialized regions of the brain have been shown to stop, retard, or alter emotional development. Such early trauma causes the brain to become more sensitive and responsive to fear and pain. The result is that the brain will more easily respond to trauma and mobilize to create amnesic parts. When this happens, the intensity of pain required to mobilize the brain is less than normal. This means a survivor who has had some early life trauma experiences that created amnesic parts will more likely have many amnesic parts. New amnesic parts can be created even when the traumas are less intense than the original trauma (see Figure 3-12). This lowered threshold, which allows for easy creation of amnesic parts, is found in schizophrenia and other severe mental disorders.
Treatment
I am going to tell you how the treatment process works. Normally, memory change involves creating a new structure and a collage of memories associated with that structure. What is different in treatment, as opposed to everyday life, is that treatment usually takes place in a quiet situation where there is no extra stimulation (see Figure 3-13, next page). When you think of an issue, it comes into or is created in the Active Experience.
The trauma issue is a collage of memories with a unique neural structure. Three crossed lines represent the neural structure. The subconscious orchestrates the treatment process. The treatment process involves stimulation by the subconscious, which causes the Basic Neurostructure to create a new collage. However, in the treatment setting, since there is little activity in the Active Experience, the structure of the collage and its content, namely the Content and Emotion Memories, remain the same. Treatment occurs when both the collage becomes active and a memory process takes place. I call this memory process a “memory event.” A memory event is some neural activity that results in a new collage of memories. In treatment, the memory event works on the emotions of the trauma memory.
With treatment stimulation, the collage representing the trauma issue is recreated, changed, and remembered. Because of the lack of activity in the Active Experience, the structure and the content of the collage do not change, but the emotions in the collage do. The change is that the patient’s present neutral or positive emotion (memory) replaces some of the trauma emotion (memory) associated with the collage. The memory event causes the changed collage to be remembered. After a memory event, when the patient thinks about the issue again, the trauma memory is immediately recreated in the Active Experience. The memory now has less pain associated with the issue. Continued treatment of the same structure by the subconscious causes a sequence of memory events and changing collages. This treatment gradually reduces the pain until there is no pain associated with the memory of the issue. During this process, you or the patient will feel the pain of the issue gradually diminish to zero or to a suitable intensity of emotion. A later section describes the strategy for treating intense trauma.
The treatment setting refers not only to the external setting, but also to the internal setting. The interaction between you, your environment — including the therapist, if present — and your internal process, such as self-talk, is part of the activity in the Active Experience. The optimal treatment setting is where there is not much stimulation externally or internally to create unnecessary activity in the Active Experience. Process Healing works best when there are few memories active in the Active Experience. Communicating about other topics or doing something during active Process Healing does not usually disrupt the treatment.
When some internal