Research Essay: The Complexity of Traumatic Memory

           This is a topic you will find that is personal to me. Initially, I chose to research the reliability of traumatic memory and with peer editing added in the variable of how it applies to the real world. The essay is proving two points simultaneously: memory is complex and there are few personnel that are truly qualified to properly assist a subject to extract traumatic memories while keeping in mind the subject's well-being. 

The Complexity of Traumatic Memory

“Regardless of whether one accepts the concept of traumatic amnesia … memory does not operate like a video tape, emotionality does not confirm veracity, and implicit memory cannot simply be translated into narrative memory” (Colin et. al.). When I was eight, I was diagnosed with a chronic, incurable condition known as Hydrocephalus and have had ten brain surgeries since to treat it. One of the worst years, medically-speaking, was 2017 and I can only remember bits and pieces of it. It was filled with trauma after trauma, and my brain protected me and is still trying to protect me from fully experiencing the events of that year. As someone with post-traumatic stress disorder, I can say that my memory is tainted by pain felt, and is faulty in terms of the chronological order of events and my perception. Thankfully, the accuracy of my memory has not been scrutinized in a congressional hearing, but if it were, there would be strong eye-witness evidence which would prove my testimony somewhat incomplete and inaccurate. Although human memory is complex and varied, traumatic memory is less reliable than general memory because the brain is not naturally able to experience and recount trauma. Traumatic memory, as said before, is tainted by extreme emotion while recalling when you put away dishes yesterday is easily recalled with little to no emotion. When a criminal investigation is being held, the criminal investigator/psychologist has only two agendas: to know what happened and to build a profile (“Forensic Psychology vs. Clinical Psychology: Choosing a Path.”). Neither of those agendas will result in the most accurate recall because from experience, you must feel and cope with the pain of a memory before knowing what exactly caused it.

Everyone knows the catchy phrase, “fight or flight”. It represents how one responds to a situation that their brain deems as life or death. You can either fight the subject(s) that you feel are a harm to you or you can run from them. But the phrase “fight or flight” forgets to mention the “freeze” response to traumatic events. A phrase one hears from sexual assault victims and other victims of trauma when explaining what happened during it is, “I froze”, “I didn’t know what to do” (“What Happens to the Brain During a Sexual Assault?”). This is the freeze response. The inaccuracy of traumatic memory is mainly caused by protective mechanisms in the brain. One natural tendency to avoid the “overwhelming traumatic experience” is called “dissociation.” Dissociation in the brain works like circuits on a house. When an event triggers a flood of overwhelming emotions, the brain shuts it all off. This is not a physical escape; it’s a psychological escape that is a “compartmentalization” in which “aspects of psychological function that should be associated… are not” (Lanius par. 1). This separates the person’s mind and spirit from the ongoing event and from experiencing the event to its’ full extent. Recalling traumatic memory is complex due to the handful of protective mechanisms the brain can choose from. Only a licensed clinical psychologist can properly handle this due to their extensive knowledge and agenda of the health of the patient in recalling trauma.

            The heavier, or more traumatic, the trauma, the more “likelihood that an individual will be driven into an altered state of conscious” (Lanius par.2). This means, the more traumatic something is to a person, the more they dissociate from it. Based on my personal experience, during and after a trauma, my brain could be in survival mode, as known as dissociation, for a period of time. This constant mental state of survival and reliving the trauma can lead to a decrease in the mass of the hippocampus and amygdala; hence, making memory recall more difficult and dissociation from the trauma more likely (Toth and Cicchetti 592, 594-597). The hippocampus and amygdala are parts of the brain known for controlling and regulating emotion and memory (Hayes 1-4, 8-11). So, it would make sense those parts of the brain are being affected. If those parts of the brain are decreasing in mass, they are becoming deformed, which would directly cause memory problems. The brain will protect itself to the extent of destroying itself and induce separation of consciousness and awareness to attempt avoiding a constant state of being “overruled” by emotions (Ehlers 142). What makes the brain dissociate from a situation is the highly emotional state it forces the brain to go into. Since the brain of a victim of trauma is trying to protect him/her from the event(s), when having to recall those memories, the subject will lack important detail and facts, chronological order, self-awareness and possess a skewed perception of the memory due to the overwhelming emotions (Ehlers 141-143). Unlike traumatic memories, general memories don’t send the brain into survival mode or affect the subject’s emotional health and physical health, an indicator that general memory isn’t processed the same as traumatic memory. Since protective mechanisms can cause gaps in memory, a clinical psychologist can help with memory recall techniques that they get education in during school. Doing this, a subject will be more likely to recall a memory without the full emotional charge.            

