A Time to Remember, a Time to Forget

There is something incredibly unique about traumatic memories. There seems little we can do to control them. They remain unpredictable and either the memory is sharp, all-encompassing, and repetitive, or, if the traumatic experience was powerful enough, sometimes we cannot bring the details to mind at all. Trauma lives in us long past the moment it occurred.

This week in Colin’s Corner our discussion was shaped by chapter 11 in Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: “Uncovering Secrets: the problem of traumatic memory”. The problem it would seem is that when a traumatic experience brings us past a certain level of arousal our hippo-campus shuts down — translation: if the trauma is severe enough, we stop making memories. Though this is one of the ways our brain is trying to protect us from the pain of remembering what happened, the memory of it will find its way out through our bodies, our emotions, even the way we interact with the world around us. Our trauma will sit on the edge of our minds, live in our body, and wait for something to bring it to the forefront.

This process of disassociation that serves to protect us from pain will eventually end up harming us, we will not be able to put the memory in its right place, so that it can simply be a memory instead of a trauma that stays in our skin that we can’t make sense of. As it goes unacknowledged, our trauma will ache in our joints, disturb our digestion, wake us up in the middle of the night, and play itself out in our relationships, day after day. It has the potential to torment us the longer we disassociate ourselves from it. Van der Kolk said it like this: “if the problem with PTSD is dissociation, the goal of treatment would be association; integrating the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize ‘that was then and this is now’” (p. 180). When we began to talk about what it meant for us to begin to associate our trauma, to integrate and remember, it brought us to talk about lament.

Lament is multi-faceted. It is not just a grieving, but an expressing of grief, and an expressing of the hope that things can be different — that “that was then and this is now”. Lament is the moment where we put voice to the pain of our traumatic experience and we dare to believe that we no longer have to relive it. Lament is the acknowledgement that something terrible has happened, but that it doesn’t have to happen again.

In our discussion of lament, we could not seem to escape from remembering our own unique experiences of it. We told stories of shared lament — to do with the trauma of simply being born to a particular culture, or gender — and of individual lament. The act of lament is an act of remembrance where we purposefully bring out all the pain, fear, sadness, and powerlessness of our traumatized selves so that we can make sense of those feelings by putting them in context. It would seem that we need some form of lament if we are to remember and to integrate our trauma, both as individuals and as members of a whole. Is it any wonder then that the book of Lamentations is included in biblical canon?

So, as we approach the problem of our disassociation from the traumatic memories that live in us we are called to remember. The protection our mind has afforded us by forcing us to forget will eventually stop working properly and it is then that we must lament.