Are you wondering why traumatic memories are so persistent and so painful, and what does
it mean to process them, anyway?
Stick around and I will answer these questions and let you know the main reason you need
to dive into them in order to get over them.
I'm Barbara Heffernan and my mission is to help you live a more joyful life.
I am a psychotherapist and I have been helping people recover from anxiety and trauma for
over 15 years.
For videos designed to help you lower your anxiety, recover from trauma, and live a more
joyful life, please subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified every Tuesday
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Why should you or a loved one have to go into a painful, traumatic memory in order to recover?
This video will help you understand how doing so will help you or your loved one feel better.
In this video, I will explain first how traumatic memories are formed.
Second, what it means to process traumatic memories.
Third, the main reason you have to dive into them to get over them and fourth, the number
one thing that you can do to help yourself begin the recovery process now.
To explain how traumatic memories are formed.
I'd first like to use the example of something that is a very common experience, happens
to most of us and is an upsetting event but not traumatic.
And that would be a fight that you might have with a loved one or somebody very close to
you.
And while you're having that fight, you are probably experiencing a lot of physiological
arousal.
Your heart rate might be up, your Uhm, might feel hot, sweaty or you might feel nauseous,
shut down, numbed out, whatever your normal response is to physiological stress, you are
probably feeling that during the fight.
And then maybe if the fight isn't resolved immediately for a few days afterwards.
As you think about it, you will be experiencing that same physiological arousal.
But over time and as you work things out with that other person, that physiological arousal
will go down and you will no longer feel it when you think about the fact that you fought.
So six months later you might be able to say, oh yeah, I remember I had that fight and that
was lousy, but I'm not re-experiencing it.
So you will have naturally become desensitized to that memory.
And then probably as you are processing the memory and thinking about it and working it
out with the other person, your thoughts are also probably reprocessed in a natural way
as you go through that.
So for example, during the fight, and right afterwards you might be thinking, wow, that
person is such a jerk.
I can't stand them.
This is intolerable.
Or, you know, this is the end of my life.
This will the end of the relationship.
I'll never get over this.
But as you process it, as you work it out with the other person, as you think about
it, maybe talk it over with a friend.
Eventually you might begin to think, you know, I was really stressed that day and they were
really, really stressed that day, and I understand why we had that misunderstanding.
And you have changed how you think about the entire event.
Or you might also get to a place where you're like, okay, this person has this habit that
really annoys me, but I love them anyway.
And that is also reprocessing how you think about the event.
So that is how our brains naturally deal with, process, desensitize ourselves to upsetting
information.
However, when we experience a traumatic event, it means that our system is overwhelmed.
It is beyond our capacity to deal with it.
We are completely in fight, flight or freeze mode.
And when that happens, our adrenaline spikes, our cortisol comes up to bring the adrenaline
down and cortisol shuts off our hippocampus and the hippocampus is the part of the brain
that helps memories move out of the limbic system and into longterm memory.
Now we form memory in the present moment, bringing in all the sensory information of
the moment.
So when that is traumatic, that is an overwhelming amount of sensory information and that all
gets lodged in the limbic system.
The emotional brain and our emotional brain has no sense of time.
It has no sense of, uh, yesterday, today, six years from now, it is just there and it
is alive and traumatic memories in the limbic system often don't have a full storyline because
the part of our brain that creates full storylines is our cognitive brain, not the limbic system.
So those parts of the brain really don't speak to one another well when we are under enormous
amounts of stress.
So this is why people who've gone through trauma may remember just flashes of moments
they may remember sounds, smells, physiological responses, blips of an image, but not all
the details that went before or after.
And that is what a traumatic memory is like.
Before I go on, would you please comment below and let me know if that explanation of how
traumatic memories are formed made sense to you and if not, let me know.
Whatever questions you have, what traumatic memory processing means is to help move that
memory out of the limbic system and into the longterm memory.
You won't forget the memory.
I do have clients who come to me and they say, Barbara, I just want to forget this ever
happen.
Well, that probably won't happen.
We don't have the tools and techniques for that.
You don't wear my shirts the greatest idea.
However, we can move it into longterm memory where it will be like, okay, I remember that
happened but it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago, and I'm not physiologically
it now when I think about it.
So that is the goal of traumatic memory processing.
And how do you do that?
There are a couple of techniques that are very, very useful for this.
EMDR therapy, trauma informed cognitive behavioral therapy, somatic experiencing.
All of those are techniques to process trauma.
Generally traumatic processing is done with a trained therapist and I do recommend having
somebody who's trained specifically in trauma and to key component of processing.
Traumatic memory is that you move in between feeling safe in the present moment and remembering
the trauma and feeling all the feelings of not being safe in that moment and then feeling
safe and you move in between those physiological states and that helps the memory move into
longterm memory and be fully processed.
The third thing I said I would cover in this video is the main reason that you have to
dive into the memory in order to get over the memory and that is that avoidance does
not work.
Avoidance is a pretty normal response to a traumatic event.
It makes perfect sense to want to avoid anything that reminds you of that event, any person
place thing.
Um, it also makes sense to want to avoid the feelings that you had and to avoid thinking
about it.
But unfortunately avoidance doesn't work and it's one of the main symptoms of post traumatic
stress disorder.
And then we can also think about the ways that we tend to avoid.
Often we try to avoid with alcohol or drugs or an eating disorder, working too much sexual
addiction.
All of these things are ways to escape from our feelings, which I don't really need to
explain in the longterm.
Create way more problems than you would have if you hadn't used one of those avoidant techniques.
And then there's the more subtle ways to avoid and I would throw into that bin the issue
of numbing out and why is numbing out a problem numbing out as a problem.
Because when you numb out to painful feelings, you unfortunately also need to numb out from
happy feelings.
And people who have been practicing numbing out for years and years and years until it's
a habitual process, they generally end up feeling that life is not really even worth
living and that's not a good place to be.
And another way that we avoid these memories and thoughts of trauma is to sublimate the
memories.
And the problem with that is that they are still in there and something can trigger that
physiological response, that panic, the upset, the anger, and we won't even know what triggered
it.
It could be a smell, it could be a sound, it could be a particular dynamic between two
people.
And that just stays in there and recurs.
Our limbic brain holds onto the memories in terms patterns and Schema and it is incredibly
persistent and it is very hard to dislodge those things.
So sublimating does not work either and all of these avoidance techniques, all of them
actually reinforce the fear.
The fourth thing I mentioned that I would cover in this video is the number one thing
you can do now to help with this process and all trauma experts today agree that the main
thing somebody needs to do prior to beginning traumatic memory processing is to be able
to access feelings of physiological safety.
So Bessel van der Kolk who wrote the body keeps the score.
Francine Shapiro, the founder of EMDR, Daniel Amen of amen clinics.
Peter Levine, the creator of somatic experiencing, Lisa Najavitz who wrote seeking safety.
There is consensus that the first thing somebody needs to do is to be able to access feelings
of physiological safety to dive into the key concept of physiological relaxation and obtain
the tools to do so.
Sign up for my online course.
I call it the aah! mini series and it is exactly the guided visualizations that
I do with my clients in my office to prepare them eventually for the traumatic memory processing.
If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up.
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when my videos are released every Tuesday and let me know in the comments below what
you think of this concept of you have to dive into it to get over it.
And I know this is a really, really difficult thing to do, but I want you to know there
is a light at the end of the tunnel.