Traumatic Memory

Traumatic memories have a number of unusual qualities. They are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story.

Herman establishes the foundational thesis that traumatic memories are qualitatively distinct from ordinary autobiographical memory, citing Janet’s classic formulation of normal memory as an action of telling a story that trauma interrupts.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis

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EPs experience these traumatic memories far too intensely, as ‘too real’… This is certainly not normal memory. Clinicians have long observed the fundamental differences between traumatic memories and autobiographical narrative memories.

Van der Hart articulates the structural-dissociation framework’s central claim that traumatic memories are held asymmetrically — depersonalized in ANP, hyperreal in EP — confirming their categorical difference from normal autobiographical memory.

Hart, Onno van der, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis

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Traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much… Janet noted significant differences between ordinary and traumatic memory.

Van der Kolk, through Janet’s case of Irène, illustrates traumatic memory’s paradoxical structure — behavioral enactment without narrative recall — and argues that true memory is ‘complete’ only when accompanied by appropriate affect.

van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014thesis

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PTSD patients experience their traumatic memories as timeless, intrusive, sensory fragments that often cannot be expressed as a narrative, whereas people who have suffered a trauma but do not suffer from PTSD usually recall traumatic memories as an integrated whole.

Ogden marshals neuroimaging evidence to demonstrate that PTSD-associated traumatic memory recall is neurologically distinct — right-hemisphere, nonverbal, and sensorially fragmented — from the integrated narrative recall of non-PTSD trauma survivors.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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Successful treatment of traumatic memory might be conceptualized as the resolution of the effects of the traumatic past on the client’s current organization of experience, rather than as the formulation of a narrative.

Ogden reframes therapeutic goals around resolving sensorimotor and affective imprints rather than constructing verbal narrative, shifting the locus of integration from cognition to somatic experience.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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Just as traumatic memories are unlike ordinary memories, traumatic dreams are unlike ordinary dreams… traumatic memories appear to be based in an altered neurophysiological organization.

Herman extends the distinction between traumatic and ordinary memory into the domain of dreaming, arguing that both share an altered neurophysiological substrate characterised by exact repetition, temporal immediacy, and atypical sleep-stage occurrence.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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Increased brain activity during recall of traumatic memories in the right hemisphere and decreased brain activity in the left hemisphere… may be attributable to the different nature and quality of a traumatic memory.

Ogden presents neuroimaging evidence for hemispheric lateralization as the neural correlate of traumatic memory’s nonverbal, sensory character, distinguishing it from left-prefrontal narrative memory retrieval.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

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To integrate traumatic memory, a piece or sliver of the memory itself must be reactivated… arousal levels must be carefully managed during work with traumatic memory.

Ogden specifies the clinical conditions under which traumatic memory can be integrated, arguing that reactivation within the window of tolerance is necessary for transferring material from implicit to verbally accessible memory systems.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

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Of the many misconceptions and misunderstandings about trauma, confusion about so-called traumatic memory ranks among the greatest and potentially most problematic. Fundamentally, traumatic memories differ from other memories in crucial ways.

Levine identifies traumatic memory as among the most misunderstood concepts in trauma discourse and signals the need for a somatic-biological account of its distinctive mechanisms.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis

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OVERCOMING THE PHOBIA OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY. This is one of the most difficult phobias to overcome, requiring high and sustained integrative capacity of the survivor as ANP and EP.

Van der Hart frames avoidance of traumatic memory as a conditioned phobia requiring sustained integrative capacity across dissociative parts, making its treatment a phase-specific clinical challenge of high complexity.

Hart, Onno van der, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting

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A cognitive, rather depersonalized narrative account of the traumatic memory is constructed, including at least the pathogenic kernels. This account is divided into a number of segments.

Van der Hart describes guided synthesis as a structured technique for incrementally sharing traumatic memory fragments across dissociative parts, targeting pathogenic kernels in a paced, arousal-regulated sequence.

Hart, Onno van der, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting

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Traumatic memories may involve EPs that engaged in the animal defense of total submission or ‘playing dead’… Traumatic memories involving total submission and its inherent hypoarousal are very hard to treat.

