Forgetting Trauma: Why do we block memories?

"Forgetting" our traumatic experiences is actually on purpose. In traumatic times, our system will rally to use all our resources for the best chance of survival which impacts how our we store our memories.

Explore how we have an intelligent inbuilt survival mechanism and that holding the memory is surplus to requirement. How our body's carrying the memory imprint and why we need to build resource to process the trauma and heal. 

It is common for many of us not to recall details of our childhood, add sexual abuse into that equation, we begin to understand why that is. Learn about your internal guidance system and how to use it to unlock what has been hidden.

Transcript

 Welcome to episode two, dedicated to forgotten memories. Now, what we're going to unlock in this episode is a deeper understanding why we have repressed memories and why sometimes we don't access them at all. Why we have forgotten the details or the specifics, whether it's in childhood abuse, or maybe you've experienced sexual trauma in your adult life and there are moments or chunks of time that is missing that you're unable to grasp to call to your consciousness.

The first thing to understand is how trauma works in the body, first and foremost. And if you've been on this journey for a while and you are trauma informed,  which is, a phrase that's coined that you understand how trauma works.

But for anyone that doesn't, I just want to briefly touch on it because it's super important how we understand our biology and physiologically in our bodies  and our responses that are unconscious, is part of our inherent survival system.

 You don't have to go too far these days to come across someone talking about the nervous system or even someone declaring they're trauma experts.  We need to understand the nervous system and the fight, the fright and the freeze.  We are biologically wired to automatically either run away from a situation or fight , in the face of adversity. And if we're unable to do either of those things, there is another strategy that's deployed, which is called freeze. Why this is important, especially in childhood trauma, but also when we have been victims of sexual abuse,  sexual trauma in a violent setting, we normally find that we are unable to fight or run away in those situations. 

So I just want to preempt what I'm going to say with a trigger warning, because I know that this subject can be highly triggering and it is never my intention to create that within someone by the information I'm sharing.  As a child, we are smaller in nature, we are weaker, we can't fight.  Simply because we don't have the strength. 

 We physically can't match in strength or stature to our perpetrator. And quite often, because of this, we simply can't run away. So our strategy is to go into the freeze state. And known really as an emotional space where we disassociate, where we disconnect. And you've got that saying where someone says, Oh, I was beside myself.

And literally it's meaning that. We leave our bodies that our spirit, our soul steps out of our bodies and the purpose of that is  the body, the avatar really that houses our spirit and our soul is the one that is experiencing the violation and so therefore we can survive the experience. Now why is this all connected to memory and our forgotten memories? So bear with me because this will start to make sense  when I talk about forgotten memories.

I'm really focusing on childhood abuse but the same applies to sexual trauma as an adult.

So physiologically we were wired that when the abuse was happening, that we could not fight because we were physically not strong enough and we could not run away usually because of the adult our perpetrators had set it up that we were trapped in some way or we were simply blocked from leaving that space.

So the strategy for survival was to freeze, and that's that idea of the deer in the headlights, when we're driving and the deer comes across the headlights, it freezes. And that's what happens to us in those moments.

 In that state of freeze, this is when we disassociate. And in that disassociated space, which is a strategy for us to use all the resources that we have available to us to survive what is happening to us. And surplus to that, is our memory. We don't have to remember to live.

 If we were to look at our memory as a filing system, and this filing system holds everything, all our experiences that we've ever had, and we hold it and we store it, and we can literally tap into our memory bank, type in a code, think back of a memory, and then it comes into our conscious awareness. Now, when it comes to trauma and when we have been in the freeze state, I'm just going to refer to that as disassociated, because it means that we're out of our body where we're disconnected from what's actually happening to us in that traumatic moment, is that memory has been imprinted, but it has not been filed.

So this is where you get  later in life that, a memory will suddenly pop in, that you will access a memory ad hoc, seemingly out of nowhere sometimes. But there is a rhyme and reason for this and it simply comes back to this idea around the nervous system and feeling safe. So not only are our memories floating around and not filed in a memory bank we also have the body memory. And you'll probably have a reference to this, especially through smell, if you smell a dish cooking, it suddenly triggers a memory maybe from your travels or childhood.

Even though this is senses, the body does hold the imprint, something that's quite common as an abuse survivor, especially in intimacy, or it could happen at any time, if someone touches you in a certain way or breathes on you or brushes their hand on a certain part of your body, it can create your body to respond. And this can sometimes can be really confusing if we don't have a correlation and a memory to back that up.

But our body is telling us that was unsafe. And even though it might have been a touch or an action through someone that we feel safe with, that we love and we care about, the memory in the body is responding back to that time. This is where I'll start to talk about processing our trauma through to integrate and then to heal.

 Our bodies are super intelligent and when we can use those moments where we are triggered as an opportunity to highlight an experience that hasn't been processed through. What I mean about traumatic experiences being processed versus non processed is the trigger. If we are being triggered, whether it's a physical touch, whether it's a smell, something someone says, an environment, any of those things, then that trigger is giving us information where there is an experience that we've had that has been traumatic and it is yet to be healed.

We can use our triggers and see them as opportunities that they are to start to unlock these pathways and recognising actually that when my partner touches my knee, it freaks me out and I don't know why. So when you can sit with that, I don't know why, and you start to be curious about why does that freak me out, when actually that should be something really normal and really natural, then that curiosity can start opening the pathways for you to start connecting with the memories and connecting through those memories with the right tools, you're able to process the experience.