General memory and traumatic memory differ in terms of the easiness of processing and ability to recall. Since traumatic memories are more difficult to recall and for the brain to process and store, this would imply that general, mundane memories, are easier for the brain to store, encode, and interpret (Ehlers 141-143). This means that the brain does not easily store and process traumatic memory because trauma itself is not an enjoyable experience. To support the point that trauma memory is more difficult for the brain to accurately encode further, studies conclude that “people tend to remember more trauma than they experienced” better explained as “memory amplification” (Strange and Takarangi par. 2). For example, if multiple people were to experience the same traumatic event together, each person would have a memory of things that are significant to the individual; hence, details important to each person will be amplified and presented as an accurate memory. When a person is trying to recall a memory that doesn’t have “the origins of each individual detail,” he uses “heuristics”, our natural, instant thought about a certain event (Strange and Takarangi par. 2). To put it another way, every time a subject recalls a traumatic memory, their initial thought or emotion tied to the memory will taint that memory. When he or she uses “heuristics” to recall a traumatic, distant memory, those memories can be easily distorted and include details that never happened and have a fake, yet believable “sense of familiarity” (Strange and Takarangi par. 2).  For example, when I was enduring medical trauma last year, I projected that trauma on to my relationships and all I could think is that those people hated me when in fact, it was only the initial emotion that seemed to define the memory of the relationships.  Freud, although he had some very controversial beliefs, also had a theory that coerces with this idea and makes it even more complex. Memories are always being rearranged in our mind every time we process it throughout our life. The brain rearranges our memories throughout life based on more current experiences and decides what it should revise (Kennedy 186). This is why something that didn’t seem traumatic as a child could become traumatic as an adult. A lot of my childhood, as I look back, was not a cookie-cutter little girl in the suburbs as I thought it was. This realization and having to go back through it in therapy traumatized me for a few years because once I aged and developed critical thinking, it then became traumatic. More research done by Sheree L. Toth and Dante Cicchetti suggests that subjects can’t accurately encode memories due to the natural dissociative state of the brain when experiencing trauma and recalling (reexperiencing) trauma (592). Their point is that if the subject experienced trauma in a mental state where their brain has shut off itself from the real world, how could the subject accurately recall the event? Some researchers disagree and introduce an opposite, yet evolutionary mechanism of the brain called “hypervigilance.” Even if this were the case, then the traumatized subject would still need to be able to be in a safe, nonobjective environment to explore their trauma.

For many years the fact that traumatic memory is unreliable has been widely accepted by researchers, but recently, for a congressional hearing of Justice resulted in a sexual assault accusation known as the “Kavanaugh Trial.” This incident brought the reliability of traumatic memory into serious question (Chatterjee 142). In “ "How Trauma Affects Memory: Scientists Weigh In On The Kavanaugh Hearing," Rhitu Chatterjee addresses the controversial trial regarding a sexual assault accusation made by Christine Ford against Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh that occurred over 35 years ago. The controversy in this trial is not the sexual assault itself but the fact that Mrs. Ford was able to thoroughly recall and tell the events that happened on the night of her alleged rape. Chatterjee explores this ability to recall traumatic events and uses research performed by Jim Hopper at Harvard University, in which he finds that “What we pay attention to is what is more likely to get encoded” (qtd. in Chatterjee); In simpler terms, mundane, everyday tasks are more likely to be forgotten rather than those that have “emotional significance” (Chatterjee). Richard McNally at Harvard University also supports this conclusion with the assumption that when a traumatic event happens ones “hippocampus [goes] into a super-encoding mode… The central details [of the event] get burned into their memory”  (qtd. in Chatterjee) and are “highly accessible” (Ehlers 143). Yet, with vivid, recountable memories, the “peripheral details” are usually not encoded (Chatterjee). Additionally, it’s important to note that evidence supporting the reliability of traumatic memories due to hypervigilance is all but nonexistent pre-Kavanaugh’s congressional hearing and in abundance post-Kavanaugh. From personal experience, I can say that there are flashes of images that I can vividly recount, but the memories themselves are out-of-order and dramatized. My question for this hypervigilance theory is how does one’s brain, during a traumatic event, pick what details are important or not? Well, it’s usually what is threatening their well-being. An example given by Richard Mcnally PhD and others, if someone were to get robbed at gun-point, they are more like to remember the gun than the robber’s face (et al. 819). Of course the brain would focus on the thing that is intended to kill them rather than their robber’s face. Our brain will focus on sensory and high-risk objects so, how could we expect to let memory to be scrutinized in a congressional hearing based on what information a rushed investigator has managed to pull out from a person’s memory. Getting a clinical psychologist to interact and extract memories will be slower but more beneficial to the patient’s health and the most accurate it could be.

