Complex trauma & memories
For a long time I felt afraid that if I didn’t remember everything that happened to me then I wouldn’t heal, but I also felt really afraid to remember everything.
Since becoming a therapist that works primarily with trauma, and continuing my own journey without remembering everything, I’ve learned that remembering can look a lot of different ways and that remembering everything is not necessary.
The reality is that sometimes our body remembers what our mind cannot. We feel these memories in the form of sensations, anxiety, or just a general sense that something bad happened.
Sometimes trauma happens when we are so little that we don’t have words or a framework yet to make sense of it. Instead it informs our very conception of ourselves and the world.
Sometimes to survive what has happened we dissociate so completely that we don’t remember what happened in a clear and concise narrative. Trauma memory can be stored differently from regular memory.
We remember what we have been through, just not always in a way that can be easily communicated or understood. Instead we may live in a minefield of procedural memories that are constantly eliciting sensations that feel intolerable and sending us messages to avoid anything reminiscent of our trauma. The sensations may not totally make sense to us.
The key is not always to make that which is implicit, explicit, but to restore a sense of safety in our being by slowly increasing our window of tolerance around that which our body remembers. This may help our bodies complete an unfinished survival response. This may result in certain experiences becoming more clear but it also may not.
We can attend to and honour what our body remembers. Our culture asks for a narrative that is perfectly clear, linear and detailed. This does harm to folks who have survived horrendous things and yet cannot put words or a narrative to it.
Your sense of what happened is enough. Your inner knowing is enough. You don’t need to remember in the ways that our culture emphasizes in order to heal.
