Molar Memories: Case Study 2

"An unconscious rush of angry feelings" — Mike Beard

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Judith first contacted me on the recommendation of a GP who knew about the human givens approach to therapy. Judith is 44 years old, and had been married for 22 years before taking the decision, a year ago, to leave the marriage. Some of the difficulties she was experiencing were around her relationship with her husband and managing their two children while they lived apart. Judith also described having been sexually abused at the age of nine (which she said had affected her, although she was not able to state clearly in what way she considered she had been affected); she had received counselling three or four years previously to "deal with the abuse", but felt her present attitude towards relationships "had not been dealt with", and that past events were having an adverse impact on her present relationships.

In our first session, Judith described the problems she was having with her relationships. She also described how her husband used to watch her while she was in the shower, which she hated — she associated being 'watched' in this way with circumstances of previous sexual abuse (she became very upset when describing this). Having gone on to describe poor sleep (including tooth-grinding, which was so bad she needed to wear a brace at night), we discussed various strategies to improve her sleep hygiene generally. We also recorded a relaxation CD and used some guided imagery to help with her unpleasant feelings of being 'watched', including the rewind technique in relation to the shower and 'shower related' incidents. We agreed to look in more detail at the impact of past events at a second session a few weeks later.

Dealing with the molar memory
At our next session, Judith reported that she had been successfully using the relaxation CD, which had helped her to feel more relaxed generally, but she was concerned about attempting, on several occasions, to walk away from situations involving her new partner which had triggered a severe stress response in her (even if the situation hadn't really warranted it), but finding this difficult to do. Judith described feeling very angry, and having an uncontrollable desire to "go on until I have really 'hurt' my partner" (although she also stated that she would of course never actually do so).

We looked at the triggers for the outbursts, and they appeared to occur whenever she experienced any situation that her 'limbic' (emotional) brain appeared to interpret or perceive as being 'humiliating' and/or 'abusive'; Judith described experiencing an unconscious rush of angry feelings at these times and started talking about the sexual abuse by her head teacher that she had experienced when she was nine.

While describing the abuse in detail, she appeared calm, and stated initially that she felt nothing; however, she then said she remembered feeling deeply humiliated at the time, and at that point in the session became more agitated. So I immediately invited Judith to close her eyes and focus on her breathing.

When she was in a subsequent state of deep relaxation, I asked Judith to cast her mind back to the time of the sexual abuse. Instantly, she became emotional again and tearful. When asked how she was feeling, she answered, "sad". I asked her to allow this feeling of sadness to build and build until she could let it go; at this point, she described feeling dirty and, more specifically, embarrassed, humiliated and ashamed.

Again, these primary feelings were allowed to build up and intensify until they bubbled over and disappeared — at which point, Judith immediately described another strong feeling, of anger this time, and there was a very noticeable change in muscle tension and animation around her face. I asked her to focus on this second emotion related to the memory, allowing it to build up and intensify. I then gradually, by asking her to imagine watching herself viewing a film of the memory, moved the guided imagery on to do an adapted version of the rewind technique, running backwards and forwards over past incidents of abuse, introducing ideas that unwanted images could 'fade away' with repetition, alongside the idea of 're-editing' past events; imagining how she could have taken more control had things been different.

It was apparent from her marked facial expressions of anger as we did this that the 'edited' version of events she was rewinding were involving the expression of the previously unexpressed anger about what had happened that she had felt at the time. Multiple rewinds were necessary until the emotional arousal associated with the event was seen to diminish. A lengthy period of positive reframing then followed, during which Judith was helped to take a more objective view of this situation by asking her to consider how much responsibility for what had happened she personally, as an adult, would place on a child of nine years old. We also did extensive positive rehearsal of a future life that involved trusting relationships, emphasising her personal qualities and strengths.

As often happens when intensive work around reprocessing a memory like this has been done, Judith was very tired at the conclusion of this session. She also estimated that she had had her eyes closed for 10 minutes — rather than the 50 minutes that it had actually taken (a typical response to trance).

Our third session was very positive. Judith was pleased to report that she was now sleeping much better, no longer ground her teeth, had not "kicked off" with her partner once since the last session, had found that the persistent headaches she had experienced in the past had gone away, and had also discovered that she was no longer afraid of the dark — much to her delight.

She said she had felt "trashed" for about three days following the last session, and had cried a lot — something she had previously never done in relation to the abuse. Judith described how she used to "box off" her thoughts around the abuse in a way that she felt that she could manage it and talk about it if necessary (the case was now finally being taken to court). She described, however, how the previous session had finally enabled her to get to grips with how it had felt, in such a way that it had enabled her to move on from the experience.

Follow up
This work was consolidated in a final therapeutic session three months later; at the time of this session, Judith was able to report that she found herself remaining calm in an increasing variety of situations, that previously would have set her off, and she had experienced no further angry outbursts or feelings of rage.