Therapy Room
Why the Past Still Feels Present: About Memory Work
Everything we know, feel and believe today, is a result of a memory. In this post we talk about how memory works, why some memories are distressing, and how to help it.
I just finished reading a sci-fi book about memory, “Recursion” by Blake Crouch. My rating is 3.5 out of 5. Interesting concept although it feels a bit chaotic and the language at times feels AI generated. But there were a few quotes and sentences that resonated with my therapeutic thinking. One is: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards” - Søren Kierkegaard. It made me think about our mind’s constant desire to repeatedly review memories, especially the traumatic ones. As if trying to make sense of them. While these mechanisms are not yet entirely understood, there are theories about why this happens and how we may free ourselves from this forced reliving of the traumatic memories.
“Everything is a memory” – another quote from “Recursion”. Everything is indeed a memory. We are constantly perceiving our world, encoding the information and converting it into memories. For a memory to be encoded, the mind has to go through these steps: read the information from the sensory organs, assign an emotional meaning to it, find a precedent for it, make sense of it and put it to storage. This is not exact science, more like a framework to explain memory. With neutral or happy memories, the process is straightforward: you go to the beach with your friends, you see the sunshine and feel the breeze on your face, your vital signs are normal, you are feeling content. You come home and know you had a great day. Done. In storage. To be retrieved when a reminder of it comes up. Like one of those friends calling you, a sunny day, etc. The retrieval does not torment you and you feel in control of it. It becomes a nice summer story.
But what happens when the event is traumatic*? Something that makes us fear for our safety (physical and emotional), is encoded with feelings of fear and labelled dangerous, and the story is usually “saved” in the brain with negative conclusions about self, others and the world. For example, you have a car accident. The mind will any reminders of the even as “dangerous”, be it crossing the same intersection or simply getting into the car. The mind may also get “stuck” in blaming oneself or someone else, or both. You will tend to avoid thinking about the event, and the retrieval of this event will feel distressing. The memory is never placed in proper storage, and you will keep tripping over it.
These reactions are true not only for sudden traumatic events like accidents. Any event or series of events deemed as “threatening” to your system, will be labelled as such, and, untreated, will leave long-standing negative impact on how you see yourself, the world and others. This may explain why people with histories of childhood trauma, are likely to have a negative view of themselves, others and the world. They developed these beliefs, and their life tended to move on that trajectory, bringing them more evidence of these beliefs. They end up living with outdated fear reactions, and they react acutely to anything that reminds them of their past pain, whether they consciously know it or not.
The good news is that we can work with our memories. We have the ability to revisit memories and, most importantly, to reprocess them. We cannot change what happened, but we can change how we feel about the memory. Reprocessing is a natural gift we all possess, but sometimes this gift is blocked by negative feelings, fear being the root of most. Techniques like EMDR and Lifespan Integration, help reduce that fear and reprocess memories in a different way, reducing distress and returning us to our natural state of growth.
When we feel a disproportionately strong reaction to an event, it is most likely something from a long time ago was stirred up. Sometimes we see patterns in our lives that negatively impact us, and, even knowing what these patterns are related to, we feel powerless to change them. Memory work can help with that. Unlike “talk therapy”, memory work is not really about tracing today’s events to past memories. It is about addressing these past memories on a deeper level and always emerging with a different understanding of what happened.
If, as the quote says, “everything is a memory”, I think it is important to work with our memories so they can work for us and not against us.
Until next time
*Traumatic is a subjective term. What is traumatic to one person, may not be so to another. Parents running late for daycare pickup may be traumatic to a 4 year old.
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