How the Past Informs Present Experiences
When you or someone else is suffering people often say things like: “It’s over you can get on with it now.” “Why don’t you move on, get over it.”
The thing is, it is not over if the memory has not been organically reprocessed by your brain. What? You have an innate wisdom within you to move from dis-ease to health. Unless something gets in the way. This is what Francine Shapiro, PhD realized in her development of EMDR therapy. (More on that in a different post.)
To give a very blatant example, a war veteran will have a flashback of being in war and actually be reliving the memory. You may have known them as far back as early childhood and they would be unable to recognize you because their brain is reliving the memory. This happens to us all the time but not in such severe circumstances.
Components of Memory
Your brain stores memory in different components: sights, sounds, emotions, sensations, smells, tastes, beliefs, and thoughts. Most of those components are stored in the other than conscious parts of your brain. (See “Why I am not a fan of talk therapy – Part 1 for more information).
Any time a circumstance that has a similar sight, sound, emotion, sensation, smell, taste, belief or thought occurs in a current situation the unconscious parts of your brain may link back to a previous memory if that memory has not been reprocessed organically. This why sometime people seem to be having an inflated reaction to a current circumstance. They may actually be linking into a previous circumstance but not know it.
For instance, a friend of mine was having an inflated reaction when his wife would say something suddenly when he was driving. He thought it was a normal response to her louder expression. She knew he had been in an explosion in his family home when he was 2yo and knew he may still be having reactions to loud noises.
I am not able to do therapy with a friend but could do a brief intervention. I had him bring to mind the memory. He said he had no conscious memory of it. Not unusual since our conscious memory does not even start developing until age two. But there is always unconscious memory it (sounds, sights, emotions, sensations, etc).
He had heard the stories from family members. When I asked what happened to him when he recalls hearing the stories he had a physical and emotional discomfort come up. I did a brief intervention with him to disrupt the components from the memory. It only took about 5 seconds. When I asked him to bring up the memory of hearing about the explosion, he said the uncomfortable emotions and sensations did not come up. (Please note: brief interventions do not often have lasting results as there are other components of a memory that can still trigger a person. And, there can be other memories in a person’s network of memories that can be triggered.)
About six months later when I was visiting them, his wife told me that he no longer responds with an inflated reaction when she would say something suddenly with more volume, when he was driving. He did not seem to notice that he was no longer having a reaction. This is typical when a memory is reprocessed. Symptoms go away, and people will not get triggered by sights, sounds, smells, etc that occurred with the original memory. People often don’t even notice they are responding differently until someone points it out.
Another example is a firefighter I worked with who had been hit by a car after finishing a call. One of the things that would trigger them was every time their neighbor would put out their recycling. Now why would that be? It has nothing to do with a car and there was no accident.
The sound of the glass clinking in the recycle bin was triggering the memory of the glass breaking in the windshield of the car when it hit them.
You can see that memories from the past do inform how we perceive and respond to circumstances in present time. So just getting over it is not necessarily so easy. It depends on how a memory is stored. It depends on if your brain was able to organically reprocess it. Sometimes the brain is unable to reprocess it. This can happen when there is a big shock. It can also happen if the same kind of thing keeps happening over and over so resolution cannot occur.