Read an old letter, personal journal, or newspaper article. Listen to an old song that you or someone in your family loved. Cook a meal your mom or dad used to make for you. Smell something that may jog your memory, like a book, pillow, perfume, or food.
Many researchers and mental health professionals do agree it may be possible to repress and later recover memories, but many also generally agree this is most likely quite rare. Some experts believe memories may be repressed, but that once these memories are lost, they can't be recovered.
Processing repressed memories is critical to long term health; thus, understanding motivated forgetting and the risks of false memory associated with recovered memories is highly important during treatment.
Trauma Blocking: Driven to Distract After a painful experience, some people may choose to face their feelings head-on while others would rather forget. The latter can manifest as trauma blocking, where someone chooses to block and drown out painful feelings that hang around after an ordeal.
Trauma and Memory
Stress and fear can cause your brain to vividly remember events to protect you later in life. However, the brain can also repress or push traumatic memories aside, allowing a person to cope and move forward.
For some people, the tremors are big movements in the muscles. For others, they are tiny contractions that feel like electrical frequencies moving through the body. TRE® is not painful—in fact, most people enjoy the sensations.
Memory and other thinking problems have many possible causes, including depression, an infection, or medication side effects. Sometimes, the problem can be treated, and cognition improves. Other times, the problem is a brain disorder, such as Alzheimer's disease, which cannot be reversed.
“Stress, an extra-busy day, poor sleep and even some medications can interfere with making and recalling memories,” Yasar says. “And we all have moments when a name or the title of a movie is right on the tip of the tongue, but those events are different from the kinds of lapses that may be warning signs for dementia.”
Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event. Most people who go through traumatic events may have temporary difficulty adjusting and coping, but with time and good self-care, they usually get better.
Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect. Most responses are normal in that they affect most survivors and are socially acceptable, psychologically effective, and self-limited.
Treatment for trauma
By concentrating on what's happening in your body, you can release pent-up trauma-related energy through shaking, crying, and other forms of physical release. Cognitive-behavioral therapy helps you process and evaluate your thoughts and feelings about a trauma.
If you can recall times when you've overreacted, and perhaps have even been surprised at your own reactions, this may be a sign of trauma. It's not uncommon for people suffering from emotional trauma to have feelings of shame and self-blame.
Attachment and relationships
Another warning flag of childhood trauma that carries over into adulthood are problems forming attachments and relationships. For example, if your childhood trauma was caused by a loved one or caregiver, you may learn to mistrust adults.
Unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, relationship problems and physical symptoms like headaches or nausea are some of the ways that unresolved trauma can manifest, according to the American Psychological Association.
Repressed memories are memories that have been unconsciously blocked due to the memory being associated with a high level of trauma. Typical incidents where repressed memory occurs in individuals include rape, child sexual abuse, incest, experience of war, and the loss of a loved one.
Repressed memory occurs when trauma is too severe to be kept in conscious memory, and is removed by repression or dissociation or both. At some later time it may be recalled, often under innocuous circumstances, and reappears in conscious memory.
repression, in psychoanalytic theory, the exclusion of distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings from the conscious mind. Often involving sexual or aggressive urges or painful childhood memories, these unwanted mental contents are pushed into the unconscious mind.
Effects of Unresolved Trauma
Not only can it lead to psychological distress, such as depression, anxiety, and flashbacks, but it can also cause physical symptoms like headaches and fatigue. Unfortunately, these concerns often go unrecognized or ignored for long periods of time.
Traumatic memories rerouted and hidden away
Memories are usually stored in distributed brain networks including the cortex, and can thus be readily accessed to consciously remember an event.
In some cases, your brain can change bad memories to shield you from the aftereffects of pain, abuse or trauma. It's a kind of “voluntary-but-invisible” forgetting that's very effective.
Smiling is a way to “protect” therapists.
By downplaying their pain they are attempting to minimize the upset they believe they are causing. Laughing while recounting something painful says, “I'm OK, you don't have to take care of me. ' Instead, clients are actually attempting to take care of their therapists.