Your Brain on Trauma

When we experience trauma, accessing those memories can be fraught for many reasons. Some of these reasons include, forgetting key aspects, having a scattered recollection of timing of events, and feeling activated when these memories are triggered. A study published in Nature Neuroscience (original study, summary from YaleNews) may help us understand why. In this study, participants with a diagnosis of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were given information to recall sad, neutral, and traumatic memories. Researchers found that individuals had distinct brain patterns while recalling traumatic memories vs neutral/sad memories. The specific patterns suggest that the experience is not similar to other experiential memory recall and suggests that it may be challenging to differentiate traumatic memories as happening in the past vs in the present.

While a lot of people trained in understanding trauma may have had the knowledge of how trauma is recalled and how activating it is to recall, this provides more data on the fact that it is a totally different experience than average memory recall. This is some compelling evidence for changing how we treat trauma. This also means that you can feel validated that it is totally normal for you to feel activated and scattered when recalling your traumatic memories.

If you want help in processing your trauma, please reach out to a trained professional to help you.

As always, take what is helpful and leave the rest. I hope you have the week you need.

Perl, O., Duek, O., Kulkarni, K.R. et al. Neural patterns differentiate traumatic from sad autobiographical memories in PTSD. Nat Neurosci 26, 2226–2236 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01483-5