Memory and Emotion

One theory about the way the memory functions holds that all memory are not completely preserved and that forgetting things means that our memories have been lost from storage.  Another theory holds that nothing we experience is ever truly lost.  Everything we see, every gum wrapper, every hole in the road, is stored somewhere in the brain.  The fact that we don’t remember every one of these things only means that we have lost the route of associations that would enable us to remember them.  It’s like losing a pair of earrings.  They don’t cease to exist because you lost them, but you can’t figure out where they’re hiding, so you can’t get to them.  Once a memory is created, you never lose it; you just can’t find it under the bed among all the dirty socks and other objects.

It’s generally believed that our memories are laid down all over our brain and that our capacity to retrieve them involves certain neuro-connections, which are like telephone lines in the brain.  Forgetting represents a disconnection of some of these lines.  In other words, if you don’t use a memory, the brain simply cuts off the telephone line to it.  Or think of it as a credit card that you haven’t used for six months, so the bank cancels it.  You can’t use it to retrieve money from the ATM anymore, but you still have the credit card itself, right there in your wallet.

It is fair to say that we don’t remember most of life.  The things we do remember, the memories we retain a connection to, are those that have an emotional charge to them.  You’re not likely to remember a bottle cap you saw on the ground at a country fair when you were six years old.  If, however, you slipped on the bottle cap, fell, broke your arm, cried in the ambulance all the way to the emergency room, and then had to walk around wearing a cast for six weeks, that you would remember.

Memory in other words, is the experience of an emotion encoded and empatterned in our brains and our bodies.  Some of the memories are pleasant and good; some are upsetting and bad.  A memory that is unusually happy or pleasant, and not particularly stressful, is usually encoded mostly by the way of the hippocampus in the temporal lobe, which helps record verbal memory, or memory that can be talked about.  When an experience is painful or traumatizing, however, the hippocampus is unable to encode it because it’s suppressed by stress hormones released by the brain and body.  That’s when the amygdala, another area in the temporal lobe, steps in and takes over, encoding the experience as a nonverbal memory, or one that can’t be expressed easily in words.  The memory is stored in the body memory.  You may not consciously recollect it, but it still lives in your brain and the tissues of your body.

This is how the brain works when you lay down a memory.  As you live a certain experience, the brain records it in the visual area and the auditory area, taking in sights and sounds of what is occurring.  It also records what you are feeling in the body-sense are.  These are all primary sensory areas of the brain.  Later, when you evoke that memory, all three areas come on-line.  You get a hologram in your mind of your wedding day, for instance.  You see people milling around at the reception, you hear the music, you feel your shoes pinching your feet, and you hear your train sweeping against the floor.  It’s a memory without trauma that you talk about easily and often and with great enjoyment.

But now let’s say you go for a walk one day down a country road.  Your feet are crunching on the pebbles, you smell the lilacs in the air and feel the breeze against your arms and face.  Your feeling strong and carefree when suddenly out of the bushes besides the road charges a huge dog, snarling and baring his fangs.  You see his great teeth, you hear him barking, you feel the gooseflesh. Terrified and stricken you run as fast as you can to get away from the dog.

That evening at dinner your husband asks you how you enjoyed your walk. “Oh, it was fine,” you say.  You don’t really want to mention the incident with the dog, so you don’t talk about it.  In a sense, you’ve already begun to forget about it, because it was unpleasant and frightening and therefore something you don’t want to confront again.  This very similar to what happens after you have a bad dream or nightmare.  If it’s a particularly frightening dream, and you don’t wake up and tell someone immediately, then it’s not laid down in verbal memory.  It stays in body memory, however, and you might walk around for an hour or two feeling extremely shaken from the experience of the dream, even though you can’t really recall it.  Like a bad dream, your emotionally charged encounter with the dog is encoded in your body memory.  What you have done, however, is to dissociate it from your conscious memory, mentally split it off or isolated it as painful and unacceptable.

This is what we do with trauma.  We act out the line from the Barbara Streisand song: “What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget.”  To the degree that we do this, however, with memories that it is important for us to face, we will experience the consequences in our emotional state, our physical state, or the state of the organs and their relative health or disease.

The Black Hole of Trauma

A famous study raised rats in boxes where they regularly received electric shocks from birth.  It sounds awful, but for the rats it was home sweet home.  It’s not unlike life for a great many people who grow up in an atmosphere of trauma.  The rats grew up with shocks, and after they reached adult rathood, so to speak, they were allowed to leave their boxes and were given the opportunity to move to other boxes, where they would receive no electric shocks.  Well, they all choose to return to their original boxes, and the memory of life amid electric shocks.

The rats were happier reliving their know distress than trying out unknown possible future health.  They had learned that helplessness was the only way of life.  It was the song they lived by, the beat they marched to.  In their boxes of electric shocks, they were in control.  They thought, “Hey, I can control this.  I’ve lived all my life with getting shocked.”  In the same way, many of us have lived all our lives with being overburdened at work or being unhappy in an unfulfilling relationship.  We can handle that, because it is familiar.  The prospect of changing jobs, though, or striking out on our own, leaving the bum and possibly being alone, is downright terrifying.  It’s easier to stay where we are.

Unfortunately for the rats, however, their helplessness ultimately affect their immunity.  They got used to the idea that the world wasn’t safe, that they would continually be shocked.  Even though they had learned to tolerate this emotionally, their bodies would not physically tolerate it.  Body intuition and body memories always win. Eventually our minds block out the number of shocks we feel.  But the body keeps score.  With each shock our white cells and immunity slip lower and lower.  Over time, the rat’s immune systems broke down, letting in all kinds of disease.  They had become physical incarnations of the rat’s belief that they were constantly vulnerable to attack from the outside world.

Like the rats, most of us tend to relive past trauma over and over.  We fall into the black hole of trauma.  Past memories increase physiological arousal – that is, they prepare us physically and emotionally for shocks.  It’s as if we’re bracing ourselves for the other shoe to drop, except that there are simply more and more shoes.  At the time of the trauma in the past, we secreted the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine.  These get us revved up for the next attack.  And guess what?  We actually attract further attacks!  When we recall that trauma or memory, the brain and the body release these hormones again and again. What that means is that we find ourselves in an environment that evokes a traumatic memory, we interpret it as being stressful and traumatic, just like the past.  Our bodies experience it as if the real trauma were occurring, even though it’s only a memory, only like a bad dream.  The body is shaking as thought we’ve been having nightmares all night, even though we’re only reliving a pattern encoded in the brain.  As a result, we’ll re-create traumas in the present and future.