Psychotherapist comes to Morris to share science of recovering from life traumas big and small

The world is awash in the trauma of war and natural disasters — Oklahoma City, 9/11, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, to name a few.

But a phoenix has risen from the ashes of these blockbuster catastrophes: Data about the human brain and lots of it.

“If you just look at the climate of the world, you can make a very arguable point that there is more trauma now than at any other time,” said Belleruth Naparstek (Bell-a-rooth NAP-pur-stack), Cleveland psychotherapist and author of “Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal” (Bantam, $25).

“Some of the greatest trauma studies in recent years have been from the earthquake in Turkey in 1999. Hurricane Andrew, too.”

Since this data has emerged in the dawn of the age of brain imaging, it has been crunched and studied until it has revealed a true treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD: soothing guided imagery. It’s as simple as that, though the imagery must be delivered in scientifically precise ways, a field in which Naparstek, known for her clear, down-to-earth speaking style, has emerged as a star in recent years.

On Saturday, Naparstek — whose groundbreaking guided imagery audiotapes are used in hospitals, clinics, homes and disaster relief programs worldwide –will talk about this breakthrough in alleviating human suffering. Local people can see her at Morristown Memorial Hospital at an event hosted by the Friends’ Health Connection, a nonprofit organization that hosts an array of educational programs on health-related subjects.

The Friends’ Health Connection is excited to have Naparstek as one of its guests because her work has increased quality of life for people suffering a wide array of traumas stemming from illness and loss to combat experience, according to Roxanne Black-Weisheit, executive director.

“The fact that Belleruth’s tapes have sold more than 1.5 million copies clearly demonstrates their tremendous impact,” said Black-Weisheit, adding that Naparstek’s work is distinguished by the fact her techniques have been researched by medical facilities and proven to have a lasting effect on people’s lives.

The Symptoms

PTSD is a medically diagnosable condition listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV. Some people suffer indefinitely after they participate in, or witness, trauma. Symptoms include re-experiencing the event in flashbacks or nightmares, avoiding triggers of bad memories, and distress to the point of impaired functioning and relationships.

Those who come to Naparstek’s talks may still be suffering from surviving a horrific disaster, or from the effects of more mundane — but real and serious — trauma, such as abuse, crime or the death of a loved one.

Naparstek, now widowed with three grown children and two grandsons, has not experienced a great disaster. But she has suffered mild bouts of PTSD.

“At least in Western civilization the biggest cause of trauma is auto collision. I’ve had PTSD from some car accidents, and a couple of muggings here and there. If you lived in Chicago on the South Side, it was just a fact of life,” she said, referring to her undergraduate and graduate school days at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

“I could say I’m a trauma survivor of sorts, but that’s not what attracted me to this field. The appeal of working with people who suffer from trauma is that they are so open for growth, it’s dazzling.”

That trauma can undo people to the point of having a new identity is a notion that has been around for a couple of decades, surfacing notably in the work of Dr. Judith Lewis Herman of Harvard Medical School, author of the 1992 landmark book “Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence –from domestic abuse to political terror.”

After trauma, people feel “cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life,” Herman wrote.

So all their assumptions about justice and order in the world are shattered, and their own ultimate powerlessness affirmed. So, too, is their capacity for feeling joy in the moment and, potentially, a realization about a wider spiritual perspective on life. They are never the same again.

As work on trauma emerged, so did studies about imagery, some of them cross-cultural. The results cumulated until technology such as the MRI and PET scans made it possible to see the workings of the human brain. This “magical confluence of information,” as Naparstek calls it, opened a window into the chemical world of the brain and emotion never before perceived.

The Biochemical Loop

The effects of trauma, it turns out, are biochemical, and emotions are psychological manifestations of hormone swings, Naparstek explained. There is not so much a mind/body connection involved as a mind/body unity.

“You can separate them and say: This is what the mind is doing, this is what the body is doing,” she explained. “But the fact of the matter is, it’s going on at the same time. The mind is influencing the body. The body is influencing the mind. It is as one.”

Here’s how it works, according to current scientific understanding: The right, or primitive, brain is about survival and processing nonverbal cues of danger. It’s the part of the brain that snaps to when a trauma is under way.

