Article – The Use of the Dyadic Affective-State Relationship (ASR) in the Treatment of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disordered Adult Molested as a Child

Judy McLaughlin-Ryan
from www.aaets.org

Schore (1994), whose research has highlighted the importance of right-brain communications in psychotherapy, notes that most research on psychotherapy focuses on what the patient says during session, often utilizing transcripts. Schore (1994) asserts:

Such samples totally delete the essential “hidden” prosodic cues and visuoaffective transactions that are communicated between patient and therapist. I suggest that the almost exclusive focus of research on verbal and cognitive rather than nonverbal and affective psychotherapeutic events has severely restricted our deeper understanding of the dyadic therapy process. In essence, studying only left hemispheric activities can never elucidate the mechanisms of the socioemotional disorders that arise from limitations of right hemispheric affect regulation. (p. 469)

In this paper, I will present an approach to therapy I use with adult patients who were molested as children (AMACs) who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This approach uses right-brain-to-right-brain communications that serve an affect-regulating function for the patient. Among the goals of this paper is to describe how trauma early in life may cause biological trauma to the brain, including the disruption of verbal encoding of experience. An additional goal of this paper is to describe a three-step technique that may, based on the current understanding that the brain retains some plastic capacities well into adulthood (Shore, 1994), alter this process. This technique will be illustrated with case vignettes.

It is my observation and belief that, most often, AMACs suffering from PTDS seek therapy primarily for an affect driven and state-regulated dyadic experience (which I am referring to as an affective-state relationship [ASR]) that addresses the affect and state dysregulated symptomatology of PTSD. These patients are seeking a relationship with an affectively responsive and intuitively involved “other” (the therapist) in which they will be able to explore their extreme, yet adaptive, emotional and psychobiological states, which emerged early in life in order to survive their trauma and which altered their natural drive responses. For effective treatment to occur, the therapist needs to navigate through many territories in which dysregulation occurs for both the therapist and the patient.

The PTSD/AMAC’s problems with attachment and self-regulation stem from the type, severity, and timing of the trauma. Sexual abuse at the hands of caregivers early in life triggers conflicting emotions—arousal and interest in the caregiver paired with fear, terror, fight, flight, despair, humiliation—at a time when brain development is occurring. Additionally, natural temperamental systems of drive are altered. Unlike a singular experience that may result in PTSD, such as being at the effect of a bank robbery, for the AMAC, more often than not, the sexual abuse occurred frequently over a prolonged period and severely impacted right-brain development, thereby disrupting normal regulating and attachment-oriented responses and, as Schore (1996) has noted, disrupting the expression and processing of both emotional information and nonverbal communication.

A feature of PTSD, which may appear to the therapist initially as a symptom of problems with impulse control, is what I call the “impulsive adaptive function.” This pervasive symptom of impulsivity is, I believe, how the patient adjusted to his original life supportive drives to survive the trauma. Although these same impulses in adulthood cause problems for the survivors, originally, I believe, their construction was adaptive and helpful.

Lichtenberg (1989) and Jones (1995) describe motivational systems that are relevant to working with traumatized patients. Lichtenberg (1989) defines five motivational systems: (a) physiological; (b) attachment; (c) exploration/assertion; (d) withdrawal, or antagonism in response to aversive events; and (e) sensual/sexual pleasure. Jones (1995) proposes a motivational system that he describes as the aggressive/competitive. Identification by the therapist and the patient of which motivational system a patient is using at any particular point provides a window both to the methods the patient used to survive his or her trauma and to the original (before trauma) motivational systems that lay dormant in the patient, ready for reclamation once he or she comes to understand the use of their current motivational systems as a reaction to trauma. I have observed in treatment the reduction of learned trauma-related responses and the emergence of natural drive responses.

When impulsivity manifests in the treatment dyad, particularly nonverbal impulsivity, it can appear as a surge of inappropriate and spontaneous reactivity. It can cause massive dysregulation for both the therapist and the patient. Yet if the therapist can ride this wave, he or she will have a peek into the survivor’s internalized history.

I believe that the “impulsive adaptive function” is directly related to the dysregulation of the trauma and not particularly related to the patient’s current environment and relationships. Survivors react to triggers that remind them of the trauma with both hyperarousal, as though they are in an emergency, and at the same time numbing, punctuated by hyperarousal, which result in an inability to use affect states as signals to respond effectively and efficiently. The response of survivors is to go from stimulus to response without assessing what is really going on (Krystal, 1978). These psychobiological trauma-based affects, states, motivational systems, and impulses are stored within the patient’s nonverbal right-brain emotional systems and are communicated to the therapist nonverbally. The therapist needs to utilize this information as though it were a “word.” This adaptive response, as I have observed its development throughout the course of treatment, initially appears as impulsive, by which I mean disruptive to the treatment due to how dysregulating its appearance or presence becomes to both the therapist and the client. Yet when the response is welcomed by the therapist, understood, and metabolized by surrendering to it through state, affective, and somatic experiences, eventually the adaptive response of the client is seen as a method whereby the patient adapted and altered his or her natural drive responses, which are unconscious, presymbolic, procedural, and somatic. These responses involve both affect and state to survive trauma and in adulthood traumatic triggers or signals. And their appearances in treatment need to be welcomed.

