Nation & World News
Recent study focuses on emotions of heartbreak
Michael Bridges' recent
study at Temple University
aims to understanding the
effects of a broken heart
By Stacey Burling
Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)
PHILADELPI1IA — What does for
giveness look like?
Maybe it looks like Elizabeth as she
envisions her heart four years after her
husband's affair with one of her
friends ended their 12-year marriage.
At first she sees it raw, red and bruised,
but then the 42-year-old dancer
smiles in wonder as her mental pic
ture mutates.
light pours from her heart. She sees
it bursting with love and joy. Her
smile fades. She leans forward in her
chair sobbing, mostly from happiness
at the beauty of it, but with a twinge
of sadness that so much love is going
to waste.
Maybe forgiveness looks like the
jagged graph of Elizabeth's heartbeat
recorded by monitors on her wrist
and rib cage as she talks with her ther
apist that day. For most of their hour
together, her heart beats between 55
and 65 times per minute. But at 1:57
p.m., as she cries, it shoots like a
geyser to 129 beats per minute. Then,
just as quickly, it falls as she settles
into post-tears peace.
All of it — plus her words, of course
— offers clues for Elizabeth's thera
pist, Michael Bridges, a psychologist
and researcher at Temple University
who is trying to figure out what helps
people let go of the pain of betrayal
and rotten relationships.
He's heading a study of the
heartbroken, people who can't get
past their anger at their parents or ex
lovers, people so hurt they're afraid to
love again. This kind of pain is what
Bridges called a "ubiquitous human
phenomenon" and it's one of the pri
mary reasons people seek therapy.
In his study, up to 60 patients will
receive therapy for 10 to 12 weeks.
Each session will be videotaped, and
researchers will later dissect the tapes
for facial expressions and other physi
cal signs of emotions.
They'll listen to the words: Is a
woman angrily listing the bad things
her former boyfriend did or crying
about the way his caddishness made
her feel? Clients will answer written
surveys before and after each session.
Bridges' team will correlate those
details with heart rates to get another
measure of emotional intensity. Some
people, Bridges said, may not be
showing much emotion, while their
hearts are going wild. Me has already
noticed something interesting in one
of his patients.
During one session, she began to
tear up as she discussed her failed re
lationship. But rather than allow her
self to cry, she veered off on an angry
tangent. Her heartbeat jumped 30
beats per minute and stayed elevated
for 10 minutes.
When something similar happened
in a later session, she cried instead.
Again her heart rate spiked, but it
came down almost immediately.
All these data will reveal "the natu
ral history of therapy," said Bridges,
who directs Temple's Psychological
Services Center. His ambitious goal is
"to think in much more detail about
what lands and intensity of emotions
really lead to change in therapy."
Ultimately, he'd like to go a step
further and measure the heart rates of
therapists as well, to help figure out
what type of therapist/client relation
ship is most effective.
John Norcross, a University of
Scranton psychology professor who
has studied the effectiveness of differ
ent styles of therapy, said the idea that
mind and body are connected is an
cient. 'The notion that there's a recip
rocal reaction between the mind and
body is as old as Aristotle," he said.
But Bridges' work fits within two
newer trends as well. There has been
explosive growth recently in studying
the interactions between psychology,
neurology and the immune system,
Norcross said. There is also a trend to
ward studying smaller elements of
therapy to ferret out which specific as
pects work.
While he has been through a divorce,
the now happily married Bridges said it
was not his own love life that spurred
his interest in heartbreak and emotions.
It was watching his patients fail to get
better after therapy.
Bridges noticed that patients
could have lots of insights of the "I
can't-stand-up-to-my-wife-because
she-reminds-me-of-Mommy" vari
ety, but nothing would change. That
led to his interest in emotion-fo
cused therapy, a style of treatment
pioneered by Leslie Greenberg, a
psychology professor at York Univer
sity in Toronto. Greenberg contends
that emotions get short shrift in the
more popular cognitive behavioral
therapy, which aims to change the
way troubled people think about
their world.
Bridges now believes, like Green
berg, that emotions can be helpful in
therapy and that a "certain intensity of
feeling" is necessary for people to
change.
Some people seek treatment be
cause they're feeling too much,
Bridges said. A depressed client may
be flooded with emotions, crying un
controllably. That person needs a dif
ferent kind of care than a depressed
client who has little energy and seems
to be cut off from emotions, or an
anxious client who frets constantly.
Often, he said, anxious patients
"think way, way too much" as a dis
traction from threatening feelings.
Overthinkers, Bridges said, benefit
from therapy that helps them experi
ence their feelings — physically and
emotionally — while the overfeelers
need to calm down enough to think
more clearly.
This is a far cry from the old primal
scream idea. That doesn't work,
Bridges said. Sometimes, anger is a
helpful emotion, he said, but patients
who are stuck in their anger often
need to work on feeling something
else.
