My Body’s Memory Exceeds My Mind’s…

I can’t remember which class it was where Dan said that memory is fiction, but I was reminded of his words in the midst of our last reading pod discussion as we talked about memory being subjective, personal, fluid, adaptive, and reconstructive. When it comes trauma, one’s subjective memory of the traumatic experience is what is important, not someone else’s recollection or take on the ‘facts.’ Treating an individual according to the takeaways in his or her own memory of the traumatic event is what enables the person to move from the rigidity of what is recalled or triggered based on the traumatic experience into a space where reconstruction is possible. If a person is living in a loop of perpetual horror from their trauma, then the aspects of the utmost importance reside in the particulars of the traumatic events that inhabit and torment the individual.

Regardless of facts or other people’s recollections, the traumatized individual is left affected, imprinted with a felt sense of the experience that is carried in his or her body even if it has been tossed out of memory because it is too much to bear. In his book Trauma and Memory, Peter Levine devotes an entire chapter to exploring generational trauma. In this chapter, he recounts studies of mice who were exposed to traumatic conditions; the most interesting point is how future generations — up to four generations — of mice carried the fear response to the original stimuli even though they had never been directly exposed to the conditioned shock of their great-great-grandparents. If this is true, then none of us come into the world unscathed, but then I’m pretty sure we’ve each come to that conclusion already — at least over the last two years in grad school, if not before.

In his piece on Memory, David Whyte says, “…We can be overwhelmed, traumatized, made smaller by the tide that brought us here, we can even be drowned and disappeared by memory; or we can spin a cocoon of insulation to protect ourselves and bob along passively in the wake of what we think has occurred, but we also have other more engaging possibilities; memory in a sense, is the very essence of the conversation we hold as individual human beings. A full inhabitation of memory makes human beings conscious, a living connection between what has been, what is and what is about to be. Memory is the living link to personal freedom.” I agree with Levine that by following the threads of physical and mental memories of trauma within the containment of a safe relationship and environment, the avenues to healing will present themselves. That the Lord designed us with adaptive memories that have the capacity to be reconstructed in order to diminish the paralyzing hold of the past offers possibilities of both hope and liberation from the overriding effects of trauma.