Van der Hart identifies a particularly resistant category of traumatic memory — those encoded during dorsal-vagal collapse and total submission — whose hypoarousal profile creates distinctive therapeutic obstacles.

Hart, Onno van der, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting

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Working with traumatic memory… Although client and/or therapist may wish to focus on the event memories or creation of a narrative, that work is put aside until such time as the client has developed a sufficiently expansive window of tolerance.

Ogden establishes that engagement with traumatic memory is a phase-specific intervention, deferred until the client’s self-regulatory capacity is sufficient to prevent retraumatisation.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

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If active attempts are being made to avoid and forget traumatic material, avoidant cognitive processes can become automatic… thus maintaining traumatic amnesia.

The Lanius volume argues that active cognitive inhibition of traumatic material can become automatized, producing traumatic amnesia through a dynamic interplay of motivated forgetting and dissociative processes.

Lanius, edited by Ruth A, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting

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Executive control processes are involved in preventing unwanted explicit memories from entering awareness. When individuals continually inhibit cues for unwanted memories, recall of the unwanted memory becomes more difficult.

The Lanius volume presents evidence for active inhibitory executive processes as a non-passive mechanism producing impaired autobiographical memory in trauma survivors, distinct from passive encoding failure.

Lanius, edited by Ruth A, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting

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Dissociation is closely intertwined with amnesia. Indeed, Hilgard has argued that amnesic barriers are the intrinsic structure by which mental contents that would ordinarily be connected are disaggregated.

The Lanius volume situates traumatic amnesia within a dissociative framework, drawing on Hilgard and Janet to argue that disaggregation of connected mental contents is the structural mechanism of traumatic memory loss.

Lanius, edited by Ruth A, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting

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Any sounds, smells, or images that reminded him of the ambush made him feel just as paralyzed, terrified, and enraged as he had the day the helicopter evacuated him from the rice paddy.

Van der Kolk illustrates traumatic memory’s hallmark quality — sensory-cue-triggered full affective and physiological reliving — through the clinical vignette of a Vietnam veteran whose present experience collapses into the traumatic past.

van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014supporting

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His memories were quite incoherent and fragmentary. He had flashes of images of Shanley’s face and of isolated incidents.

Van der Kolk exemplifies the fragmented, non-narrative character of traumatic memory through the clinical record of a sexual abuse survivor whose recall consists of isolated sensory-perceptual flashes without temporal or narrative coherence.

van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014supporting

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The patient is able to assemble the fragmented recollections into a coherent testimony. ‘Paradoxically, the testimony is the very confession that had been sought by the torturers… but through testimony, confession becomes denunciation.’

Herman describes the testimony method as a therapeutic technique for transforming fragmented traumatic recollections into coherent narrative, framing this integration as simultaneously clinical and political act.

Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992supporting

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Essential interoceptive conditioned stimuli are those associated with synthesizing and realizing traumatic memories (e.g., ‘If I would fully realize what happened to me, I would go insane or kill myself’).

Van der Hart identifies interoceptive conditioned stimuli linked to the anticipated synthesis of traumatic memories as a key driver of the phobia of traumatic memory, illustrating how catastrophic beliefs about integration perpetuate avoidance.

Hart, Onno van der, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentaside

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Memory for trauma-relevant information may actually be heightened relative to other information… Holocaust survivors diagnosed with PTSD recalled fewer paired-associates overall.

The Lanius volume documents the paradoxical memory profile of PTSD — heightened encoding of threat-relevant material alongside global explicit memory deficits — complicating simple deficit models of traumatic memory.

Lanius, edited by Ruth A, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010aside

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Studies of RM are more available and larger in scope, but those studies gathering information about mechanism of recovery and corroboration of abuse are smaller and less frequent.

The Lanius volume acknowledges the evidential asymmetry in recovered-memory research, noting that studies corroborating the mechanisms of traumatic memory loss and recovery remain underrepresented in the literature.

Lanius, edited by Ruth A, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010aside

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