How Trauma Impacts Memory

Trauma can significantly impact a survivor's brain and memory making it difficult to recall details of traumatic experiences, the sequence in which they played out, and sometimes the entirety of the experience. However, there are proven ways to retrieve repressed memories, work through them, and ultimately heal your brain to live a more peaceful reality.

In this episode, I chat about how the brain responds to trauma, how explicit and implicit memories are impacted, and most importantly 4 healing strategies to lower the intensity of traumatic memories and move forward in your healing journey.

Sources:
NICABM Infographic https://www.nicabm.com/trauma-how-trauma-can-impact-4-types-of-memory-infographic/
Somatic Therapy Info https://meridianuniversity.edu/content/a-holistic-path-to-healing-somatic-therapy
CBT Info https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/cognitive-behavioral-therapy/about/pac-20384610
EMDR Info https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
Trauma and Memory https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4087/3/1/5

Healing requires energy, vulnerability, and hard work. It’s a lifelong journey and it's never linear. Whatever season you're in on your healing journey, hold on to hope. <3

I hope you have a lovely rest of your day!
Love,
MacKenzie Mae


For help NOW!
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-HOPE

For boys and men specifically: 1-800-656-4673

More resources here! https://linktr.ee/traumachatspodcast

Transcript

Welcome back fellow survivors and allies! I’m so grateful you clicked on today’s episode of Trauma Chats with MacKenzie Mae. Today’s topic is a highly requested topic that I’ve personally also been incredibly curious about recently and that is how trauma impacts memory. Many survivors of sexual abuse or assault, including myself, experience having fragmented memories, forget details of their abuse or assault, are triggered by certain situations or events without consciously knowing why, or don’t recall being traumatized whatsoever, but have a feeling that something happened. Not remembering details, being triggered with no explanation why, or mixing up the sequence of traumatic events can feel defeating, humiliating, make one feel broken inside, or even make some survivors question the trauma they experienced. It’s hard to heal from something you can’t exactly put words to or remember in sequential order, let alone trying to disclose your abuse to someone else or seek justice when your memories are all jumbled up, fragmented, or completely forgotten. In this episode, I’ll be chatting about exactly how the brain and memory is impacted by trauma to help other survivors become educated and feel less alone in their struggles and most importantly I’ll be sharing some healing strategies to help recall repressed memories and restore those traumatic memories to lessen their intensity and live a more peaceful life. 

I’ve done a ton of research for this episode, so I’ll be linking all the sources I used in the episode description if you’re interested in diving deeper! As a reminder, I am not a mental health professional, I am just a survivor who is using my own experiences, learnings from therapy, and research to create this episode. And lastly, before we get into it, if you would be so kind to leave a rating and review of this podcast, it would mean the world to me! It really helps push this podcast to other listeners to grow this community, help other survivors feel less alone, and spread awareness on sexual trauma. Okie dokie, let’s chat! 

