Peter A. Levine Ph.D. - Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past: A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory

Memory is the selection of images; some elusive; others printed indelibly on the brain. Each image is like a thread each thread woven together to make a tapestry of intricate textures. And the tapestry tells a story. And the story is our past Like others before me, I have the gift of sight. But the truth changes color depending on the light. And tomorrow can be clearer than yesterday.

E VES B AYOU, SCREENPLAY BY K ASI L EMMONS

In early 2015, Brian Williams, a highly respected journalist and broadcast media star, retreated in shame and defeat over lying and inflating his exposure to extreme threat in his warfront coverage. We now know these facts: Williams was flying behind a helicopter that had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Over time, his story mutated to a version where he recounted that he was riding in the helicopter that came under fire. Public and pundits alike were astonished that he would risk his reputation with such specious heroism and self-aggrandizement. We all asked ourselves how we could have been duped by this sincere and earnest reporter.

Yet consider other similar missteps by public figures: Hillary Rodham Clinton once claimed that she was under sniper fire in Bosnia, only to later admit that she had her facts wrong. Not to be partisan, let us not forget that Mitt Romney remembered a Detroit jubilee that took place nine months before he was born! Are all of these notables outright liars, or is something else going on? The real answer is that these kinds of memory distortions, particularly when laid down in times of high stress and danger, are something to which we are all readily susceptible. On a lighter note, we can identify with Romneys pre-birth memories, as many of us have incorporated a family photo or oft-repeated story into our factually recalled personal reminiscences. Indeed, the meaning we attach to a particular event can have a significant effect on the content of that memory. In the words of the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler: Out of the incalculable number of impressions which meet an individual, he chooses to remember those which he feels, however darkly, to have a bearing on his situation.

Aristotle believed that humans are born as a tabula rasaa blank slateand that we are the product of a life imprinted as a series of memories, just as an impression is made in wax. However, memory is no such thing; we must live with the uncomfortable acceptance that memory is simply not something concrete, definitive, and reproducible, like a video recording that can be retrieved at will. It is instead more ephemeral, ever-shifting in shape and meaning. Memory is not a discrete phenomenon, a fixed construction, cemented permanently onto a stone foundation. Rather, it is more like a fragile house of cards, perched precariously upon the shifting sands of time, at the mercy of interpretation and confabulation. Indeed, memory is a continual reconstruction, more akin to the wayward, wildly unpredictable electrons in Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. Just as the very act of observing electrons changes their position or momentum, so does the warp and woof of memory interweave to yield a soft fabric that changes hue and contour with the movement of light and shadow throughout the day and over the seasons.

Literature and film have long been fascinated by the fallacies of memory. The fragility and inherent subjectivity of memory are brilliantly portrayed in Akira Kurosawas 1950 film Rashomon, in which four characters each recall their starkly contrasting memories of the same event. Just as in the movie, memory is like a fleeting dream: Just as one tries to grasp it, memory slips away, leaving us with the stark consolation that the ever-changing eye of the beholder may be the only truly reliable defining quality of recollection. So can we observe our memories without changing them in the process of recall? The short answer is no.

Philosophers and filmmakers, along with a growing number of contemporary cognitive neuroscientists, question the validity of recollection per se. Mark Twain once confessed, I am an old man and I have known a great number of misfortunes, but most of them never happened. In other words, his immediate and current misery caused him to remember (i.e., construct) events that never really happened. Indeed, recent research resoundingly demonstrates that memory is a reconstructive process that is continuously selecting, adding, deleting, rearranging, and updating informationall to serve the ongoing adaptive process of survival and living.

In the following chapters well explore the implications of the mutability of memory, as well as pursue an understanding of the types of memory that pertain specifically to trauma. A central premise to be explored in this work is that our present feeling state may be the major factor determining what and how we remember a particular event. Indeed, first changing our current feeling state is a sine qua non for effective work with traumatic memories. What has been poorly understood in clinical work with traumatic memories is that our present mood, emotions, and somatic sensations (generated for whatever reasons) profoundly influence what we are remembering. Remembered images and thoughts that appear in our field of awareness are evoked and (unconsciously) selected to match our current emotional state. Our current moods and sensations play a key role in