Memory Trauma
& Loss
By Peter A. Levine
This
article is reprinted from Creations Magazine, November 2000
Thanks to Creations staff, Stuart R Friedman, MS & Laurie Schwartz, LMT
The brain's function is to choose from the past, to diminish
it, to simplify it, but not to preserve it.
- Henri Bergson, from The Creative Mind, 1911
Around 1900, the French philosopher Henri Bergson gleaned deep
insights into the nature of memory that are just now being appreciated by contemporary
researchers and clinicians. Bergson theorized that there are two fundamentally
different forms of memory- one conscious, the other unconscious.
Neuroscientist Daniel Schacter (1996), in Searching for Memory,
describes his examination of a patient with a serious head injury. This man (called
Mickey) had little memory of his recent experiences. Schacter asked Mickey a series
of obscure questions such as "Who holds the worlds record for shaking hands?"
and "Where was the first baseball game played?" Not surprisingly, Mickey did not
know the answers to these questions. Schacter then gave them to him. When asked
the same questions twenty minutes later in another room, Mickey correctly answered
Teddy Roosevelt and Hoboken, New Jersey, etc., to the trivia questions. However,
he had no recollection of how he got this information and thought that perhaps
it might have been from his sister. Although he had an implicit memory
of his meeting with Schacter twenty minutes earlier, he had no explicit memory
of it.
Similar observations and extensive experiments have been carried
out by experimental psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists and clinicians, confirming
that we humans have two distinctly different forms of memory- one explicit and
conscious, the other implicit and unconscious. The description by Schacter of
Mickey's strange behavior illustrates the curious "dissociation" between the conscious
and unconscious aspects of memory.
So, what role does memory play in the understanding and treatment
of trauma? There is a form of implicit memory that is profoundly unconscious and
forms the basis for the imprint trauma leaves on the body/mind. The type of memory
utilized in learning most physical activities (walking, riding a bike, skiing,
etc.) is a form of implicit memory called procedural memory. Procedural
or "body memories" are learned sequences of coordinated "motor acts" chained together
into meaningful actions. You may not remember explicitly how and when you learned
them, but, at the appropriate moment, they are (implicitly) "recalled" and mobilized
(acted out) simultaneously. These memories (action patterns) are formed and orchestrated
largely by involuntary structures in the cerebellum and basal ganglia.
When a person is exposed to overwhelming stress, threat or injury,
they develop a procedural memory. Trauma occurs when these implicit procedures
are not neutralized. The failure to restore homeostasis is at the basis for the
maladaptive and debilitating symptoms of trauma.
Acts must be carried out to their completion. Whatever their
point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is (only) because an action
has not been completed that it is vile.
- Jean Genet, from Thief's Journal.
In response to threat and injury, animals, including humans, execute
biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the
threat and defend themselves. The very structure of trauma, including activation,
dissociation and freezing are based on the evolution of survival
behaviors. When threatened or injured, all animals draw from a "library" of possible
responses. We orient, dodge, duck, stiffen, brace, retract, fight, flee, freeze,
collapse, etc. All of these coordinated responses are somatically based- they
are things that the body does to protect and defend itself. It is when these
orienting and defending responses are overwhelmed that we see trauma.
The bodies of traumatized people portray "snapshots" of their
unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves in the face of threat and injury. Trauma
is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time.
For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire
body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable
to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy
generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific
patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute
and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized
people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word- they
have become stuck in an aroused state. It is difficult if not impossible to function
normally under these circumstances.
In an attempt to rationalize the highly activated survival responses
in which they are stuck, traumatized people will often create stories that energetically
match their internal experience. These "memories" may be accurate only in the
sense that they are metaphors for what is stored implicitly. Many survivors of
trauma need an "explanation" for their disturbing internal states. For example,
I have worked with numerous people who came to me fairly certain that they had
been molested or raped as children. In many cases the people were correct, but
not in all of them. Several clients had created interpretations that seemed to
explain their symptoms, but, in fact, they had been traumatized by early childhood
surgical procedures. A child may experience a frightening surgical procedure very
much like a rape.
Whether you can remember a traumatic event explicitly
is not highly significant for healing to take place. Trauma is implicit. What
is significant in the resolution of trauma is the completion of the incomplete
responses to threat and to discharge the energy that was mobilized for survival.
In this way, survivors can begin to re-member in the sense of associating the
dissociated aspects of their body experience and thawing the frozen energy that
is at the core of their trauma. In doing this, they begin to integrate implicit
experience into coherent conscious narratives. These stories are neither true
nor false. They contain a balance of elements, some of which are historically
accurate, some are symbolic of feeling states, while the primary function of others
is to promote the healing process.