CASE STUDY DELETED FOR INTERNET PURPOSES

The therapeutic approach that I am proposing for the treatment of the PTSD/AMAC is in three steps. In Step 1, the therapist needs to be receptive to the patient’s dysregulated states and affective experiences, thus visiting the patient’s traumatically adjusted adaptive responses. In Step 2, the therapist needs to mobilize and regulate the dysregulated state by experiencing the dysregulation and then exiting those feelings and bodily experiences by responding with increased or decreased arousal and/or increased or decreased calming (i.e., soothing, restoration, conservation). Finally, in Step 3, the therapist needs to deliver back to the patient the regulated state through an interactive dyadic state and affectively regulated right-brain-to-right-brain communication. When I use the words “receive,” “became a tenant or a resident of,” “visit,” “became a guest,” “acquiesce,” I am referring to Step 1, describing the fraction of a second wherein the patient communicates an internal experience to the therapist through soma and affect, using nonverbal right-brain communications (e.g., vocal rhythm tones and sounds; a variety of gazes and looks: gaze averts, still gazes, hypergazes, constricted pupils, dilated pupils; gustatory responses: stomach making noises, feeling like vomiting; muscleloskeletal responses: arching 90 degrees, 180-degree turns, posturing, jumping, running, hopping, feelings, or affects). If this experience is received by the therapist through a unilateral bridge of receptivity from patient to therapist through the medium of soma and affect, the right brain, the therapist will experience some of the patient’s unconscious, fertile, and critical information including early adaptive impulsive responses and information about the patient’s unedited, unfiltered internal experience. Therefore the therapist must receive it first and then begin to sort it out during and after experiencing it, while involving a bilateral affective-state exchange. This method of therapy embodies a template for the repair of the patient’s primitive parts, which during this phase of treatment are unresponsive to symbolic or reflective thought. As Michael Robbins’s (1993) paradigm so eloquently suggests, therapists cannot necessarily assume that their patients possess an internalized representation of cognitive-affective experiences or representations of self from representations of others. Furthermore, one cannot assume that the patient has the capacity for appropriate, adaptive self-regulatory functioning, let alone the ability to move from primary process to reflective or interpretive experiences. This requires that the therapist is attuned not so much to the overt behavior of the client as to the internal states of the client, as Schore (1996) points out.

With the advent of neurobiological studies, we are now able to support with neurobiological evidence a method of treatment that makes possible positive outcomes for primarily nonverbally equipped patients who have trauma stored in the right brain.

According to Schore (1994,1997a), in early development, the caregiver functions as a psychobiological regulator of the behavior and physiology of the developing brain of the infant. The maturation of homeostatic regulatory systems in the right frontolimbic cortex is dependent on the quality of the psychobiological attachment. If there is unregulated interactive stress and prolonged episodes of heightened levels of negative affect (fear, humiliation, shame, despair, anger, rage, intense excitement, and arousal)—which is the core of trauma and sexual abuse—this will result in a growth-inhibiting environment that disrupts the experience-dependent development of the prefrontal system.

The reason this information is critical in adult treatment, particularly with AMAC PTSDs, is that there is anatomical evidence that the prefrontal limbic cortex retains some of the plastic capacities of early development. Specifically, changes in the right orbitofrontal cortex and its subcortical connections have been detected in patients as a result of successful psychological treatment (Schore, 1997b). This finding provides support for the efficacy of psychotherapy, in particular therapy that focuses on the affect-state-regulated relationship of patient and therapist (which Schore, 1997b, describes as “reciprocal mutual influence”) that mobilizes fundamental modes of development and continuance of previously interrupted developmental processes. Schore (1997b) asserts:

Experience-dependent plastic changes in the nervous system remain throughout the lifespan. In fact, there is now very specific evidence that the prefrontal limbic cortex . . . retains the plastic capacities of early development. The orbital frontal areas of the limbic system, even in adulthood, continue to express anatomical and biochemical features observed in early development, and this properly allows for structural changes that result from psychotherapeutic treatment. (p. 16)

Nonverbal interactions take place at preconscious-unconscious levels and are represented in the right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere communications that are involved in the expression and processing of emotional information and in nonverbal communications (Schore, 1996). This processing reads traffic of visual signals and prosodic auditory signals that effect emotions. This psychobiological communication system is a mechanism thought to be responsible for mediation of attachment. These informational systems occur as fast-acting, automatic, regulated and unregulated emotional states in relation to the patient and therapist. This right-hemispheric activity is dominant for the interactive transfer of affect and state.