While the researchers sometimes
call this study the "forgiveness proj
ect," Bridges said that's an oversimpli
fication. "We don't have an agenda
that forgiveness is the only way to re
solve this," he said.
In the case of abuse, for instance,
patients may not forgive, but they
can let go, Bridges said. He uses the
empty-chair technique: Patients are
told to imagine their transgressor in
a chair across the room and talk to
him. When they're getting better,
Bridges said, patients will say, "I'm
not going to let you take up any
more of my life. ... You've been in
my mind too long, so I'm going to
cast you out."
Elizabeth, who asked that her last
name not be published, read about
the study in a Temple newspaper and
felt as if someone had read her mind.
Even after four years, including
therapy immediately after the
breakup, she felt stuck in the past,
afraid to choose another man after
she had so thoroughly misjudged the
last one.
"I got into some cycles of blaming
myself and not trusting my judgment
in men and still feeling like a victim,"
she said.
She found it relatively easy to forget
the heart-rate monitors during her
sessions with Bridges, though it did
make her a little nervous to realize
someone would be analyzing her fa
cial expressions on the videotape. Af
ter six sessions, she was already feel
ing much better.
The therapy helped her not only re
member the good times in her mar
riage but realize that she, like her hus
band, had been unhappy. "I think 1
really didn't want it to last either," she
says now.
Before the therapy, she found her
self thinking of her ex in a sad, painful
way three or four times a week. That
has changed.
"I'm not thinking about him," she
said. "If I do, it's almost like thinking
about a movie I saw a couple years
ago. It's not charged the way it was."
(c) 2004, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune
Information Services.
Jurisdiction questions cloud civilian prison abuse cases
uases or abuse committed
by civilians have yet to be
referred to the FBI, says
Director Robert Mueller
By Shannon McCaffrey
Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)
WASHINGTON — Although sev
eral cases of prisoner abuse by civil
ians in Iraq have been referred to the
Justice Department for possible
criminal prosecution, the FBI has
not yet been asked to investigate any
of them, Director Robert Mueller
said Thursday.
Mueller’s comments before the
Senate Judiciary Committee seemed
to indicate that the probe into
whether independent contractors or
CIA officers killed prisoners in Iraq
and Afghanistan is moving more
slowly than on the military front,
where one soldier has already been
court-martialed and others have
been charged.
While the faces of military police
have been splashed all over the
news, the names of almost all civil
ians involved — employees of other
government agencies and civilian
contractors — were deleted from
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report
on the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Mueller said he believed that the
FBI, which has agents in Iraq, is "the
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appropriate investigating body" when
cases are referred to the Justice De
partment. But he said lawyers there
had not passed any cases their way.
"My understanding is the investi
gations have been conducted to date
by the (CIA) inspector general’s of
fice, ” Mueller said.
Mueller, a former U S. Marine and
federal prosecutor, also said lawyers
for the Justice Department and De
fense Department are wrestling with
jurisdictional issues. Any crimes at
the prison would have been com
mitted on foreign soil against for
eign citizens, creating complicated
legal questions.
The CIA inspector general is investi
gating three prisoner deaths — two in
Iraq and one in Afghanistan — and
whether there was any CIA involve
ment in the prisoner abuse depicted
in photos taken at Abu Ghraib.
Among the cases that have been re
ferred to the Justice Department is an
Iraqi who died at the Abu Ghraib
prison while under CIA interrogation.
His bruised corpse, packed in ice, was
photographed. Nearby were two
American soldiers — Spc. Charles
Graner and Spc. Sabrina Harman —
posing with thumbs up. Both have al
ready been charged in the prison
abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib.
Also Thursday, Sen. Charles
Schumer, D-N.Y., called for a Justice
Department probe into two mem
bers of a U.S. group sent in May
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2003 to Iraq to help with the recon
struction of Abu Ghraib. Lane Mc
Cotter, a former corrections chief in
Utah, and John Armstrong, who led
the prison system in Connecticut,
were part of a team picked by Attor
ney General John Ashcroft and oth
ers in the Bush administration.
McCotter resigned from the top
spot in Utah when a schizophrenic in
mate died after being strapped naked
to a chair for 16 hours. McCotter went
on to serve as head of a private prison
system now under investigation for
denying prisoners access to medical
treatment, Schumer said.
Armstrong shipped a variety of
Connecticut inmates, even low-level
offenders, to a super-max prison in
Virginia known for its use of
excessive force. Schumer said that
when Armstrong resigned he was
facing allegations that he sexually
harassed female subordinates.
"Why would we send officials
with such disturbing records to han
dle such a sensitive mission? That's
beyond me. It cries out for an expla
nation," Schumer said.
Neither McCotter nor Armstrong
could be reached for comment. But
in a statement sent to the Santa Fe
New Mexican newspaper earlier this
week, McCotter condemned the
abuses in Iraq and said he had noth
ing to do with training guards there.
(cj 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune
Information Services.
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