And that word process is really important because in that moment,  when you can't fight and you can't run away and therefore, you go into a freeze state and you disassociate from that experience, you're not in your body, then it can't be processed. Nothing can be processed.

So it's reconnecting and aligning those moments when you have resources. Now you'll hear me talk about processing, integrating and feeling resourced a lot because when you're a child, you do not have the resources to process what is happening to you. You simply don't have the emotional intelligence. You don't have the safety, you don't have the developed physiological resources that you need to process it through.

Now, that's not to say that if you've had a traumatic experience in childhood and you've got the right support in a loving, understanding environment, that something that was traumatic for one person doesn't become a lasting imprint, it  becomes integrated as an experience that they've had.

And you may have come across this and it may be your story that you have a sibling that you've both gone through the same experiences of being abused in similar ways, but how you both deal with it, and hold the trauma completely different.

There are many factors that go into how we process our trauma. 

And in the case of having two siblings going through the same trauma, it really depends, on so many things. And the first thing that I would be asking the siblings would be what information they have around their birth.  How was the birth?  Were they born naturally? Were they breastfed? Were they born in a time where the baby was removed from the mother? Where were they in their birth order?  What was going on in the family at that time? What was going on for the mother at that time? Those things all impact how we grow and how we develop our nervous system.

And therefore, when we experience trauma, either in childhood or as an adult, as two siblings who grew up under the same roof, seemingly with identical experiences, can vastly differ how they process a traumatic experience.

 So just coming back to our bodies holding the imprint, holding the memory for us.

In my personal journey there are so many times that my body told me that something was not okay. My body showed me by the feelings and the sensations and my reaction to the touch and it was often the breath against my ear that I was like, oh get away from me. 

So our bodies are incredible storytellers and the wisdom that they hold will carry the imprint of our trauma until we are ready to process it through. When we are ready to connect it to a memory and an understanding, when we feel resourced as an adult to be able to access the information and to heal it.

Now, when I reflect back on my journey, I know there are countless times that my body told me that something wasn't okay. And it was only through this dialogue that I had in my mind. And responding in this super acute awareness of how I was feeling in every moment and when that shifted , and my curiosity around why, why was I responding this way?

Like, you know, everything was fine. Why am I doing this?  Earlier in my journey, before I fully accessed my childhood, before Pandora's box exploding and me accessing those deeply traumatic memories of my childhood was one incident in particular, which I know was very perplexing, not only for myself, but also for my partner.

 I would even go on to say that, I was deeply embarrassed about it, but I didn't have a context for it at the time. Now, again, I share this with a trigger warning and the reason I say trigger warning, not because I'm going to go into any sordid detail, but just in case what I share , is familiar and similar to your experience. And know that if you do feel triggered by anything that I share and say.

This is a technique that I have used successfully when I've been triggered, and that is simply to talk directly to my body and say, thank you, body. Thank you for showing me something that you have been holding and that I am now ready to acknowledge and bring into my awareness. I am safe in this moment. I know that I have survived whatever it is that I am feeling and right now I am safe.

 Quite often our body based trigger points come up with intimacy and there was this one time  that I actually bit my partner's tongue, and really hurt him, and he was really angry with me, and he said, if you wanted me to stop, why didn't you simply ask me to stop instead of actually biting me?

I didn't have an answer.  I didn't understand it myself and I didn't have an answer apart from to profusely apologise.  And I remember feeling really uneasy in myself and I didn't have any reference for it except for feeling embarrassed and feeling ashamed that I had done that.

But actually, over time, as I started to unlock my own memories, I realized that I was acting something out that was pre verbal. So it triggered a time that I didn't have the ability to speak up and say no.

So all I could do was to act in a way that was trying to fight back. I also wanted to add that it was in specific circumstances that, that got set up. 

And in the setting up is really important because this is where I bring in my belief around the universe that we are souls and everything is unfolding for us.  Because there are so many examples of situations that I found myself in that opens the doorway for me to access these deeper memories.

And I can so see how my soul, the universe, divinity, perfectly set up these exacting criteria that were going to mirror my experiences in childhood, really opened these doorways to bring awareness to what was locked, to bring awareness to the trauma that I held and was blocked. 

So with that overview of understanding nervous system and how we disassociate and in those moments of survival, knowing that it's surplus to be filed in our memory bank.  So how do we access these repressed memories? 

There is a technique that when I'm working with clients in a safe and held, sacred space and knowing that we've been working together as a guide that they can access the blocked memories.

It's super interesting because sometimes the body will guide us in those moments more so than the memory. And it's through the body's guidance system, it's innate wisdom that we then can unlock the conscious memory, through the feeling sense. But really in our day to day life, a repressed memory is accessed, because you are resourced enough that you feel safe enough, right circumstance for that memory to be accessed. And even in that moment, if you feel like that you're unable to process it through or act to heal it. It's really understanding that we are an infinite intelligence system, that there are three main aspects that I personally work with, and that is the infinite intelligence of our body, that is the inner child,  and our soul.

Working individually with these three elements, knowing that each of them holds specific keys to unlock what is hidden and held in the physical and in the unconscious, really allows us the perfect pathway to heal.

Thank you for joining me on this episode. 

I wish you ease and grace on your healing journey and look forward to sharing more with you. Much love.