Recovering Memories

Experience, relationships, events, circumstances, and conversations pave the path of a person’s life, of which many are unavoidable or unpredictable. But all carry associations that run the spectrum from euphoria to trauma, leaving him to wish they could be repeated in the first case and avoided in the second one.

Once experienced, these moments, like tapes, can only be rerun and remembered, but not regenerated in reality. Like pieces, they combine into the puzzle the person becomes, regardless of where on the emotional spectrum they lie. They mold, shape, and impact him, and, in the event of recovery or healing, they release him from areas in which he has been entrapped when they are finally accessed.

Memories are recordings of sometime life-changing or transforming experiences. Positive ones can include the day a person graduated from college, was accepted at his first job, got married, and won the lottery. Negative ones can include losses, such as of a spouse, and traumas, as occur during accidents and earthquakes.

Memory Effects

While everyone has countless memories, their ability to access them vary according to several factors.

One of them is the meaning a person attaches to them because of individual importance or significance.

“We have a system in our brains that tags memories as important in some way so we’ll remember them in the future,” according to Dr. Andrew Budson, a neurologist and Chief of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology at the VA Boston Healthcare System, as reported in Harvard Health Publishing’s “Tips to Retrieve Old Memories” article (April 1, 2021).

Although these memories are more easily accessible than those considered less significant, there are other factors that determine their recallability.

One of them is time. As a person continues to experience new aspects in his life, memories of his previous and older ones begin to fade with its passage, prompting him to focus on what is ahead instead of behind.

Another aspect is age. The brain changes with it and over time, the person is less able to reach all the way back and rekindle some of the events, people, and experiences that shaped his life.

Aids to Jarring Positive Memories

While it may not always be possible to instantly recall something that happened—and the lower its importance, the more difficult that ability will become—there are aids to doing so.

“To activate an old memory, you must think about the senses that were engaged as the memory was being recorded,” according to the “Tips to Retrieve Old Memories” article (ibid). “That’s because, as you experienced something special or important, your perceptions--images, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, thoughts, or feelings—were being stored in one part of the brain (the cortex) and then bound together as a memory by another part of the brain (the hippocampus) and tagged so the frontal lobes could retrieve the pattern of information later.”

Cues or prompts, such as old photographs, report cards, yearbooks, songs, movies, childhood toys, a cashmere coat, and reminisces with a friend or a relative, serve as sensory paths to past experiences, jarring the memories associated with them. Once the connection has been established, it is easier to recall them in the future and they often serve as thresholds to additional details or even other, related incidents. Like knobs turned in the present, they open doors to the past.

Cues such as nursery rhymes, coloring, and humming childhood-appropriate tunes can access early experiences.

“These activities tend to access areas of your subconscious that you have not visited for many years,” according to the Adult Children of Alcoholics textbook (World Service Organization, 2006, p. 306). “Feelings and memories will emerge if you are consistent with these methods.”

“Our memory holds the key to living fully human lives in the present full of feelings, hope, and spirituality,” it also advises (ibid, p. 304).

Negative Memories

Negative memories, which themselves encompass times when a person’s salary was reduced to those of full-blown, survival-threatening trauma, are not so easy to access. Aside from their unpleasant nature, they can regenerate degrees of emotional discharge and even physiological sensations, and for this reason, a person often deliberately implements a number of strategies to minimize or eliminate their effects. These include avoidance, unknowingly recreating neuropathways in the brain that circumvent such evocations, denial, dissociation (detachment from their emotional effects to bypass their charge), repression (the unconscious act of burying feelings and emotions until they are no longer within the person’s awareness or reach), and suppression (which is continuous repression). The purpose of all of them is the same—namely, to protect the person from mental, emotional, physiological, and even spiritual overwhelms from which he cannot easily recover in order to re-stabilize and reregulate himself.

“Some stressful experiences, such as chronic child abuse, are so overwhelming and traumatic, that memories hide like shadows in the brain,” according to Marla Paul in her article, “How Traumatic Memories Hide in the Brian and How to Retrieve them” (Northwestern Now, August 18, 2015). “At first, hidden memories that can’t be consciously accessed may protect the individual from the emotional pain of recalling the event. But eventually, those suppressed memories can cause debilitating physiological problems, such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, or dissociative disorders.”

Positive and Negative Memory Differences

There are several fundamental differences between positive and negative memoires.

Positive ones, which are more pleasant and even enjoyable to recollect, can be jarred with cues or prompts, and generally have a cohesive sequence of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Negative ones, on the other hand, which can be more prone to re-stimulation and retriggering, return the person to the state in which they occurred, recreating, in the case of survival-threatened trauma, the fight-or-flight response that includes a release of stress hormones, elevated heart and blood pressure rates, and blood flow constrictions to the extremities. Until they are fully recovered and desensitized, they manifest themselves as senseless, sequence-devoid snippets and flashbacks. Recovering them, which could take considerable time, stabilization of the amygdala, and a very gentle approach, usually requires professional therapist and./or twelve-step program help, but it offers numerous benefits.

It reduces the emotional and physiological effects exerted in present time, leaving the person less victimized by them so that he can gain control and stability.

It enables him to re-see, reframe, reprocess, and learn from them, usually through more mature adult eyes, facilitating his further assessment of their severity and ill-effects.

They release the person from what could be a lifelong tether to a trap in which he has been unknowingly caught.

It frees him to move ahead, now unburdened.

It fills in what may have been blanked-out periods he could neither access nor understand why he could not.

Finally, it facilitates healing and restoration, especially of those who were subjected to childhood dysfunction or abuse.

“No matter what abuse or neglect we endured, the Adult Children of Alcoholics Program helps us figure out what we are carrying inside,” the Adult Children of Alcoholics textbook concludes (op. cit., p. 34). “We are seeking a full remembrance of the childhood that goes beyond merely recounting the acts of dysfunctional parents. With a full remembrance, we revisit the feelings that came with the abuse or hypercritical behavior of the caregivers. We remember the events and we remember the feelings.”

While a person cannot change what he does not acknowledge, he cannot process the negative and adverse experiences he was subjected to if he cannot remember them.

Robert G. Waldvogel has earned the Interdisciplinary Certificate in Behavioral Health for Late Adolescence and the Emerging Adult and a Postgraduate Certificate in the Fundamentals of Cognitive Behavioral Treatment at Adelphi University’s School of Social Work. He has led Twelve-Step support groups on Long Island for almost fifteen years, and created the Adult Child Recovery-through-Writing, and the Strengthening Our Spirituality Programs taught at the Thrive Recovery Community and Outreach Center in Westbury. He is a frequent contributor to Wisdom Magazine.