Trauma and Memory

         Pain and suffering are part of human life. Every day someone dies, someone suddenly leaves our lives. Many times we end a relationship or a loved one gets sick, in short, nobody is free from misfortune. You can’t start a healing process if you do not face your painful experiences. Our suffering is the result of how we deal with the aftermath of past traumas in the present.

The memories of the past will affect the present in the form of physical discomfort, insomnia, nightmares, panic attacks, headaches, fatigue, chronic pain, digestive problems, etc. Freud and his followers believed that "The Compulsion to repeat" was an unconscious attempt to have control over the painful situation and that it could lead to its resolution. In my experience "Repetition" only leads to more pain, repeating the trauma during traditional speech therapies such as psychoanalysis only reinforces the concern leaving the person with more questions than answers.

¿What is trauma? It is the cause of suffering most ignored, without treatment and misunderstood since there is psychology. Traumas are associated with symptoms that weaken people because in the past they experienced some event where they perceived a threat of imminent harm to their physical or mental well being. The trauma is unique in each individual, what one person finds fun can cause terror to another. The most important thing I learned about trauma during my service in the Iraq war is, that children are the most likely to be traumatized. Not only children victims of war, but any child can be traumatized by events of daily life that seem normal to us adults.

The majority of psychologists I know are limited to seeing trauma with a closed eye, where only soldiers who went to war, victims of violence and sexual abuse or those victims of a natural catastrophe enter the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. The truth is that a series of small events can have harmful effects on the person throughout their lives; the trauma not only arises from a war or a violent event, but it can arise due to a very strong shock, a bicycle fall, a car accident, a visit to the dentist, the doctor or due to the loss of a loved one. Trauma is about the loss of connection with our environment, with family, with others and with our selves.

No matter what caused it, trauma is trauma. People can be traumatized by any event they perceive in a conscious or unconscious manner that is a threat to their physical or mental well-being. This will depend on the life experiences of each individual and also their age. The loud screams of a very angry adult, thunder or sudden sounds can traumatize children; the critical factor in trauma is the perception of the threat to our mental or physical well-being and the inability to do something to stop the threat.

Memory

“There is no present or future,

Only the past happening over and over” Eugene O’Neill

Memory is a process of reconstruction, continuously adds, deletes, reorganizes and updates information, all to improve our chances of survival.

What many mental health professionals do not understand in clinical work with traumatic memories is that emotions, bodily sensations and moods severely affect our memory. The thoughts and images that appear in our memories are selected to go with our present emotional state. If we are sad then we will have sad memories, thoughts and feelings.

The primary function of our memory is to ensure our survival, which selects from the past what was effective and avoids repeating harmful responses. The memories that stand out in our minds are full of emotions, feelings and thoughts good or bad. ¿Do you remember your first kiss? Your first trip to the beach? Mom's smile? Parties with friends? Now see how memories are emerging in your mind and notice the sensations in your body that are associated with those memories. Are those sensations pleasurable? That will depend on the type of memories that stood out in your mind, pleasant memories will attract feelings of well-being; but bad memories are what make us tense, with a knot in the stomach and throat. They disconnect us from the world.

Our memories are mutable and change over time, whereas traumatic memories are fixed traces of the past, horrible experiences that leave deep scars in the mind and body. This fixation of trauma prevents us from creating new strategies and giving meaning to things. The past lives in the present.

What mental health professionals have to understand about traumatic memories is that the person does not remember his trauma in the form of a narrative; Memories are fragmented like a hand grenade in the form of sensations, tastes, smells, images and thoughts. According to Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, when a person remembers a trauma, the left side of the brain goes off. This means that our ability to organize our experiences in sequence and the ability to put our feelings into words is disabled. For example, a girl or boy and even an adult victim of rape will not remember her traumatic event in the form of a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Memories are recorded in the form of images "I remember how he looked at me", Sounds, "I only remember the sound of the clock", Sensations "I feel I can’t breathe", smells "I can smell his breath of cigarettes and alcohol".

Advice for my Forensic colleagues:

In cases of sexual abuse to boys and girls where there is very little evidence we must take into account, 1) that the minds of children are manipulated very easily. 2) Children lie and some are very good. But there is something that children do not know how to do, that is to be able to imitate the physiological responses associated with the emotions of a victim of sexual abuse. Behaviors such as bed-wetting, panic attacks, repetitive behaviors, fear of being touched or bathed, stomach discomforts such as constipation, mood swings, stuttering, isolation and anxiety. These behaviors appear when the abuse was real and not invented. A trauma, as it is, has as a consequence changes in the emotional brain which will produce responses associated with the sexual abuse that I call "triggers", it can be a smell, a place, the name of the accused can send the victim to a hypertension or freezing state. It is very important to observe that what they say is congruent with what their body manifests.

Pablo A. Clavijo

Creador de la Psicología del Movimiento y Emoción

US Marine, Veterano de la guerra de Iraq, 2005

Especialista en Protección Personal
At-Risk International LLC

Private Investigator
At-Risk International LLC

Diplomado en Psicología Forense 

Universidad Privada Domingo Savio

Certificado Experto en: 

Detección de MicroExpresiones y Expresiones sutiles 

Paul Ekman Group Online

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