You see it in the faces of returning combat veterans, that benumbed, loveless look. Trauma demolishes love. The victim no longer can love. There is no love to be found for the old dog, nor the spouse, nor the kids. It has always been this way for veterans not only of foreign wars but of domestic violence as well. Now we have a name for this lost capacity, alexithymia (translated from the Latin: no words for feelings). Experts in trauma understand this as part of a larger complication of trauma, dissociation. It is the dissociation of emotion. It is as if the left-brain has lost all access to the emotional right brain. Returning warriors often regard this as their most mortal wound.
Alexithymia can be devastating but it can be treated and cured. It responds to the forms of trauma therapy that process and bring closure to the traumatic memory in addition to reversing the dissociation that is part and parcel of the traumatic process http://traumatherapy.us/. The success of trauma therapy can be rated by the reduction of alexithymia as measured by the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS). The diminishing of PTSD and dissociative symptoms occur in lock step with the alexithymia scores.
Too often the problem of dissociation is overlooked in conventional trauma therapy approaches. That is a shame because dissociation yields to measures that are really quite simple. The challenge is to contact and talk to the part of the self that remains frozen in the trauma. The instinctual reaction to trauma includes a freeze that occurs in the wake of a failed fight/flight reflex. A prey animal captured by a predator will freeze and this seeming dead state may be life-saving if the predator moves on to bring down a second prey. The first prey may recover and escape.
The freeze state in the human is complicated by a broken connection to consciousness. Escape from the trauma may leave the prior consciousness dissociated and frozen in the traumatic memory. Brain imaging studies indicate that the traumatic memory is locked in the right brain. The frozen dissociated self is locked in the unfinished memory. When therapeutic processing of the traumatic memory is successful and closure is achieved the memory becomes historical. The dissociated self may remain present tense and may be left in limbo, out of touch with consciousness, still locked in the right brain.
It is the retrieval of the dissociated self that reverses the alexithymia. Making a place in the present for that previously locked-in self can do this. The simple method is to use an externalized dialogue with the dissociated self. The dialogue can be by writing or by video recording and replay. The participants are the present self and the dissociated self. The present self invites the other to participate and the speaker or writer takes turns speaking for the present self and then the dissociated self, back and forth in turn. The process involves negotiating for the dissociated self to join forces with he present self.
When this is successful the person reclaims the nearly forgotten emotions and attachments to others, alexithymia resolves, and the capacity for love is regained.
Louis W. Tinnin, MD
Psychiatric Consultant
Intensive Trauma Therapy, Inc.