So you know the drill, I’m gonna start out with some basic info to build a foundational understanding. First of all, what is trauma? Well, in this case, we’re talking about psychological trauma which, according to the United States Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. Trauma can impact pretty much every aspect of a person, one of those aspects being the parts of the brain responsible for memory. However, the severity of the impact trauma can have depends on the person, their state of mind when they experienced trauma, what age they were, the duration and intensity of the trauma, and the support and resources they received after experiencing it. Memory loss, repressed memories, distorted memories can be linked to post traumatic stress disorder, but it’s not strictly due to PTSD. Some survivors experience amnesia, disassociation, trauma denial, and other mental health related reasons as to why memory is impacted. One point to note before we get into how the brain can be impacted by trauma, is that our brain, nervous system, bodies altered and evolved in ways to allow us to survive. Believe me, I know it’s incredibly frustrating to not be able to clearly remember something especially if it has such a significant impact on your life, but I’ve found more peace in showing gratitude for the way my body, mind, nervous system reacted to my trauma to allow me to survive and in knowing that it was a normal, human reaction out of my control helps me realize that experiencing the trauma as well as how it impacted me is not my fault. Our brains as survivors have developed in a way to help us survive unbearable psychological experiences. Sometimes memories are too painful to remember to re-experience, so our brains have done what they needed to do to allow us to survive and keep living. However, at some point the way our brains and bodies have survived for so long doesn’t serve us anymore. And that’s where therapy, a healing journey, comes into play because we have the power to rewire our brains and reinvent our perception of reality to allow us not only to survive, but to thrive. The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, or the NICABM, created a phenomenal infographic that portrays different types of memory, how trauma can impact each type of memory, and what part of the brain is responsible for each type of memory. I’ll have it linked in the description of this episode, but I’m going to summarize it here because I think it’s incredibly useful in understanding how trauma impacts memory. So, there are two main types of memory: explicit and implicit. Explicit memories are conscious memories that aren’t so automatic, that one can consciously think about and recall. Whereas implicit memories are stored deeper than one’s thoughts; they’re connected to bodily sensations and one’s nervous system. There are two types of explicit memories and two types of implicit memories all which can be impacted by trauma. We’ll start with the two types of explicit memories, the first being semantic memories. Semantic memories are general memories about knowledge and facts which are created by the temporal and inferior parietal lobes of the brain that collect information from different parts of the brain to recall general memories. Trauma can impact semantic memory by preventing information like words, images, and sounds from being collected and combined to recall such a memory. Traumatic stress can inhibit one’s ability to link events, thoughts, or words together to create the memory in the first place, meaning a semantic memory wasn’t able to be created during that experience so it won’t be able to be recalled either. For example, I know many details of the abuse I endured, locations it occurred at, who was present, what exactly happened, etc. But there is one instance that I know I disclosed initially to my parents, the police, and forensic interviewer right after my abuse, but ever since I have not been able to recall it. When I was 12, I was in San Jose for a national taekwondo tournament. I know I was abused here because my mother was told she could take legal action in California as well as Missouri and New York because I disclosed that abuse took place in all of these states. I can remember so so many times of abuse in Missouri and the time I was abused in New York, but I cannot for the life of me remember what happened in San Jose. My forensic interview that took place right after I disclosed was recorded and I’ve been meaning to reach out and get ahold of that recording for a couple years now honestly. I think I’ve been putting it off so much because I can’t imagine watching 13 year old traumatized me being re-traumatized as I’m being asked details of my abuse by a complete stranger. And I think maybe I blocked out the abuse that happened in San Jose because I’ve always romanticized California and the bay area in general. I didn’t want a bad memory about it. So one day I will get my hands on that video, but for now that semantic memory is completely lost in me. The second type of explicit memory that is very very commonly impacted by trauma is episodic memory. Episodic memory is the autobiographical, sequential, and spatial memory of an event. These memories consist of what happened, when it happened, who was there, and in what order. Trauma shuts down the episodic memory and creates fragmented sequences of events. The part of the brain responsible for encoding, creating, and recalling these memories is the hippocampus. Let’s dive deeper to understand how the hippocampus is impacted. Traumatic experiences cause two chemical reactions in the brain, one of which releases cortisol or stress hormones the other which releases adrenaline. Extended release of cortisol is incredibly damaging, especially for developing brains. Repeated release of cortisol can inhibit brain growth and is neurotoxic which can result in killing neurons and destroying already established synapses, the way neurons connect and communicate with one another. Cortisol can cause the hippocampus to shrink or become damaged. Experiencing trauma at a young age or repeated, prolonged trauma worsens the impact the trauma has on the survivor. Additionally, the longer one goes without treating the impacts of their trauma, typically the worse they are impacted in the long run. Like I mentioned before, the hippocampus is the part of the brain that encodes and consolidates memories, initially learning information and storing it for