Several studies have attempted to decipher the role of trauma, or an intense emotional experience, in coding, storing and retrieving memories Is there a relationship between memory and trauma?Do traumas leave a smaller or larger footprint than ordinary memories, or are they equivalent??
There are several positions that support both arguments. Some argue that traumatic experiences are treated differently from the most common memories, these mechanisms create a deteriorated memory that is difficult to recover.
- On the other hand.
- Others argue that stress does not change the quality of these memories and that they are treated in a very similar way.
The defense of these positions was based on laboratory studies, the traumatic condition is very difficult to reproduce in a controlled and safe situation.
As a result, have studies been conducted with patients with post-traumatic stress disorder?PTSD? Whose rooted trauma seems appropriate to discover how memory and trauma relate.
PTSD can be defined as the abnormal response with which some people react to a traumatic, devastating or painful experience, classifying it as abnormal can be a mistake, as we are talking about reactions from normal people to unusual situations.
The inability to cope with this experience leads the person to experience intrusion symptoms associated with the same event.
Can these symptoms be recurrent painful memories, dreams or nightmares, dissociative reactions?What can lead to a loss of consciousness of the present?Psychological discomfort and avoidance of everything related to this experience and intense physiological reactions.
The most common causes of NATURAL disasters related to PTSD?Floods, earthquakes or tsunamis?, accidents and diseases. However, there is one type of event that generally has rates of 70% to 80% PTSD development: human atrocities. This category includes assaults, terrorist acts, sexual abuse and rape, concentration camps.
One of the diagnostic criteria included in the DSM-5 to determine if a person has PTSD is the inability to remember the relevant aspects of the traumatic event.
This can be defined as dissociative amnesia, and although memories are not stored, they can change behavior.
For example, even if a girl doesn’t remember how she was sexually assaulted in a bathroom, she can behave in a way that avoids public restrooms and can even feel very bad when entering the bathroom of her own home.
Among the main symptoms of PTSD, and also one of the most limiting, are emotional avoidance and bottling, overactivation, dependence and invasive memories.
By focusing on the latter, people who have experienced a traumatic experience may be conditioned on reviving the traumatic situation through nightmares, intrusive memories or flashbacks.
This is not to say that the person’s memory is not lacking, as they may not remember certain aspects of the event; In turn, other details or scenes can return to memory with brilliingness, the problem with this is that reviving is uncontrollable and inevitable. for the individual.
Keep in mind that while intrusive memories are actually memories, flashbacks are not. With flashbacks, temporality is lost, because the individual feels he is living everything again.
Does this happen in the presence of neutral stimuli?stimuli that do not condition the person in aversive or pleasant way?triggering flashback.
For example, a person who was the victim of a terrorist attack may have a flashback when he sees a blue cloth wrapped around a man’s neck, because the mall where he was on the day of the event had walls of that color.
Therefore, flashbacks are not just a memory lived with anguish, they are the rebirth of the traumatic emotional experience and involve thinking that everything happens again.
Therefore, in patients with PTSD, we can find several effects on memory.
Can excess hypermnesia occur, when trauma is characterized by intrusive memories, flashbacks and nightmares, or amnesia?For lack of ,, when there is disorganization of memory, fragmentation of memories and total or partial forgetfulness.
The two can coexist, depending on the forgotten aspects, the living aspects, or the nature of the trauma.
Memory and trauma seem to be related to autobiographical memory, autobiographical memory is part of explicit memory and allows us to remember the events of our lives and the world around us.
What makes it possible to have a logical discourse of life and a development from our memories is exactly the memory.
Thus, since traumatic memory is not a coherent story, unlike memories of autobiographical memory, studies seem to find the problem in this memory system.
The memory of trauma is broken, fragmented and even seems separate from the individual’s history, when these memories are beyond the person’s control, seem to be invasive and intrusive in relation to autobiographical memory.
The answer to this question, in relation to memory and trauma, is yes, it seems that with the differences between the two types of memories, the presence of the action of special memory mechanisms is evident in situations of high stress.
Some of the most relevant aspects of traumatic memories are
In the case of ordinary memories, everything seems to change:
From all that we’ve mentioned above, it seems that a very strong emotional experience, a source of stress, can automatically influence how information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Pierre Janet stated in 1904:
“Extremely terrifying experiences cannot be equated with a person’s common beliefs, assumptions, and meanings. In this case, will they be stored differently, dissociated from conscious experience and voluntary control?”