trauma, memory, and the brain
“The human brain is capable of a tremendous amount of plasticity. The important thing is to understand and recognize that capacity while wielding it for the highest beneficial impact.”
“Since memory is flexible and tangible, that means that we have the power to change how it impacts our emotions and physical sensations.”
How does memory work? And what is its role in trauma?
Trauma is the experience of something very unpleasant and outside of the normal experiences a person has while also feeling trapped and unable to get away from what is happening. People talk about trauma being either a “capital T” or a “little t” trauma, but both get stored in the brain in the same way and have similar impacts on someone’s functioning. Capital T traumas are the things that are really horrific; the ones that no one is surprised could mess a person up. While “little t” traumas can surprise people sometimes. Like having a parent who suffered from a chronic illness. They were there, they loved you, but sometimes the management of their illness resulted in you not getting certain needs met which created a trauma response.
A trauma response is how the brain reacts to a traumatic event. This is important to understand because trauma literally re-wires the brain. It’s not just a memory like any other. The brain literally changes. Most importantly to learn about is Broca’s Area. This portion of the brain is responsible for the production of language. Now get this: Broca’s Area shuts down and goes dark while a trauma is occurring. And not only that! Broca’s Area shuts down even when the trauma is just thought about later! What this means is that it is impossible to experience a trauma and fully access your ability to talk about it at the same time. To talk about the trauma is to access the memory of the trauma itself. And due to how trauma re-wires the brain, to think about the event is to relive the experience of the event, thereby strengthening the memory and strengthening the trauma.
Traditional talk therapy needs to utilize Broca’s Area of the brain just in order for a client to talk about the issue bringing them to therapy. See the problem here in being able to address traumas using talk therapy? We can’t talk our way to healing certain things. It just doesn’t work neurobiologically. There are, however, other methods that are great for treating traumas that do not require Broca’s Area to be lit up. I personally love using ART, but there are other treatment modalities as well that do not require talking about the traumatic event including functional neurology, yoga therapy, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Memory is a fascinating thing that is still being studied to try to understand exactly how it works. One very important thing to understand about memory is how malleable it is. The creation of a new memory causes protein production in the brain which create new neurons to form. Memory is a physical thing: the production of new cells (neurons) in the brain. Memories are physical, tangible, and real. And each time we access a memory by recalling it, new proteins are formed which create new neurons that grow off that original memory. Thinking of a memory opens up the original, allowing it to be malleable and played with. How we think of an event affects the original memory. It is fluid, flexible, and malleable.
So with this understanding about the flexible nature of memory you can see how talking about a traumatic event is typically not effective in reducing any of the symptoms experienced from the trauma. Talking about it accesses the original memory, stimulates the production of memory-making proteins, and then reinforces the intensity of the original experience by recalling what happened. It just reinforces and entrenches the negative event along with the subsequent bodily sensations and emotions.
The human brain is capable of a tremendous amount of plasticity. The important thing is to understand and recognize that capacity for plasticity while wielding it for the highest beneficial impact. Since memory is flexible and tangible, that means that we have the power to change how it impacts our emotions and physical sensations. This is why I love using ART. It is a wonderful tool for reprocessing memories. It purposefully accesses the original memory, processes out the negative emotions and bodily sensations associated with it, and then uses that malleability to build new neurons of a positive nature; rewiring the old to now be linked to the positive and new.
After ART, when you think of the original event, you no longer experience the reactive emotions and sensations that you used to. Instead, thinking of the facts of what happened is now linked to the positive emotions and sensations that you wired in during your ART session. You have the ability to rewire your memories. Now that we understand how the brain works, we have the power to do great things. When we know better, we can do better. I still love talk therapy for a million different reasons, but I love ART even more for truly bringing real and lasting relief!