short- or long-term memory. Many trauma survivors are unable to remember every detail of their traumatic event like what their surroundings looked like, what time of day their trauma occurred at, or even what exactly their potential attacker looked like. Along with encoding and consolidating memories, the hippocampus is also responsible for spatial memory or spatial perspectives of a scene. If the hippocampus is shrunk or damaged, the brain has a harder time encoding, consolidating, and spatially recognizing those memories, so the memories can get stuck in the body instead as an implicit memory. Again, this is the body’s way of psychologically protecting survivors of trauma from the unbearable reality. However, although many memories can be forgotten or fragmented consciously inhibiting or restricting the brain’s access to explicit memories, the subconscious, the body, and the nervous system remember these events in the form of implicit memories. There are two main types of implicit memories: emotional memory and procedural memory. Emotional memory is pretty self-explanatory; it’s the memory of emotions felt from a certain event, series of events, or set of circumstances. The part of the brain that has the most influence on emotional memory is the amygdala. The amygdala is known to store experiences that caused one to feel threatened or in danger as implicit memories, meaning unconscious bodily memories that affect behaviors and thoughts in order to protect from future threats of danger. The amygdala primes us to instantly react and respond to danger. When one is experiencing danger or a traumatic event, adrenaline is biologically released and causes one to enter fight or flight mode as a survival mechanism. It’s incredibly helpful in dangerous situations because it raises sugar levels in the blood to give you energy, increases your blood pressure, sends more blood to your brain and muscles, slows down your digestion to give more energy to your muscles, and heightens your sense of awareness to either fight off the danger or flee from it. Traumatic experiences that get stored as implicit memories are like hidden memories which were helpful in the moments of trauma and allowed the body to respond to danger without the conscious burden. However, these hidden, suppressed memories can overtime become the source of anxiety, depression, PTSD, or dissociative disorders. The other main type of implicit memory is procedural memory, or the memory of how to perform a task without actively thinking about it. This type of procedural memory is produced by the striatum which also creates new habits. Many times, survivors of trauma have an amygdala filled with emotional memories that were threatening at the time of their trauma and procedural memories on how to react to those threats, but these implicit memories aren’t necessarily helpful anymore. Sometimes after trauma, the brain perceives a threat that isn’t there and triggers one to enter fight or flight mode even when no threat is present. Let me explain. In my experience, there are several locations where abuse took place. There is a certain road that I haven’t been able to drive down for so many years because the last time I drove down it, I was triggered and had a full on panic attack seeing the spot where my abuser pulled off on the side of the road and abused me in his van. Just seeing that location triggered me to enter fight or flight mode, but in reality there was no danger there anymore. See as a child when I would be riding with my abuser down that road, I would have the same reaction because typically abuse actually would occur. That emotional memory got stored in my brain so even when I drive past that location in the future on my own, I still feel as if the same danger is there. Adrenaline is released, my body enters fight or flight mode, my heart rate increases, and I become hyperaware and energized to protect myself. Similar instances occur in individuals who struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. PTSD involves vivid, recurring recollections of one’s trauma in flashbacks, nightmares, or thoughts. These flashbacks, nightmares, and thoughts are usually fragmented and brief involving visual or sensory sensations commonly caused by a trigger. When someone is experiencing a symptom of PTSD, their symptom is fragmented, disorganized, incomplete, poorly elaborated, and they feel like they are re-experiencing the trauma in real time all over again with the same thoughts and physical sensations. Meaning time feels distorted, like even if the event happened over a decade ago, it feels like it’s happening right then and there, causing the survivor to re-enter survival mode even when there is no danger. These symptoms are fragmented and disorganized because they are composed of emotional memories as well as the poorly encoded and consolidated episodic and semantic memories we discussed earlier from the hippocampus being shrunk or damaged. For years and years I wasn’t able to even think about the trauma I endured without being triggered and feeling the same emotions and physical sensations I felt during my trauma as if it was happening all over again. This is one reason why it’s so so incredibly difficult to disclose abuse in the first place as well as be able to recall sequentially and clearly to even yourself let alone another person. Just thinking about something can cause someone to be retraumatized, so the brain represses memories in order to reduce the emotional pain of recalling such memories. No wonder survivors mix up information, the sequence of events, specific details, etc when recalling memories. They’re going off of mainly bodily implicit memories. They know how they felt, but they don’t always have the explicit memories to recall in words what actually happened. I hope this makes sense. This information has been so profound for me to learn as a survivor because it's helped me understand myself better. It’s helped me find peace knowing that there’s nothing wrong with me per say for not knowing specific details or the sequence of events of my trauma. It’s truly a biological response to what I endured. It’s not my fault, and on top of that I truly have the ability to strengthen my brain and truly heal and cure myself and so do you! So let’s learn 4 healing strategies, some which we can do alone and others which require professionals, but all that can help us rewire our brains and repair the pain that has been inflicted upon us. 