Twenty-five years ago, Jody's life was shattered. While walking
in the woods near her boyfriend's house, a hunter came up to her and began a conversation.
It was mid-September. There was a chill in the air- her boyfriend and others thought
nothing when they saw someone apparently chopping wood. A madman, however, was
smashing Jody's head again and again with his rifle. The police found Jody unconscious.
Chips from the butt of the rifle lay nearby where they had broken off in the violent
attack.
When I first saw Jody two years ago, the only recollection she
had of the event was scant and confused. She vaguely remembered meeting the man
and then waking up in the hospital some days later. Jody had been suffering from
anxiety, migraines, concentration and memory problems, depression, chronic fatigue
and chronic pain of the head, back and neck regions (diagnosed as fibromyalgia.)
She had been treated by physical therapists, chiropractors, and various physicians.
Jody, like so many head-injured and traumatized individuals, grasped
desperately and obsessively in an attempt to retrieve memories of her trauma.
When I suggested to Jody that it was possible to experience healing without having
to remember the event, I saw a flicker of hope and a momentary look of relief
pass across her face. We talked for a while, reviewing her history and struggle
to function.
Focusing on body sensations, Jody slowly became aware of various
tension patterns in her head and neck region. With this focus on the felt sense,
she began to notice a particular urge to turn and retract her neck. In following
this urge in slow gradual "micro movements" she experienced a momentary fear,
followed by a strong tingling sensation.
Through following these movements, Jody began a journey through
the trauma of her assault. In learning to move between flexible control and surrender
to these involuntary movements, she began to experience gentle shaking and trembling
throughout her body. Thus began, ever so gently, the discharge of her trauma.
Jody's implicit memory was leading her home.
In later sessions, Jody experienced other spontaneous movements,
as well as sounds and impulses to run, bare her teeth and claw at her assailant.
By completing these responses, Jody was able to construct a sense of how her body
prepared to react in that fraction of a second when she was attacked. In allowing
these movements and sounds to be expressed, Jody began to experience a deep organic
discharge along with her body's innate capacity to defend and protect itself.
While explicit memory is accessed primarily through thought, implicit
memory must be reached through the body. Jody, through her felt sense,
was able to follow her body's intentional movement. Intentional movement
is non-conscious- it is experienced as if the body is moving of its own volition.
Through completing the life preserving actions that her body had prepared for
at the time of her attack, she released that bound energy and realized that she
had, in fact, attempted to defend herself.
Renegotiation is a word I use to describe the process of
healing or resolving trauma. It is the gradual discharge of the highly compressed
survival energies, accompanied by a completion of biological defensive and orienting
responses that were frozen at the time of overwhelm. It is not a cathartic reliving
of the traumatic event, a method that can lead to re-traumatization.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is the name I have given to this
work. SE is based on the understanding of why animals in the wild, though their
lives are threatened routinely, are rarely traumatized. Their ability to fully
discharge the highly activated energies mobilized for survival and then reorient
(resume normal functioning) points to an innate, instinctual capacity for the
resolution of trauma. Humans share this innate capacity.
The foundation of Somatic Experiencing is built upon a tradition
of somatic education and body-oriented psychotherapy. It draws upon the neurobiological
study of the multi-directional interconnection between the body, brain and mind.
This approach uses education about and awareness of body sensations as a primary
tool to alter these pathways. When appropriate, gentle manipulation of the muscles,
joints and viscera is employed. Traumatized individuals learn the biological strategies
that enable animals to restore homeostasis after being aroused by a threat. Empowered
with these innate resources, people can transform trauma.
One of the paradoxical and transformative aspects of implicit
traumatic memory is that once it is accessed in a resourced way (through the felt
sense), it, by its very nature, changes. Out of the shattered fragments of her
deeply injured psyche, Jody discovered and nurtured a nascent, emergent self.
From the ashes of the frantically activated, hypervigilant, frozen, traumatized
girl of twenty-five years ago, Jody began to reorient to a new, less threatening
world. Gradually she shaped into a more fluid, resilient, woman, coming to terms
with the felt capacity to fiercely defend herself when necessary, and to surrender
in quiet ecstasy.
copyright © Peter Levine Ph.D. 1996
Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. is the originator and developer of Somatic
Experiencing® and the Director of the Foundation for Human Enrichment. He holds
doctorate degrees in both Medical Biophysics and Psychology. His best selling
book, Waking the Tiger; Healing Trauma,
is receiving wide international attention.
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