Hi All,
I know I'm late to the thread but I wanted to take a shot at answering this one. I believe we process the trauma in order to free ourselves in two ways: from the memories and they're ongoing affects and the behaviors we've developed to avoid those memories.
When something happens to us, there are processes in the brain, especially in the hippocampus that process what happened, how we felt about it, make sense of it and then store it as a normal biographical memory. If I asked you what you had for breakfast yesterday or who your fifth grade teacher was (if you can remember) this would be the kind of memory you'd be recalling. In this case, if the memory was properly processed, then you could remember you emotions but in a distant, yes I felt that way but I'm not feeling that way now kind of way. During trauma though, which by it's very definition means that it's overwhelming, the intense levels of fear actually take the hippocampus off line, so there is no processing, sorting or fitting the experience into your self-narrative. It just gets put away raw. Current research seems to indicate that traumatic memories are actually stored in a different part of the brain from biographical memories.
Your sense of time and logic are both within your left brain which is your cognitive center. Your emotions and creatitivty are in your right brain which has no sense of time. So when a traumatic memory gets triggered, you not so much remembering as you "experiencing" it as happening in the moment. The emotions are raw and powerful and very much there. It's not remembering how you were feeling, it's feeling it. These are not fun memories, they are not of good experiences and often, when they happened they felt so overwhelming that we feared actual annihilation. When we have not faced or processed those memories, they are stil there, even if they are out of our consciousness and to our right brain, that has no sense of time, they are in some sense, still happening. So if we go near a situation that in some way reminds us of the original situation around a traumatic memory (i.e. triggers us) then the emotions and sense of danger come back in a way that your right brain/limbic system experience as happening RIGHT NOW not in the past, this in turn wil trigger your fight, flight or freeze mechnisms. Which can look odd to the people around you and make you feel like a crazy person because everyone's left brain, including yours, recognizes that nothing that dangerous is actually going on in the here and now.
So in an attempt to keep us safe, our mind starts avoiding anything that might remind us of those memories. But that means that in many situations, our choices become very limited. We can go there or do that because it feels very dangerous. We become rigid in our responses and often the strategies that we used to survive, that were utterly necessary at the time, are now hurting us.
But if we can find a safe place and a safe person to help contain us and finally approach those memories (slowly and only as fast as we can bear), then we can "experience" them and teach our right brain that there really isn't any danger anymore. We also can sort through and process them and work them into our narrative so that they become stored as a biographical memory. Not a real pleasant one and one that will probably always evoke some sadness, but one that will no longer overwhelm us. And as we do this, we no longer have to keep avoiding situtations and places that used to feel dangerous, so that a lot more choices open up and we become much more flexible in our ability to respond to what life throws at us.
Not to mention that it takes an enormous amount of energy to hold this stuff down. It's not all that bad when you're younger but at least for me, as I got older they "pushed" harder. Whether or not you're conscious of the memories, they still drive you in so many ways. They can make you so scared to feel that you shut down and lose so much valuable information about who you are and what makes life worth living.
It's horrible when you start looking at this stuff. You would not have pushed it away so hard and so long if it hadn't been really painful. And it feels life-threatening to face it, because it was life-threatening when it happend. It's a hellish thing to have to do. Unfortunately, it's the only way to heal from it. But there's a lot of pain along the way and it really is a person's choice how much they want to look at and let out and how far they're willing to go. Only they can know if it's worth it to them. My T often said that who was he to tell someone they had to face that kind of pain.
For me, as painful as it was to go through, I feel like the healing I found was worth it, which is why I often encourage people to stay with the process. But it took me a really long time over a long span of years to get through it and I have been blessed with a lot of good people (not to mention two amazing Ts) in my life. So, like my T, I know that what was true for me may not be true for everyone.
AG
