This post explores how negative/unprocessed memories are created. You may also want to read the related post on How to Resolve Traumatic Memories to understand how traumatic/unprocessed memories seem to be fully and completely resolved.
Introduction
Why do fairly minor situations sometimes cause us to react more strongly than the situation merits? Why do some people go through a challenging or dangerous situation and emerge with PTSD and others do not? While there is still not complete understanding on this subject, a variety of researchers, clinicians, and other sources point to the following three part hypothesis:
- That it is not the size of the event that determines whether an event is stored as a normal or traumatic memory, but our brain-mind-body system ability to process the event and whether we had the necessary help/support to resolve it.
- That unprocessed experiences seem to be stored differently and have different effects on the brain when activated than normal/adequately processed memories and result in what are commonly known as triggers or over-reactions to seemingly small events as if the similar unresolved were happening all over again.
- That unprocessed memories and associated beliefs and feeling states can be resolved/updated at a later time given the right conditions and support for our brain-mind-body system to complete the necessary processing tasks.
How to Define Trauma?
Often trauma has been defined simply as any life threatening experience or second hand experience that overwhelmed the person’s ability to cope. While there are merits to this definition, it fails to recognize that there are millions of smaller experiences that also overwhelm our brain’s ability to cope. Anything from rejection by peers, minor bullying incidents, scary movies, routine surgery, and so on can result in post-trauma symptoms in people such as avoidance of certain situations, hyper vigilance, and over reactions related to similar situations in the future. This is especially common when we are children and our capacity to adequately process a challenge may be more easily overwhelmed. These kinds of post-trauma symptoms are usually referred to as triggers as they involve a seemingly small event that triggers a large stress response based on negative past experiences. While these don’t technically qualify for the official diagnosis of PTSD because they are not life threatening, I would argue that they actually constitute the vast majority of the stress responses people have throughout the course of a normal day. I would go so far as to suggest that multiple times a day pretty much all of us get somewhat “triggered” based on our past experiences. So, what might be another way to define psychological trauma? This has been attempted by various psychotherapy models such as EMDR one of the top trauma models which refers to l’arge T’ and ‘small t’ traumas. Large T trauma are the more extreme traumatic experiences and small t trauma is the daily events that result in post traumatic stress responses and triggered reactions. While this is somewhat helpful, I will point to work of Dr Karl Lehman to add more clarity on the subject.
Redefining Trauma
Below is a 20 minute introduction to a longer lecture by Dr Karl Lehman. I find his theoretical framework extremely helpful for redefining trauma and understanding triggers/emotional over reactions. Dr Lehman is a highly observant clinician who reports seeing both a lot of trauma and a lot of resolution of traumatic memories in his therapeutic work. The key take away from his lecture is that psychological trauma always involves a failure of the brain to adequately process/integrate/digest the painful experience. He briefly introduces a 5 step pain/experieince processing pathway. When the brain successfully completes each of these steps the experience is processed as a normal memory. When it fails at some step in the process, it results in an unresolved ‘traumatic memory’. Traumatic memories are thereby in his definition, any memory that the brain fails to metabolize through it’s inherent processing pathway. While there may be some room to negotiate about which exact steps the brain needs to accomplish at each level, the key concept of an adaptive information processing system in the brain is actually the way multiple leaders in the field of trauma are going. For example, Dr Francine Shapiro, the developer of EMDR, says there is an adaptive information processing system within the brain that needs to be reactivated in order to finish metabolizing unresolved memories.
Memories that are not adequately processed seem to be stored differently in the brain in a way that each time we see a certain combination of the similar variables as the unresolved memory, all of the emotions, beliefs, and sensations of the original experience come up WITHOUT conscious awareness of the original memory they are coming from. This is what the psychological field describes as a trigger. It is an over reaction to a present situation because it pulls up the feelings from an earlier unresolved memory/memories. Triggered over reactions tend to be easier to recognize in other people than in ourselves. When we are being triggered, it tends to feel subjectively true to our brain that our strong feelings are entirely justified in the current situation. If you are interested in further learning, Dr Lehman goes into much more detail about these phenomenon in his book Outsmarting Yourself. In the video below, however, Dr Lehman illustrates his redefinition of psychological trauma and reviews a number of helpful and entertaining examples from his own life to help people get a picture of this phenomenon. (Note that he includes some references to both his personal faith and past faith challenges.)
The Pain Processing Pathway: Outsmarting Yourself Lecture 1 from Karl Lehman on Vimeo.
Ever wonder why little things can seem so upsetting and why some disagreements seem impossible to resolve. Watch on! Dr. Lehman explains what happens when we don’t adequately process life experiences. His paradigm is compelling, hopeful, and grounded in brain research. This lecture comes from Chapter 1 of Dr. Lehman’s book Outsmarting Yourself. Find out much more at www.outsmartingyourself.org. Also check out the full 5 hour version of this lecture entitled “Psychological Trauma, Implicit Memory & the Verbal Logical Explainer”.
How to Resolve Trauma
Blow are two possible directions for this question. The key phenomenon in question regarding whether a traumatic memory is resolved seems to be whether memory reconsolidation has occurred. Memory reconsolidation seems to be synonymous with successfully processing a traumatic experience. I strongly encourage you to read my page about Memory Reconsolidation to get an understanding of this amazing phenomenon.
Forward Facing Trauma Therapy
One train of thought is that it is what Dr Eric Gentry calls “forward facing trauma therapy” which involves teaching the person how to calm themselves and regulate their own emotional state such that they can begin to re-enter potentially triggering situations while staying in an adequately ‘relaxed body.’ As they are able to do this in their daily lives, they begin to have new experiences which seem to update the old triggered emotional learning. Gentry argues that 50-60% of his clients with PTSD only need this forward facing, present focused approach. I would argue that the success of this model is that it allows for memory reconsolidation to occur through creating mismatch experiences where the brain expects some negative thing to happen, but when the person can stay relaxed and focused in the situation, a positive outcome actually occurs. Repetitions of this mismatch within a 5 hour window result in memory reconsolidation.
Processing Past Traumatic Memories
The other school of thought is that in order to resolve psychological trauma, we need to actually reactivate the original unresolved memories and allow our brain to finish the processing work, giving additional support where needed. Many different therapeutic modalities can potentially accomplish this goal. The ones I draw upon can be found at the Approaches That Influence My Work Page. Again, the key is whether memory reconsolidation has occurred. I have seen well over a thousand memories be successfully reconsolidated in my work with clients over the years and with each memory that gets healed, the associated triggers will improve or resolve. The challenge is when certain experiences exceed our brains capacity to stay connected to the experience and either dissociates or stress levels get too high for processing to occur. I plan to write more about how to navigate this challenge in a future post.