In order to heal traumatic memories whether implicit or explicit, we need to be able to retrieve them, work through them safely, redefine them, and lastly restore them as less intense memories to decrease their negative impact on us. I will say, you can heal a lot on your own, however in my experience, I believe it’s best to work with a trauma-informed therapist when healing traumatic memories. As I said, we need to work through these memories safely. It’s incredibly easy to be re-traumatized when working through these, but a trauma-informed therapist is trained to know when to keep moving forward, when to take breaks, and the pathway to take to ensure their clients aren’t re-traumatized. If we are re-traumatized, it can set us back in our healing because we’ve now extra charged the already traumatic memories and made them even worse. So please please please be careful when embarking on this journey. What is going to happen when healing traumatic memories is we’re going to make the implicit memories, explicit. So we’re going to give our unconscious memories, the vague, unclear memories descriptive words, physical drawings, or whatever other means to define them. Because if we can define our triggers, define why we feel a certain way or why we react in a certain way, we gain our voice and our power over them to feel more in control in order to heal them. It’s a delicate process, but 100% doable. There are three must haves when embarking on this part of a healing journey though. 1. You must take it slow. Go little by little to not re-traumatize yourself. 2. Show yourself compassion. Its going to be a bumpy road. It’s going to hurt worse before it gets better, but trust the process. And 3. A support system is absolutely crucial. You need people in your life to support you, be a shoulder to cry on, and pick you back up when the process gets hard. Alright now let’s go into the 1st healing strategy to heal traumatic memories. We must establish and secure a sense of safety and a healthy distance from the memories. As I mentioned before, our brains can have a hard time differentiating whether something is a threat or not and time can get warped making us feel like we’re back being traumatized again when in reality we are in the present moment and safe. We must get to a point where we can acknowledge the traumatic experiences and memories, but know we are in control right now in the present moment. In order to healithy store memories and not as another traumatic memory, we have to get to the point where we can think about, talk about, and acknowledge memories without getting completely overwhelmed or re-traumatized. Oftentimes, traumatic memories can be charged or become activated when recalling them. This means the memory can cause physical and phycological reactions in your body like tensing up, elevated heart rate, sweating, or spiraling/ruminating thoughts that impact your actions and your perception of reality. In order to lessen the charge of these thoughts, we have to establish a sense of safety by internalizing that the trauma happened in the past and we are here, safe in this present moment. Once we can internalize this, we can chip away at small memories over time, ensuring that we keep a balance between recalling charged memories and feeling grounded in the present, to restore those memories with a lower intensity than before. This must be worked on with a professional though so they can monitor the speed at which you recall traumatic memories and ensure they don’t become too overwhelming because that could retraumatize you and defeat the purpose of trying to restore the memory with a lower charge or intensity. Along with a therapist, you’ll need supportive loved ones as well as an internal support system meaning self-compassion and coping skills to remain grounded and present and regulate your nervous system. Once you establish a sense of safety and realization that the memories are from the past and you are safe in the present moment, then you can move on to the second healing strategy I’ll be chatting about which is cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. CBT addresses traumatic memories that one may remember fragments of but may not remember the sequence of events or have the words to describe how one feels about them. CBT allows one to explore these memories to make sense of them and determine one’s feelings about them, as well as redefine them in a calmer perspective. It involves talking about memories, writing about them, drawing them, and sharing them to work through them and restore them with less intensity than before. This healing strategy must be completed with a trauma-informed therapist because of similar reasons I’ve already mentioned. They will know how far to go, when to take breaks, and how to prompt you to help you recall memories and put them together to redefine them. This is an extremely common and powerful healing strategy that many survivors will begin with because it has proven to be incredibly effective. Although I highly recommend working through this with a therapist, there are ways to work on this on your own. You can journal, write music, or create art to work on deciphering how you feel about such memories and process them that way. I think these are great ways to continue your healing outside of the therapist office alongside working through it with them. CBT can help a ton, however since it is more based on conscious thoughts and talking, it’s mainly focused on explicit memories and doesn’t always get to the implicit memories, the unconscious memories that impact many survivors. To tackle implicit, unconscious memories, somatic therapy can be used which is the 3rd healing strategy I have to share with you today. Somatic therapy can be a supplement to talk therapy to treat trauma. Many traumatic memories are implicit memories, meaning they are stored deeper than in the mind, in the body and nervous system. These can present themselves in sleep issues, headaches, stomach aches, chronic fatigue, and more. Or they can cause triggers that one is unaware of. For implicit traumatic memories to be healed, they need more than just talk therapy because generally one is unaware or doesn’t have words to describe these implicit memories or why they are impacting them. Somatic therapy treats implicit memories or body-stored trauma by incorporating one’s mind, body, and emotions in the healing process. Some of the most common somatic healing techniques are breathwork, grounding, and mindfulness. All of these techniques can increase one’s bodily awareness and it’s physical sensations to encourage emotional healing. Breathwork involves a series of several potential breathing sequences that allow one to reduce tension in their body and increase their awareness of their body sensations. It can even allow the brain to communicate more effectively. Grounding involves activities that allow one to connect to the present moment by intentionally leaning into all of their senses. Some examples are smelling something that brings you comfort, walking barefoot in nature and feeling the earth beneath you, supporting you, or going to the beach and listening to the sounds of the waves crashing. All of these can help one to increase their awareness of their body and become more connected with themselves and their immediate surroundings. And lastly, mindfulness is a somatic technique that involves being present in the moment and being aware and observing any passing thoughts, feelings, or emotions that arise. Mindfulness requires that any judgment be let go so one is truly just observing and accessing their awareness of such thoughts and sensations but not criticizing them. If judgment is present, one will have a harder time observing thoughts without getting overwhelmed. Gentle movements or activies such as stretching, yoga, and tai chi all incorporate these techniques and can allow one to scan their body for any tension or other physical sensations while incorporating breathwork, grounding, and mindfulness. Like I said before though, somatic therapy is typically supplementary to talk therapy, a more holistic approach to tackle body-based trauma that may not have been able to be healed through talk therapy alone. The last healing strategy I’ll be sharing today to help heal traumatic memories is EDMR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. This healing strategy must be completed with a trained EMDR specialist or therapist. A therapist will direct lateral eye movements, tapping, or audio stimulation as external stimuli while introducing emotionally disturbing material to their client over time in specific dosages. This can allow their client to access and process traumatic memories in order to adapt to them in the present time and create new associations with them. It’s yet another supplementary healing strategy to dig deeper into recalling repressed memories, bring them to the surface so one can work through them. Although this is highly thought out and must be monitored by a trained specialist, there are ways to get similar effects to this on your own. Some believe going on walks or hikes can give a similar effect because one’s eyes are naturally laterally panning your surroundings and it’s a space where one is typically in their own thoughts, allowing thoughts to arise. Whether this has a similar effect to EDMR or not though, exercising and getting outside are both great for healing anyways. So these are 4 healing strategies that can be used to heal traumatic memories whether implicit or explicit. I think it’s helpful to learn about these because 1 it shows that healing is possible and there are proven ways to do so and 2 it can help if you are somewhat aware of the strategies when seeking out professional help. Some strategies work best for one person and not the next so if one strategy isn’t working for you, you could ask your therapist about another strategy. Again, I want to reiterate that this type of healing is very delicate and can re-traumatize you, so it's super important to approach it safely, with a support system, professional guidance, and self-compassion. 

