Hi, I'm Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist,
and I make mental health education videos.
When you experience an emotionally traumatic event,
the way you remember the event is very different
from the way you remember a non-traumatic event.
Why, because trauma memories
are stored in different parts of the brain
than non-traumatic memories.
Traumatic memories are stored
in the right back part of your brain,
which produces nonverbal memories,
such as how things looked, sounded and smelled.
Non-traumatic memories are stored
in the left front part of your brain,
which is more associated with language
and producing narrative accounts.
This difference in the way the brain encodes these memories
explains why traumatic memories are so vivid and haunting.
Here are six characteristics of trauma memories,
and this is not an all-inclusive list.
Number one, they are intrusive.
They pop into your mind involuntarily,
even if you're trying to suppress the memory.
Because they force themselves on you,
it's not easy to distract yourself from them.
Also, the loss of control of your thoughts
can make you feel like you're losing your mind.
I've had patients say to me,
"I don't know why I can't get over this.
What's wrong with my brain?"
Number two, they feel fresh and current.
Trauma memories feel
as though they're happening in real time.
It could have been 10 years ago,
but it still feels like it's happening
over and over again for the first time.
With an ordinary distant memory,
you feel disconnected from it.
There may even be a fuzziness to it,
and you can't remember all the details,
but with the traumatic memory,
you may not remember all of the details,
but certain aspects of it will be in sharp focus
and may even feel more intense than the first time around.
Number three, they're predominantly sensory.
Because non-traumatic memories
are stored in a verbal part of your brain,
you tend to recall it as a narrative.
You can think, "I did this, then I did that,
and then this happened."
But since the traumatic memory is stored
in the nonverbal part of your brain,
the sensory details are the most prominent.
For example, suppose you narrowly escape a house fire.
When you think of the fire,
you can still feel the heat on your face,
even though there's no heat source around.
Or you hear the roar sound of the fire
as background noise in your head all day,
or you can't get the smell of smoke out of your nose.
You remember these sensory details
much better than the narrative details.
Number four, the memories are fragmented.
No one has a perfect memory for things,
but with trauma memories,
certain things can stand out in sharp focus,
while other details are lost.
And the details you remember
may not be in the correct sequence.
So going back to the house fire example,
you may remember hearing someone scream, "Let's go!"
And you may remember standing outside
waiting for the fire truck and seeing your dog
still in the house barking in the window.
But you don't remember hearing the smoke alarm,
and you don't know how you got out of the house.
Number five, the memories are very vivid and unchangeable.
The details you do remember are very clear,
and if have flashbacks of the experience
or nightmares about it, the details stay the same,
or at least close to the same.
You don't incorporate new information into the memory.
And here's a subtle example of this,
going back to the house fire.
The fire truck came and saved your home.
There was some damage, but you didn't lose your home.
You and your family escaped,
and the firemen rescued your dog.
But the most disturbing part of the experience
was not that it was life-threatening.
It was watching your helpless, frightened dog
bark in the window while your children's screamed
and your spouse said,
"There's no way anyone's going back in that house."
The barking dog and screaming kids
is what your nightmares are about.
The fact that your dog was saved doesn't change much.
You stood there and watched your dog struggle
while your kids screamed and begged you to save him.
That's the experience that shook you to the core.
I say this is a subtle nuanced example
because on the surface, it seems like of course,
almost dying in a house fire would be traumatizing,
but the obvious isn't always the thing
that has the traumatizing effect on you.
In this case, you weren't traumatized
because of what could have happened to you.
You're traumatized by watching your children
and your beloved pet suffer.
Number six is the trauma memories
contain high levels of emotion.
One of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder
is developing a negative outlook
about your life or yourself.
After your house fire, you beat yourself up
over how you could watch an extended member of your family
burn to death while you do nothing.
How could you be that heartless and uncaring?
And what about your spouse who held you back from going in?
What kind of person are they?
Is that how they'd act toward you
if you were in that situation?
Is there anyone that you can trust
to have your back when you're in need?
These thoughts can continue to spiral downward
into the catastrophic cavern of mistrust and despair.
People who have post-traumatic stress disorder
often have these kinds of memories,
but you don't have to have a diagnosis of PTSD
to have traumatic memories.
They can result from any situation
that you experience as traumatic,
such as bullying or growing up in a household
where one or both parents were verbally abusive.
Sometimes the memories can fade and become less prominent,
but sometimes they don't.
If they don't, the best treatment is trauma focused therapy.
Therapy can help transform the memories
from sensory to verbal,
allowing you to process them better.
As you process through them,
they become less intense and intrusive
because you gain more control over them.
There are three evidence-based treatments for trauma,
eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy,
also called EMDR,
cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy.
I'm not going to talk about how these therapies work
in this video,
but I do have a link in the description
to the Veterans Administration website
that has great information
comparing all three of these treatments.
For more on trauma, watch this video
that I did comparing PTSD to chronic or complex PTSD.
Thanks for watching. See you next time.