“It’s a movement out of the corner of your eye. It’s a bristle of alarm in the back of your neck. It’s hearing an odd sound. It’s about sensory fragments,”Naparstek said. “The primitive brain is so critical to safety that it overrides any thinking mechanism and just goes into gear. So you act before you know why. That’s why the thinking brain is out in left field, literally, when it comes to this stuff.”

Going into gear means that the body, for its own protection, is imprinting the brain with the experience to ensure it will not get hurt in the same way again. The imprint comes by way of huge jolts of Adrenalin, cortisol and epinephrine. In the aftermath, the body tries to settle itself with huge blasts of opioids.

The body swings from one state to another, at the mercy of these chemical washes, sometimes for weeks. Most people’s bodies will self-regulate naturally after a time, Naparstek explained.

But for other people the washes of alarm drugs and opioids keep going. They are the PTSD sufferers.

“The most wonderful thing I get from either mail or e-mail or the workshops or talks I do is people coming up and literally bonking their foreheads with the heel of their hand and going, ‘I’m not crazy. This explains me to me,’”Naparstek said. “There is such wonderful relief in that.”

Understanding that the whole process rests in the primitive brain — and not in the left brain, the seat of language and reasoning — explains why talk therapy alone has not helped PTSD sufferers, according to Naparstek. For decades psychotherapists had patients talking about their traumas over and over again, causing those chemical cascades to restart and play out. In the name of healing, much suffering ensued. In her book Naparstek counts herself among the well-intentioned majority who did just that. But no more.

In recovery from trauma, there still is room for “good, old-fashioned, deep-dish psychotherapy,” she said. But not first. Not before imagery has been given to patients as a way to self-soothe and stop their biochemical loop of misery. There also is room for drugs, which may provide people great relief from the biochemical loop in the early stages of their trauma, before they’ve learned the skills guided imagery can afford them.

Power of Metaphor

If the loop of alarm chemicals and opioids is automatic, then the deliberate use of imagery can be thought of as putting the whole process on manual. This is deliberate relaxation.

“You’re reminding the body that it knows how to do this,” Naparstek said.

The guided sensory imagery journeys produced by her company, Health Journeys, leave room for individual PTSD sufferers to conjure their own images. They make reference to a safe, peaceful place, for example, or to gentle guardians. Such things mean different things to different people.

In “Invisible Heroes,”Naparstek tells the story of Frannie, a PTSD patient who experienced multiple traumas and conjured the image of a stone in her chest. As time and therapy passed, the stone softened into a heart.

Nationwide licensed clinical social workers and licensed psychologists are incorporating a variety of innovative imagery therapies into their practices. In the Morris area the BDB group — standing for Victoria Britt of Montclair, John Diepold Jr. of Moorestown and Sheila Bender of Florham Park — happily uses Naparstak’s work.

Britt and Bender agree that the therapies have proven powerful and profound in their practices, and that they are best administered by a well-seasoned clinician within “the trappings of therapy.”

“Imagery therapy uses lovely, very invitational language in urging people to pick the images they need to heal,” said Britt, a licensed clinical social worker. “These images encapsulate metaphors and, somehow, just the healing needed.”

Bender, a licensed psychologist, agreed metaphors are potent.

“We’re wending our way in human capacity,” she said. “There is so much we don’t know about gaining entree to the mind. Metaphors do have a concreteness, though. They can heal. Hypnosis heals, and guided imagery is a form of hypnosis.”

The Next Steps

As exciting as imagery work is, according to Naparstek, it’s still new and needs refining.

There are some people, for example, for whom guided imagery does not work — people for whom relaxation feels dangerous, and veterans whose trauma includes feelings of guilt for having been an instrument of violence.

Imagery work also has potential value for use in traumas of great magnitude, such as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. Instead of leaving people to the images in their heads, or replaying the same footage of catastrophe for weeks on end, multi-sensory imagery tracks can be used to stop bad biochemical loops from starting.

“We can develop downloads for people to use,” Naparstak said. “If anything should happen where people have to pile up in a place like the Superdome again, as a result of some threat, we could be giving out methods — maybe a combination of imagery with some tapping exercises. We could be explaining to them some of the crazy hormone swings they are going to have.

“You can have maybe five tracks of different exercises people can do right then and there to help them.”

Using imagery at those times, she said, could be more than therapeutic. It could, in her words, be “wildly inoculative.”

Reprinted with permission of the Daily Record.