How Trauma Affects Memory

[Kizzie]

Saw this infographic about trauma and how it affects four different types of memory on Twitter this morning and thought Id share it.  Explains a lot about my interesting memory issues.

[Elphanigh]

Thank you for sharing Kizzie. That resonates with my weird memory issues as well

[Blueberry]

Thanks for sharing! That's really interesting for me too. My traumas are quite strange in that I hardly forgot anything. I remember tons of stuff that was done to me as a kid including CSA. I didn't fragment it.

Once I started T a couple of decades ago, my semantic memory got worse. I forgot the most basic of facts. It has improved but still not good. My emotional memory has been really badly affected, probably since before I was ever in T. My procedural memory is very bad. That explains why I forget how to do basic things on the computer like a scan a document and then the how-to doesn't return to my brain for 6 weeks or something. The information is completely missing. So that latter point is especially interesting to me.

[SunnyDays]

Yes indeed,

Some of us are prescribed with some drugs that alters memory as well. Music is a great helper, try to use not-triggering music, but good memories music, our memory improves and our mood too.

[Kizzie]

I just went back to seeing a T yesterday and she talked about how trauma gets stuck in short term memory (STM) rather than being transferred to long term memory (LTM) because of the way brain works to protect us when we are overwhelmed.

Apparently, this is why when those of us with CPTSD are triggered the memory is retrieved from STM and we almost feel as though we were back in the situation.  STM keeps it 'fresh' (as though it just occurred when it may have happened decades ago), whereas LTM moves it to a distance and decreases the intensity. 

So although I did not have a good experience with EMDR (which is thought to stimulate/aid transfer memories from short to long term memory) a few years back, we are going to give it a try.   I hope it helps as I don't want to keep reliving my trauma over and over again. 

[Billy Pilgrim]

"That's really interesting for me too. My traumas are quite strange in that I hardly forgot anything. I remember tons of stuff that was done to me as a kid including CSA."

I relate to that strongly. I once wound up talking about embarassing or painful situations in class, with an old school friend. He came up with two or three, then I got going and he stopped me around the twentieth or so. He couldn't believe I remembered all that stuff, I couldn't believe he didn't 

[Ellis]

Saw this infographic about trauma and how it affects four different types of memory on Twitter this morning and thought Id share it.  Explains a lot about my interesting memory issues.

Hey Kizzie,

I was excited to look at this but it looks like the link is broken now? Is there any other way to view it?

Regards,
Ellis.

[Kizzie]

Tks for pointing that out Ellis, the link is fixed now.

https://www.nicabm.com/trauma-how-trauma-can-impact-4-types-of-memory-infographic/

[GoSlash27]

 All,
 I've recently discovered that I carry sensory impressions that I "shouldn't be able to" according to most psychologists. These are vivid, detailed sensory and emotional impressions of completely mundane scenes that date all the way back to age 1.
 Where most people find a handful, I happen to carry hundreds. Psychologists say this is improbable due to infantile amnesia; the brain overwrites these memories as the hippocampus develops and even if I do somehow still have them, they're inaccessible due to their lack of context.
 I had a minor identity crisis over this conflicting information. Am I crazy? Did I imagine these memories or confabulate them?
 I've concluded that no, these memories are absolutely real. My ability to access them is way out of the realm of what is considered possible, but it exists anyway.

 I now have a working theory of why I have this odd ability: The onset of dissociative amnesia coupled with the age at which it occurred.
 My first traumatic experience occurred at almost exactly age 3. A DV event (Dad's suddenly gone and mom's suddenly hurt), then hiding (home is gone), then chronic child abuse from our babysitter (Mom is gone), leading to being taken away into foster care (separated immediately from my siblings).
 This caused proximal dissociative amnesia as all memories of my family and home were quarantined.
 The important part is that it happened right around my 3rd birthday. The early memories that should have been overwritten remained because they had been protected by the vault.
 My memories associated with my family remained sequestered until I was reunited with them.
 I wasn't reunited with my sister until late age 6; long after infantile amnesia ends for most people.
 Thus, my early sensory impressions remained in place.

 The reason I'm able to retrieve them is because I suffer from generalized dissociative amnesia. Many of my memories are formed with incomplete context and I've had to go back and examine/ contextualize them after the fact, stitching them into a coherent timeline.
 The process works the same way for these earliest memories as well. In fact, those snapshots are in the same disorganized pile as all the rest.

 So if you can do this too, you're not crazy and you're not alone. "Impossible for the average person" </> "Impossible".

 Best,
-Slashy
 

[NarcKiddo]

The reading I have been doing about memory deals with right brain and left brain. (It is actually in a book about accessing the right brain for artistic purposes but I was happy to find out how much neuroscience is in it. And this has caused me to do a bit more digging online about the subject.) The purpose of the art book is to suggest ways we can engage the creative right brain and bypass the left brain, because the left brain is not at all interested in the nuances of what we see. It is only interested in the practical ramifications.

Anyway, what happens in infancy, apparently, is that our right brain encodes all the early memories. The left brain does not start to come online until the age of about 3, after which it gradually becomes more dominant. As I understand it, it's not that the early memories are overwritten, so much as filed in a place we don't have logical access to. Once we become left brain dominant, which is necessary for our practical processes of living, language, understanding of linear time and what have you, we rely on the left brain filing system and can't access right brain information easily. So Slashy's description of a disorganised pile of snapshots makes total sense to me. What seems unusual about Slashy's experience is that he is more able than many of us to access (and maybe then to decode) right brain memories.

One of the reasons that EFs can be so hard for many of us to make sense of is because they are essentially a right brain flashback. The right brain has encoded the emotion rather than specific visual information and certainly not language information if the memory is pre-verbal or before much left brain involvement.