A single moment can last forever in our memory . . .
Now when it’s something special, a time or an event that we hold dear, reliving memories can feel almost as good to us as the actual moment did.
But when someone’s memory keeps replaying a traumatic experience, that can cause them to relive difficult feelings of pain, fear, or helplessness over and over again . . .
. . . and this, in turn, can slow the healing process for patients recovering from trauma.
So can traumatic memories be changed?
In the video below, Peter Levine, PhD shares some key insight. Check it out – it’s about three and a half minutes.
If you want to learn more about if traumatic memories can be changed, click here to check out our series on Rethinking Trauma.
How have you helped someone work through a traumatic memory? Please share your experience in the comments section below.
Dear Dr. Levine
We have read your book more than any other author.
This trauma uniquely strips us of the ability to pay for anything, therapy included. Is there a way we can more effectively try your approach without a therapist?
If not, well shoot! – please pray for us. We are all soooo without hope that two of us have killed ourselves. One went back to work and jumped off the building and the other took pills.
Even if we could get everything back, we have lost ourselves. I went from being a gregarious and athletic “life-of-the-party” type (I even built a 2000 sq ft dance floor in my home where I had free dances) to a sick, fat, suicidal introvert. I’m jerked awake throughout the night, biting my tongue. I cry each day. I wish I had died. Most of us have complex trauma due to childhood events. Workplace bullies often pick on the vulnerable. It’s a sport to these people and they LOVE it!
That guy in Amsterdam put bullies on fMRI and EEG and showed them video of people hurting other people. IT LIT UP THEIR PLEASURE CENTERS. I’m not kidding.
We read WAKING THE TIGER + tried to “shake” off the trauma. (120 members support group all targeted at work for expulsion + mistreatment.) In civil service it takes years to fire someone so we all spent a long time in the abusive environment NOT KNOWING how sick we would become.
We lost EVERYTHING:- first physical health. Then income, career, health insurance, home, car, friends, family (unbelievable stressors on a marriage!!) I hope Peter Levine addresses workplace bullying in his lecture. This trauma uniquely strips financial and emotional resources.
(one woman stood up for me, then the bully made her the next Target. She lost her job 6 weeks after I lost mine and proceeded to lose her house, marriage, etc. She lost her mental health therapist too. She couldn’t pay for it. She had been sexually abused as a child and that therapist was important to her).
So when we finally figure out how to heal ourselves (without a therapist) what kind of life will we emerge into? It looks so bleak anyway – two of us committed suicide. Please ask Peter Levine to say something that gives us some hope.
Dr. Levine,
Just reading what Elena says below – ADOPTEES are bullied out of their jobs at a higher rate.
Martha Woods
if anybody wants to know more about us, our website is:
http://stopthebullies.home.comcast.net
We are not a company or registered charity – just a grass roots group that doesn’t deal with money at all.
Dr. Levine, Do you know how to address traumas that happened AT BIRTH…Would you be asking the Adult stuck in an infant dissociation to IMAGINE having the ability to run or scream or fight or put on a superman uniform and fly away? So far this restorying technique has done zip for me.
When the doctor used nitric oxide on my mother after my head had crested, the gas, as it is wont to do, built-up pressure in her internal cavities and caused me to catapult right out of her womb, and slam to the floor, damaging my soft cartilaginous cranium beyond recognition…developmental delay, maternal rejection, no attachment/bonding etc. I was in both parasympathetic(freeze) and sympathetic (pain) states simultaneously.
How do you address this kind of preverbal shock?
Seems like a case where the “talking cure” is at a disadvantage.
fortunately the body remembers even if the mind has repressed a memory.
Pat Ogden, in her book “Trauma and the body”
has a lot to say about this.
I’ve supported NICABM from the beginning. Thank you for the work you are doing to educate people around important psychological and health issues. I do not have the money to sign up and appreciate your offering these free interviews. They have been affirming and helpful for my own issues. — Meryl
Our support group has read some of Dr. Levine’s books.
We wish we could have therapy for our trauma.
Some of us are so sick we can’t get out of bed.
We’ve had two suicides! It’s only a short jump from killing yourself to taking someone else with you.
Isn’t it a pity these folk cannot get help with their trauma?
How can they, when the very trauma also costs them their ability to pay for therapy?
YES I Know this works. The Fear of reliving the trauma keeps one stuck in the trauma…until it’s possible to feel SAFE and work thru the trauma with the understanding that it’s time to let go of the feelings in a conscious manner.
That is, if you can remember the actual trauma. Trauma happened to me when I was three years old and it took until I was 75 years old to remember and work thru the horror that I had buried as a young child because it was “too awful” and painful to look at.
Ronnie
Please please tell me how you accomplished this. Relate to your story as had early childhood trams for several years. EMDR only retramaized me. Working with therapist, doing tapping
Any insight greatly appreciated
Laraine
Dr. Levine’s remarks in this clip match what I’ve found my way to in assisting survivors of events such as bank robberies. Their reviews of events often include a remark about “I didn’t do anything,” or “I couldn’t do anything,” “I should have done something.” At the same time, they are telling me about what they did, they signaled to an associate, or they purposely did something which kept the attention of the robber on themselves so as to keep the robber from bothering their associates, or they just backed up and cried. Those were actions, and usually quite helpful ones given the situation. But only after living with the person in their sense of helplessness do I then direct our attention to the fact that they felt helpless, and yet they actually did somethihng, perhaps many things. They were functioning. This seems to be a great relief to them, as shown by their breathing, body tension, and all the indicators we sense in themselves and in us when such turns occur.
This is my understanding of the reconstruction of memory, or reinterpretation of events and of one’s behavior. The process of reinterpretation which we have gone through may itself become a memory. That it is possible to move from recalling only the feeling of helplessness to recalling that feeling and recalling the acts one did undertake and attempt, seems to have great value.