When you have a traumatic experience, your brain physically changes in structure and electrical
activity. And one of the big symptoms that we see with trauma and PTSD is changes in memory.
There are four ways that traumatic memories differ from regular memories. And in this video
we'll talk about how PTSD and trauma change your memories and three things you can do
to soften or treat traumatic memories and their painful symptoms.
Now, real quick, I just wanted to remind you about my online course Change Your Brain.
In it I teach 10 essential mind-body skills to improve mental health. And most people just
don't know how many options they have to improve their mental health. So in this course I teach
10 fundamental skills that research has shown to drastically reduce depression and anxiety.
And many of these skills only take a few minutes a day. So if you'd like to learn more,
please check it out. The link is in the description. Okay. So back to the video. Now,
normal memories change over time. Every time you retrieve them, retell them, and store them,
they change. So that's one reason why two people might experience the exact same event
and remember it very differently. Every time a non-traumatic memory gets retrieved or remembered,
they change just a little bit when they're stored. So in that way they can soften over time and we're
able to create new meaning around them. So for example, I can remember a perceived slight I had
as a teenager. I got cut from the soccer team, and it was super painful back then. So as a teenager
this felt like the end of the world. It was the most unfair, unjust, you know, horrible thing
that had ever happened to me. But now when I remember it, it really doesn't hurt so much,
and I can see how from the coach's perspective, you know, they weren't trying to be mean to me;
they just were trying to do what was best for the team. So so the intensity of this memory
has changed over time, and now it doesn't hurt so much. But this isn't the case with traumatic
memories. This is the first way that PTSD memories differ from regular memories. Uh in the book The
Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk shares a study of veterans from World War II.
And researchers interviewed these veterans every couple of years for like 45 years,
and they asked them about their experiences with the war. And they found that for the veterans
who did not develop PTSD, their accounts and their their memories, they changed over time.
The events had lost the sharp edges of fear and intensity of painful emotions. But for the men who
did develop PTSD, their experience was different. They may not remember all of the details,
but the things that they did remember remained sharp and consistent for over 45 years after
the war ended. Their their traumatic memories were much more vivid than regular memories,
and their accounts did not change over the decades. When traumatic memories are retrieved,
the physical stress response actually serves to strengthen them, to reinforce the memory in the
circuits of the brain. The PTSD response makes these memories stronger and stronger over time.
And, you know, I personally believe our brain is not out to get us. I believe that our brain
does things for a reason. And if you think about, you know, something really terrible that happens
and you have this huge emotional reaction to it, your body and your brain want to help you
avoid having that happen again. So it might have a built-in response that makes these memories
so strong that you'll never forget them to help keep you safe and avoid those situations again.
Okay. Let's talk about the second way that trauma changes memories. So these veterans who
were getting interviewed for 45 years described these memories as feeling like yesterday, and
they said that these memories trigger the physical sensations of the actual event. And so that's the
second way that PTSD memories differ. Traumatic memories come with very vivid sensations.
People report actually smelling during a memory or actually feeling the sensation of a memory. These
are sometimes called flashbacks. Now, studies show that for non-traumatized memories, like
for example, the birth of a child, people don't have such vivid memories. They don't, you know,
remember every little detail in full clarity, like how someone's face looked or the smell of a room.
But with traumatic memories there's the physical re-experiencing. One example that Dr. van der Kolk
gave was of a woman who was assaulted by someone who was drunk. And later if she went to parties,
if she caught a whiff of alcohol, the flashbacks would return so powerfully that she felt like
she was being assaulted again. So she basically stopped going anywhere. Now, the third way that
traumatic memories differ is that the passage of time is distorted. The memory doesn't feel like
something in the past; it feels like something happening in the present moment, and the survivor
re-enters the fight/flight/freeze mode. Dr. van der Kolk shared an experiment he ran where they
were able to scan the brains of participants who were reminded of a traumatic event. Blood
pressure and heart rate went up, and the brain essentially entered a super emotional state. The
regions that process fear get super activated, and the part of the brain that processes rationally,
that says, "Oh, no, you're safe now. That was in the past," that part of your brain actually
decreases activity and shuts down. So this is one of the reasons why it's difficult to calm down
and rationally think through trauma memories. So when our system gets overwhelmed, the part
of our brain that makes words, that tracks time and integrates sensations, it shuts down. So this
leads to the fourth way that traumatic memories differ. So because the emotional brain takes over,
traumatic memories often get stored as fragments of emotions and sensations,
as blips of images and sounds, but not a cohesive story. When someone has PTSD, their memories
often have large gaps. So regular memories are cohesive, right? They have a beginning
and a middle and an end. But traumatic memories are often disorganized. So for example, someone
who survived a car crash, they might remember every detail of someone's face, but they can't
remember who first helped them or how they got to the hospital. Other memories could be fragmented,
missing, or blocked. Studies show that between 19 and 38% of people who were sexually abused as
children experience memory loss. In another study highlighted in the book The Body Keeps the Score,
researchers interviewed girls between the ages of 10 and 12 and documented their abuse.
And then 17 years later they interviewed the girls again, and 38% of them did not recall the abuse
that was documented in their medical records. Some reported that they forgot that they had been
abused and then remembered later. Now, memory loss could be protective. Your brain might be
shielding you from memories that you don't have the resources to handle yet. And, you know,
in my opinion, when those memories come back, it may be your brain telling you that you're ready
to deal with this now. But repressed memories can lead to memory loss in other important areas
or lead to being triggered without knowing why. Van der Kolk gives the example of Marilyn,
who was sexually abused by her father as a child, but she had no memory of it. When men touched her
she would lash out, even in her sleep. And then she also developed autoimmune disorders. So
even when trauma is not clearly remembered, it still can have an impact on people's lives.
The brain is driven to fill in these gaps, to complete the story. So sometimes it reenacts the
trauma over and over to process it, but when this is done without the right support and in an unsafe
environment, this can be really unhealthy. Van der Kolk tells the story of a woman who kept trying to
take care of her mother who had died years before. He tells the story of a Vietnam veteran who every
year on the anniversary of his war trauma he would seem to dissociate and then attempt to rob a bank,
pretending that his finger was a gun. I worked with a lot of clients in residential treatment
who had been sexually abused and were essentially reenacting that by engaging in these really risky
sexual behaviors with, you know, unhealthy relationships. When the traumatic response gets
frozen in time, the brain seems driven to repeat those experiences, to complete the story, or get
resolution by repeating it over and over again. Now, this takes us to the hopeful part of this
video. The brain and body have natural, inherent drives toward healing, and with the right skills
and support, PTSD symptoms can be treated and often resolved. There are two types of memories,
implicit memories and explicit memories. And there are at least four different treatment approaches
that can help you work through these memories of trauma. So in the next video we'll talk
about how you can create a safe environment so that you can process those memories,
how eye movement can help you soften the sharp edges of memories, and how somatic treatment works
through the memories that are stored in your body. CBT is another great tool. It can help you change
how you think about your traumatic experiences, and that can help you change how you feel,
because basically CBT helps you take a memory, retrieve it, re-label it, and restore it.
Okay. So make sure to check out the next video to learn what you can do with these traumatic
memories to help soften them and heal. Thank you so much for watching, and please take care.