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Your personality and actions are influenced by the memories you have. Memory loss or challenging recollections occasionally bring anxiety, worry, anger, and despair. Remaining in these moods can make recovering difficult and even frightening, specifically if your memories are connected to terrible experiences. Studies reveal a link between memories and instances of emotional, psychological, or bodily stress.
If the trauma is not handled, some of your lapses, blocking, or avoidance of particular memories may serve as a temporary coping mechanism. Learning how trauma might impact your memories can help you decide on the right course of action for therapy and even aid in regaining control over your emotions, such as rage, anxiety, tension, and despair. A psychologist can help you overcome your trauma issues.
Shift Grit’s registered Calgary psychologists specialize in trauma-related therapy and can help you address underlying trauma impacting your emotional and psychological well-being. Their standard and alternative treatment approaches can aid in managing emotions and impulses, leading to a greater sense of peace and harmony in your life.
Mental Health and Trauma
Stress can result from trauma both immediately and over time. Also, stress reactions can affect the cortex, amygdala, and frontal cortex, among other brain areas. According to studies on the effects of traumatic experiences, these brain regions may alter in volume, structure, and function. These brain regions are strongly associated with memory retention, which is not coincidental.
The prefrontal cortex assists in processing working memory, which is the information you need to recall often. While memory recall, such as where you left your car keys the night before, is handled by the right hippocampus, the left hippocampus controls memorization and recognition. The hippocampus also can compare recent and prior events. The cortex also deals with memories of terror, such as burning your palm on a hot grill and learning never to touch one again. The amygdala also contributes to long-term memory.
PTSD and Trauma
Post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes known as PTSD, may result from a terrible incident. However, they can also result from various occurrences, such as mishaps, attacks, natural catastrophes, and the current epidemic. Such experiences are frequently associated with war-based situations. Acute, long-lasting, and delayed beginning PTSD symptoms are all possible; the latter occurs when the signs don’t start to show up until a long time after the traumatic incident. Anger outbursts, illogical conduct, loneliness, remorse, and humiliation may occur when a PTSD episode is in progress. Different sorts of trauma might lead to short-term or long-term issues with memory.
Physical Trauma and Memories
Stress on your body might impair your memory. Physical damage from accidents or severe head injuries might impair your brain’s ability to take in and store facts. A loss in cognitive ability, and remarkable memory, can result from long-term alcohol and drug abuse.
Let’s say you display symptoms of drinking or a substance use problem. If so, you could be causing nerve damage to both your peripheral and central nervous systems, which could impede your ability to remember things, solve problems, and learn new things. A person may experience transient memory loss when coping with critical injuries or persistent substance use that further sets off PTSD. The severity of the damage or the extent of your addiction determines how long the memory loss lasts.
The trauma of the Mind or Emotions
Humans use memory loss as a coping technique and survival strategy to protect themselves from psychological injury. After acts of violence, sexual assault, and other highly distressing events, dissociative amnesia can develop, enabling the victim to adapt by forgetting the specifics of the experience. When dealing with this kind of PTSD, you can put off recalling events until you are ready. However, if you don’t take the essential steps, you might never have to.
When some memories are suppressed, the traumatic occurrence is blocked, but as a result, you may momentarily forget your identity, experience despair, or become disoriented. Relationships and routine chores that are a part of everyday life may suffer due to the episodes, which can be mild or severe. A few symptoms of PTSD include flashbacks, unsettling thoughts, and buried memories. If you don’t deal with the memory, it might resurface at any point and cause your brain to experience the trauma again.