As I was creating this episode, I thought it would be a more matter of fact episode, not triggering, more so empowering to understand the science behind what happened to my brain from experiencing trauma. It truly was empowering to understand and know that I’m not crazy, my brain has coped to survive and there are ways to heal it, but I did find that this was definitely one of the more triggering episodes to create. I thought I’d add this in in case it helps another survivor if they’ve felt similarly. But basically, I became incredibly triggered because I was thinking about how unfair it is to have gone through child sexual abuse and for my whole life I’ve been forced to pick up the pieces, heal myself, and try my best to live a peaceful life. I started ruminating on all the ways my trauma has impacted me, my quality of life, how my brain functions, and how the impacts have been such a center piece of my life even when I didn’t realize it. I’m upset that I’ve had to embark on a healing journey. I did nothing wrong. I did nothing to deserve being abused, no one does. Yet, we are the ones who have to find the strength and resilience inside us to keep going, to heal ourselves, and maybe one day we’ll move through the world in peace. In my case, I’m angry that the man who abused me is still free, always has been. Just living his life while I’m over here on a lifelong healing journey from his horrible, hateful, abusive acts on me. It hurts me to think he could’ve done this to another child who is now on a lifelong healing journey of their own. Do sexual predators realize the detrimental impact their actions have on their victims? And to do such a crime on a child then lie to everyone’s faces and say they’re innocent? It’s unfathomable to me that such humans exist. However, I know they’re in pain too. They have to live the rest of their lives knowing in their heart of hearts that they were in so much pain themselves that they chose to inflict it onto another to spread their pain so just maybe they wouldn’t feel it as much inside themselves. But in the end, their pain is still inside them, festering inside and it won’t go away until they attempt heal themselves and own up to their mistakes. There’s no excuse to the actions sexual predators take. Personally, I will never forgive the man who abused me, but I will also not let him cause me any more pain than he already has. This is why I will never give up on my healing journey. No matter how angry, upset, triggered I get. I will not let his disgusting actions bring me down. The damage has already been done, but I have the power to repair it and so does each and every other survivor out there. I hope this episode taught you something, empowered you to seek healing, make you feel less alone, or just felt relatable. I truly appreciate each and every one of you for listening. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day!