Getting Unstuck; Unravelling the Knot of Depression Attention and Trauma

Dr. Ahsen says that images are our most natural way of recording information, and that all images are recorded along with the complex emotions that go with them. He talks about a natural sequence of impulse, tension, and relaxation, and says that images of situations in which the tension created by an impulse was unresolved are the ones that retain

He believes that the majority of our inhibitions and psychosomatic illnesses come from just such unresolved tension and its continued recurrence in the present, as we are reminded of and relive our frustrations and disappointments.

the underlying cause is always the same: the labeling of parts of the self as bad and unacceptable, first by the outside world and then by judging parts of the self.

Dissociation: The making of a new, cut-off self, to hold the deadly, disorganizing pain away from the ongoing growth of the logical, goal-directed watching self, the one we need to help us master the world, the one that keeps us safe, the one that knows danger. We have to preserve that left-brain self, so we encode the very strong negative memory w

ADD is about an atypical relationship between motivation and attention.

Everyone loses some contact with their inner selves, and great wide swaths of religion and culture from all over the world can be seen as part of the never-ending human struggle to reclaim that contact,

dissociation creates dysfunction, we had to go back to the beginning. Think for a moment of small children of two or three and about the delightful combination of unselfconsciousness and rapid learning they possess, of the joyfulness with which they meet the world when they are safe and well-tended. They are the prototype of pure right-brain functi

As it turns out, inner selves come in three main types — inner children, inner parents, and inner guides/alter egos.

At the other end are milder but more chronic forms of trauma that cause problems in adulthood not through the creation of networks of personalities but by interfering with the developing relationship between the left-brain labeling and planning aspects of the self and the right-brain feeling and doing aspects of the self. This particular sort of di