Comments on: Venting Emotions After Trauma Predicts Worse Outcomes

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:11:00 +0000

What I understand, from basic knowledge of how the human brain works, is that when we vent we are reliving our negative emotions, in actual real-time. When we talk or dwell on negative emotion after an event or about a person, we strengthen those bad feeling connections in our brain and make the same negative emotions more likely to arise via association when thinking of the event or person in the future. Does anyone who studies the actual brain (not pop psychology) have any information on this? (myelination of dendrites?)

By: dale

dale — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:16:00 +0000

I would have to agree with Dr. Sam and Vaibhav to a certain extent.

First of all just expressing whatever emotion happens to show up and recalling their story about what happened certainly could have a serious negative affect.

Research seems to demonstrated that connecting strong emotion to any learning experience will reinforce the memories related to the experience.

When the individual subjected to the event creates a story through their own filters they may be simply amplifying, reliving and reinforcing the events and beliefs from which their filters were created. I believe it's possible there was already some sort of emotional trauma present and the current event simply amplified what was there.

The reframing Dr. Sam mentioned may need to take into account framing that was in place prior to the most current trauma.

Sounds like a great place to use an fMRI so we can take a lot of the guess work out of this. If that's possible?

By: Dr. Sam

Dr. Sam — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:44:00 +0000

I work in the treatment of trauma. I see hundreds of patients a year. I think that the researchers do not understand how traumas are cured or they would see that talking or not talking can be relevant or irrelevant depending on what they talk about concerning their traumas.

Effective trauma resolution involves reframing and processing the original trauma memory. This can be done via any of the following modalities: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. To the degree a person talking or "venting" about their trauma gets close to the exact trauma event being embedded in them, to that extent there is resolution.

It is possible to get totally different results because the venting being done is not guided but haphazard or spontaneous. In other words, it is disorganized and not necessarily focusing on the exact trauma moment where the reframe has to take place to be neutralized.

Samuel Lopez De Victoria, Ph.D.
http://www.DrSam.tv

By: Jennie

Jennie — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:13:00 +0000

One thing that does not appear to have been considered here is that people who already feel more traumatized BY THE EVENT IN QUESTION may also feel a higher need to talk about it. The extent of the responses to the survey was positively linked to the chance of PTSD: the more traumatized by the event someone was, the higher their need to talk about it at length and in depth. What this study shows is nothing more and nothing less than that people feel the need to talk about things that are bothering them acutely, and they don't feel the need to talk about things that aren't particularly bothering them.

Rather than looking at this from the perspective of whether survivors of potentially traumatic events should or should not talk about their traumas, it might be more valuable to look at it from the perspective that the desire to talk about traumatic events is apparently an effective clinical screening marker for the risk of PTSD, allowing support efforts to be targeted where they are most likely to be needed.

By: Vaibhav

Vaibhav — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:34:00 +0000

It is a normal phenomenon that when we talk about something we visualize it. When these respondents were a part of therapy, they might have tried to provide as much detail as they could recover, which unforunatly have reinforced the cruel memories of the tragic event.
I believe repeating the event to someone has nothing to do with PTS unless it does not reinforce the memories. And eventually it does reinforce, hence it could be dangerous. Moreover, after-effects also depend upon the person's attitude whether they look the better side of the future life, or they fear another such event. The people who tried this therapy to forget such event might have reinforced it because they were continuously thinking about the same thing. We need to remove the systematic errors in such a study.

By: JunosL

JunosL — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:34:00 +0000

But still.. Are those who talk also generally more prone to PTS? IT is explicitly pointed out that it doesn't tell us anything about the CAUSE of PTS. Then why make causal conclusions?

Maybe those who remain silent cope better with stress and PTS. And maybe those who talk would experience even more PTS if they DIDN'T talk about traumatic experience... Is general coping taken into account?