When it comes to memory, general memory is easier to accurately retrieve than traumatic memory due to the protective mechanism of the brain, dissociation. The counter-arguments presented are supported by mostly political-based research and are contradicted by many reliable researchers stating that traumatic memory is unreliable. It is not my purpose to question the trauma that happened to individuals but to bring awareness on just how unreliable and difficult to navigate traumatic memory can be in comparison to general memory. Based on the fragility of memory in the evidence of this essay, the actions that should be taken, whether it’s in a court of law or not, only a licensed expert should help the victim process their trauma and help dilute the strong, unmanageable emotions that come with it.  A court psychologist will have a bias. The bias of the objective to figure out the what, when and where of the event but they don’t have the education in psychology as much as clinical psychologists. Clinical psychologists must at least get a master’s degree and most end up getting a PhD. While court psychologists only have to get a bachelor’s degree and are able to go straight into the field (“Forensic Psychology vs. Clinical Psychology: Choosing a Path.”). Two years is not enough time to learn about the brain let alone, how traumatic experiences affect its memory. In conclusion, there is still much more research to be done in this subject but it can confidently be said that traumatic memory is more difficult for the brain to process and therefore, requires a professional who has studied for years and has no objective other than for the patient to extract traumatic memories in a healthy way.

Works Cited

Lanius, Ruth A. “Trauma-related dissociation and altered states of consciousness: a call for clinical, treatment, and neuroscience research” European journal of psychotraumatology vol. 6 27905. 19 May. 2015, doi:10.3402/ejpt.v6.27905. Accessed 4 March 2020.

Ehlers, Anke. “Understanding and Treating Unwanted Trauma Memories in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” Zeitschrift fur Psychologie vol. 218, no. 2, 2010, pp. 141-145. Accessed 4 March 2020.

Chatterjee, Rhitu. "How Trauma Affects Memory: Scientists Weigh In On The Kavanaugh Hearing". NPR, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/28/652524372/how-trauma-affects-memory-scientists-weigh-in-on-the-kavanaugh-hearing. Accessed 4 March 2020.

TOTH, SHEREE L., and DANTE CICCHETTI . “Remembering, Forgetting, and the Effects of

Trauma on Memory: A Developmental Psychopathology Perspective .” Development and Psychopathology, vol. 10, no. 4, 1998, pp. 589–605. Accessed 4 March 2020.

Strange, Deryn and Melanie Takarangi . “Memory distortion for Traumatic Events: The Role of Mental Imagery” Frontiers in psychiatry vol. 6 27. 23 Feb. 2015, doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00027. Accessed 4 March 2020.

"memory, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/116363. Accessed 4 March 2020.

"trauma, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/205242. Accessed 4 March 2020.

"Memory | Psychology". Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/science/memory-psychology. Accessed 4 March 2020.

Hayes, Jasmeet Pannu et al. “Reduced hippocampal and amygdala activity predicts memory distortions for trauma reminders in combat-related PTSD” Journal of psychiatric research vol. 45,5 (2010): 660-9. Accessed 4 March 2020.

Cameron Colin, Alexandra Heber, and Richard J. McNally. "Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory." Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 51, no. 6, 2006, pp. 402-3. ProQuest, https://search.proquest.com/docview/222804441?accountid=39906. Accessed 4 March 2020.

Kennedy, Roger. “Memory and the Unconscious.” Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, Fordham University Press, NEW YORK, 2010, pp. 179–197. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c999bq.16. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

N.A. “Forensic Psychology vs. Clinical Psychology: Choosing a Path.” Maryville Online, Maryville University, online.maryville.edu/vs/forensic-psychology-vs-clinical-psychology/.

N.A. “What Happens to the Brain During a Sexual Assault?” Acasa.us, ACASA, acasa.us/what-happens-to-the-brain-during-a-sexual-assault/.