Can a person let go of traumatic memories?

Memories make up a person's identity, their autobiographical thread.

It is memory that allows us to relate the present to the past and project our thoughts and expectations into the future.

Therefore, in the adaptation of the human being to daily life and in decision-making, the perspective of his past experiences is essential.

In turn, forgetting is an involuntary mental action that consists of stopping remembering previously learned information or lived experiences due to the fading of the memory trace over time and the interference of other memories that are acquired more recently.

Furthermore, many people have a special capacity to forget unpleasant events and selectively remember positive ones, which constitutes a survival-type adaptive mechanism.

More information

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The memories associated with an intense emotion, be it positive or negative, achieve a greater consolidation in memory.

Thus, most people vividly remember certain intense past experiences that have been charged with emotional value.

An adult person remembers their first meeting with their partner with emotion and detail, no matter how much time has elapsed, and has no difficulty in evoking where or who they were with, for example, when the attacks on September 11, 2001 against the Twin Towers in New York.

In fact, a strong emotion is felt when a person recalls from the trunk of his memories events that in a certain way have marked him for life.

However, memory is quite dependent on the current state of mind.

Life is not what is lived, but what is remembered from what is lived (selective memory).

Thus, the existing relationship between affectivity and memory makes it possible to explain why happy or sad past memories can produce joy or sadness in the present, but also why current happiness or sadness can distort the perception of past memories.

Memories associated with an intense emotion, positive or negative, achieve greater consolidation.

However, memory depends a lot on the mood of the moment.

In 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (2004) Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman erase memories, today still science fiction.photo: MPTV.net

The adversities of daily life do not generate disturbing memories because people usually have psychological, family and social resources to deal with them.

On the contrary, traumatic events (childhood abuse, sexual assault, intimate partner violence) produced by people close to the victim often generate humiliation, helplessness and a broken sense of security.

The result of the person having been violated in their privacy supposes a negative interference in the social and work adaptation to daily life and, what is worse, a loss of trust in human beings.

A traumatic event involves an imbalance in the body's biological homeostasis, an overflow of the person's coping resources and a challenge to cognitive processes, including memory of what happened.

These events can generate vivid memories in the victim that cannot be detached over time and even alter their ability to love and relate to others.

The images of what happened, due to their emotional significance, are burned into the subject's memory.

Thus, these disturbing memories are reproduced involuntarily and repetitively in the form of current painful experiences (not mere past memories), as if they were happening right now.

These are nightmares and invasive thoughts that escape the control of the subject months and even years after the event occurred.

A traumatic event (childhood abuse, sexual assault, intimate partner violence) generates humiliation and involves an imbalance in the body's biological homeostasis

That is to say, the traumatic past can exercise, in a parasitic way, a tyrannical action on the current field of consciousness of the victim, preventing him from resuming a normalized daily life and enjoying the present.

Sometimes it can even create a kind of network of fear in the person's memory, which can be accompanied by emotional anesthesia, as if the person had frozen tears behind their eyes, but could not make them flow.

These vivid and repetitive thoughts and images are not incompatible with the presence in the same person of blurred, fragmentary or unconnected memories that are inaccessible in an unconscious attempt to protect themselves from the pain suffered.

That is, there are people who sometimes remember what they want to forget and other times they forget what they want to remember.

The greater or lesser intensity of traumatic memories does not depend only on a psychological automatism that is beyond the person's control.

There are those who live anchored in an idealized nostalgic past, who ask themselves unanswered questions (“why has this happened to me?”), who try to return to what no longer exists, or who feed back negative emotions (resentment, shame or even guilt).

Closing a false story means that it will never disappear.

The traumatic past can parasitically exert a tyrannical action on the present of the victim, preventing him from leading a normal daily life.

But it is possible to get out of that loop of suffering.

There are people who focus their attention on enjoying the present, without forgetting the misfortunes that have occurred, and project themselves into the future, supported by positive emotions, such as hope for the future, the joy of enjoying their children or forgiveness of the offender.

Getting involved in new experiences and exciting projects makes it easier to forget painful memories because the passage of time and new experiences contribute to weakening the old ones.

It is not a passive or amnesic forgetfulness, but an active forgetfulness, which forgets the grievances, but not the facts, which does not encourage revenge, but buries that situation from the express recognition of its existence.

For this reason, it is one thing to remember and quite another to be trapped in the tunnel of time and live in the rancor of bitterness.

More information

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Sharing traumatic memories with loved ones (in necessary cases with the therapist) helps to name and emotionally process what a person has experienced.

Reliving is not the same as remembering.

It is not about erasing, but about overwriting a new way of remembering those negative emotions and turning a traumatic past into a biographical past.

In this way, traumatic experiences are reintegrated, already digested, into a person's biography in the form of painful memories, but not determinants of current and future life.

In short, the objective experiences of the past are unchangeable, but the perception of these experiences can be changed and this can transform the course of present life.

And this is how people stop being shipwrecked, shaken by the ghosts of the past, to resume control of their lives and become navigators of their future.

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