Your Unremembered Past (the kinds of memory)

I'm back in Montreal now, giving luff to the cats and settling in. Onto today's show.

 

The Dr Siegal book Mindsight has a great chapter on trauma, specifically on memory. There are apparently two kinds: implicit and explicit. Explicit memory comes when we're about one year old and the hippocampus emerges, and it's the place where you learn facts and figures, and create your biography. Implicit memory comes from birth or before, and takes the form of sensations that you record in the body, but don't remember recording. When you remember implicit memories, you experience them like they're in the present. This can mean flashbacks, or mysterious body pain, or avoiding certain things without knowing why, or numbing.

 

He gives a great example of a doctor studying a woman who didn't have any explicit memory. So every day when he came, she wouldn't remember him. One day when he came in and shook her hand, he had a pin in his hand and pricked her. The next day when he arrives, she wouldn't shake his hand.

 

He treated a woman who'd been raped during a heavy rainfall. She disassociated from the rape while it was happening, so didn't have an explicit memory of the details. But one day she was showering with her boyfriend and the sound set off the implicit memories, which is something you can't disassociate from. That is to say, the feeling of being raped. She was overcome by the feeling, and it felt like it was her boyfriend doing it to her.

Siegal works with such patients to go in and retrieve those fragmented memories, while keeping them grounded in the moment--to make implicit memories explicit. Something you're not reliving. Something you can look at, integrate with your biography to create a whole story, reflect on, and then release.

When we have an unremembered implicit memory, our brains are likely to come up rationalizations for why we feel a certain way--we think we're making logical decisions. Or decisions based on trustworthy intuition. When in reality we might be making a decision based on something negative. Like his patient who was reluctant to try new experiences because when learning to ride a bike she fell off and broke her arm.

C'est intéressant, n'est-ce pas?