Completing Incomplete Memories

In the brain, memories are encoded utilizing various visual components, smells, sounds, reactions, movements, emotions, and cognitive and narrative elements. Traumatic events can often affect memory encoding, resulting in incomplete memories. The body reacts to trauma by deploying fight or flight defense responses, which interfere with conscious awareness and memory encoding in the hippocampus.

Memories become fragmented and results in difficulty of traumatized individuals to recount. Although incomplete, traumatic memories can commonly evoke significant emotions and bodily reactions. To address the physiological and psychological effects of trauma, sensorimotor psychotherapy arose.

Sensorimotor psychotherapy asks patients to hone in the awareness of bodily reactions to an evoked memory. One approach of this method emphasizes dual awareness of orienting away from the trauma and tuning into the internal experience to uncouple triggering stimuli. Redirecting focus towards pleasurable or neutral stimuli helps to improve one’s relationship to trauma. In this technique, incomplete memories are redefined and become manageable and overall, more complete.

Sources: Fisher, J. (2019). Sensorimotor psychotherapy in the treatment of trauma. Practice Innovations