Throwing in some recent research I've been exploring.
Dr. Ruth Lanius has a 4D model for Dissociation, which can be used to break down 4 dimensions of traumatic memories into: Time, Thought, Body, and Emotion.
Building from past empirical and theoretical research Frewen and Lanius (2014) have proposed a four-dimensional model (4D-Model) that differentiates states of posttraumatic distress based on whether they intrinsically represent
trauma-related altered states of consciousness (TRASC; i.e.,
dissociation symptoms), or states of normal-waking consciousness (NWC), the latter referring to states of distress, that while clinically significant, are not intrinsically dissociative in nature. The model is an extension of the phenomenological framework developed by Thompson and Zahavi (2007), which outlined the qualitative properties of human subjectivity or conscious experience. Thompson and Zahavi’s (2007) model has four dimensions, which are: 1)
temporality (sense of time and memory), 2)
narrative (the story-like quality of thought), 3)
embodiment (the sense of having, and consciously belonging to a body), and 4)
affect (the experience of emotions). The 4D-Model simplifies this structure by characterizing the four dimensions of consciousness as: 1) time, 2) thought, 3) body, and 4) emotion, respectively (Frewen & Lanius, 2014).
--- source: Honors thesis by a student of Dr Frewen:
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=psychd_uht
Linking this 4D model with current discussion, I think that the unresolved pain and EPs are a combination of body memories that started out as emotion (triggering) and then got covered up with thought. Then as the memories are trying to process and get integrated they start invading a 3rd dimension of body, but that presents itself as pain and threatening because the 4th dimension of Time is missing.
Bessel van der Kolk uses a brain stress model with descriptive labels of Smoke Detector (amygdala), Watchtower (frontal lobes), Cook (thalamus) and Timekeeper (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex: DLPFC).
This section describes interaction of 'cook' with low road 'smoke detector' and high road (slower) 'watchtower':
Danger is a normal part of life, and the brain is in charge of detecting it and organizing our response. Sensory information about the outside world arrives through our eyes, nose, ears, and skin. These sensations converge in the thalamus, an area inside the limbic system that acts as the “cook” within the brain. The thalamus stirs all the input from our perceptions into a fully blended autobiographical soup, an integrated, coherent experience of “this is what is happening to me.” The sensations are then passed on in two directions—down to the amygdala, two small almond-shaped structures that lie deeper in the limbic, unconscious brain, and up to the frontal lobes, where they reach our conscious awareness. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls the pathway to the amygdala “the low road,” which is extremely fast, and that to the frontal cortex the “high road,” which takes several milliseconds longer in the midst of an overwhelmingly threatening experience. However, processing by the thalamus can break down. Sights, sounds, smells, and touch are encoded as isolated, dissociated fragments, and normal memory processing disintegrates. Time freezes, so that the present danger feels like it will last forever.
-- The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk
This section describes how the timekeeper collapses under trauma:
Two brain systems are relevant for the mental processing of trauma: those dealing with emotional intensity and context. Emotional intensity is defined by the smoke alarm, the amygdala, and its counterweight, the watchtower, the medial prefrontal cortex. The context and meaning of an experience are determined by the system that includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the hippocampus. The DLPFC is located to the side in the front brain, while the MPFC is in the center. The structures along the midline of the brain are devoted to your inner experience of yourself, those on the side are more concerned with your relationship with your surroundings
The DLPFC tells us how our present experience relates to the past and how it may affect the future—you can think of it as the timekeeper of the brain. Knowing that whatever is happening is finite and will sooner or later come to an end makes most experiences tolerable. The opposite is also true—situations become intolerable if they feel interminable. Most of us know from sad personal experience that terrible grief is typically accompanied by the sense that this wretched state will last forever, and that we will never get over our loss. Trauma is the ultimate experience of “this will last forever.”
Stan’s scan reveals why people can recover from trauma only when the brain structures that were knocked out during the original experience—which is why the event registered in the brain as trauma in the first place—are fully online. Visiting the past in therapy should be done while people are, biologically speaking, firmly rooted in the present and feeling as calm, safe, and grounded as possible. ... Being anchored in the present while revisiting the trauma opens the possibility of deeply knowing that the terrible events belong to the past. For that to happen, the brain’s watchtower, cook, and timekeeper need to be online. Therapy won’t work as long as people keep being pulled back into the past.
-- The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk
So when memories don't get processed and stored properly with all the ingredients of 4D (time, thought, body sensation, emotion), because of a failure of watchtower, cook and timekeeper all being functionally online. These incomplete memories end up getting clumped together and stored in areas of the body. (ie. pain in the neck, lower back pain, heavy shoulder burdens, tension in thighs, etc.) But these incomplete memories also want an end of story, seeking to be completed and integrated into long term memory. So they lie relatively dormant, sorta 'waiting in line', waiting for an opportunity to latch onto any new stimulus which has similar emotional frequency and suffering pain. And then when that opportunity comes, they flood the nervous system, piggy-backing on top of the recent trigger, often creating an over-reaction and emotional flashbacks.
This experience is confusing to the watchtower and with repeated re-traumatizing experiences of this, ANPs are developed and refined to counter, control, and limit these outbursts and perceived attacks by EPs, which are clustered around baskets of emotional suffering of similar frequency or associations.
