Trauma, Memory, & Behaviors

“Why is my child still triggered…after all these years?”

“Why does my child STILL feel unsafe?”

“I’ve never hurt my child. They’ve never missed a meal here. Why does their history still matter?”

The parents I work with try so hard to be attuned. To be connected. To understand the impact of trauma.

So. Hard.

Three, or five, or ten years down the road of working hard to create safety, be attuned, provide the intense level of needed co-regulation needed to parent a child with a history of trauma, and it can start to feel pretty demoralizing when some triggers or behaviors haven’t seemed to change.

“WHY is my child still struggling?”

“And I doing it wrong?”

“Is something wrong with my child?”

“Will they ever be OK?”

Parents give me the side-eye when I try to help them understand that their nine-year-old’s meltdown over being told ‘no’ to a snack five minutes before dinner is related to their experiences when they were three (or even two, or one).

I say “They get overwhelmed with the belief that they’ll never eat again and it feels completely true in the moment!”

More side-eye. Uh…what? This child has now never missed a snack or a meal in seven or more years. AND dinner is literally being cooked and is almost ready to put on the table. And now they are kicking and screaming and you are saying it’s because of feeling hungry? Seven years ago?

Believe it or not- yes!! And it’s not about bad parenting, or manipulation, or anything like that.

It’s simply about memory science!

I LOVE MEMORY SCIENCE.

Let’s look at how our memory processing system is designed to work!

And…if you’d like to watch a free three-part video series AND receive a PDF E-Book (also free!) about Trauma, Memory, and Behaviors, you can grab there by CLICKING HERE.

Implicit Memory

Simply because things cannot be recalled does not mean they are not remembered…by your body and your mind. There are two kinds of memories- implicit and explicit. Implicit memory is the kind of memory that describes ALL of your memories before about age 18 months old, and MOST of your memories before about age three. Implicit memory including body sensations, feelings, perceptions, and behavioral impulses- which are behaviors that don’t have any conscious awareness.

Your child might not have recall memories of being left alone for eight-hours at a time when they were 12-months-old, but their body remembers the terror and helplessness. Terror and helplessness might have been experienced at the same time as other every-day things, like the sound of the television or the phone ringing. Or the way the light peaked in through the blinds. Or the smell of feces. In the brain “What fires together wires together” (Hebb’s Axiom) so terror and the telephone right may have been wired together. Or terror and the certain way the light looks in the room. In the future, when your child hears a phone ring or seems the light stream in a certain way, the part of their brain that holds terror may also be activated- EVEN THOUGH THEY DON’T HAVE CONSCIOUS MEMORY!!! This can be pretty confusing- for us and them!

Explicit Memory

After about age three, implicit AND explicit memory both start contributing to the way we have experiences, stores those experiences in our memory, and recall them later.
Explicit memory is what we are usually talking about when we are talking about memory. Explicit memory has a felt-sense of “I am remembering something right now.” You bring a situation to mind (or recall some facts) and there is a sense in your body that you are remembering this situation- not having it right now.

Explicit memories are recalled. It’s the image we bring to mind when we remember the day we got married or when we graduated. Or that moment from our favorite family vacation. When our memory processing system is working correctly (and when we are older than age three and encoding explicit memories!!), implicit and explicit memory work together. The positive sensations and feelings emerge in our body while we have fact-based memories of the experience. An image often comes to mind. There is a clear sense of “I am remembering something!” and we even have a different felt-sense that arises when we remember something from a year ago versus ten years ago.

These memories have a time stamp!

Explicit memory helps us orient to time. If explicit and implicit information is appropriately connected, then when you recall your favorite family Christmas at Grandma’s home because you smell homemade cinnamon rolls, your brain instantly knows that Christmas is a memory- it isn’t happening RIGHT NOW. If Christmas at Grandma’s house was traumatic and the experience was not fully integrated and appropriately stored in your memory processing system, you may be triggered by the sweet smell of cinnamon rolls and your body may feel as though Christmas is happening NOW. The feelings of the trauma will arise in your body now (feelings like terror, helplessness, hopeless) but they feel related to what is happening NOW- not a memory.

During traumatic experiences, implicit and explicit information may not be linked appropriately. The implicit does not connect to the explicit. And (here’s the REALLY important part) this implicit data that isn’t connected is often not altered by later life experiences! (Though it can be under the right circumstances…it isn’t hopeless!).

When an implicit memory is triggered and there is no explicit memory to help it understand time and place, your child’s body literally feels like the experience is happening RIGHT NOW. Which means fight/flight/freeze/collapse happens in less than an instant. Their experience in the now is flooded in the experience from the past, and their body reacts.

Trauma doesn’t tell time.

When an unintegrated implicit memory gets triggered, it doesn’t have access to information that tells your child “Hey! That happened a long time ago! You are safe now!” Trauma seizes your child’s body in the moment and thrusts them back into those terrifying times when the trauma was happening. This happens in milliseconds.

This isn’t happening because you are failing as a parent or because your child is being manipulative. It’s happening because of the way our memory processing system works and the way we construct our own experience of reality based on the NOW and the PAST- and then our body responds to THAT. It is always in response to how we are experiencing reality and it is always in response in trying to stay safe and alive.

Why do I think this is important?!

Believe it or not, understanding what’s happening and why it’s happening is a parenting strategy. It doesn’t really feel like a strategy, but it is! When we understand what’s happening, we can stay more regulated. We don’t take it personally. We don’t try to logic away the trauma response. We respond to the behavior with safety, co-regulation, and connection because we understand that the only necessary thing to do is soothe our child and help them come back into connection with the ‘here and now.’ We don’t punish, lecture, or berate ourselves for being a terrible parent.

And these actions actually are strategies. When we respond to a trauma response with connection, co-regulation, and safety, we actually are doing EXACTLY the thing that helps those disconnected implicit and explicit memories find each other and integrate. Experiencing safety and connection in a moment when the brain is expecting to experience danger (a trauma response means the brain is expecting to experience danger) is precisely what memory reconsolidation theory tells us needs to happen! This will encourage the disconnected implicit memories to get connected to the explicit so that the memory feels like a MEMORY. When our bodies know a memory is a memory and not what’s happening right now, it will decrease and maybe even eventually stop a fight/flight/freeze/collapse response.

Want to dive even deeper? FREE video series!

I love this topic SO MUCH and believe it is such powerful and important information for caregivers to have that I’ve created a three-part video series where we dive a little deeper into these concepts. So if you want a little better understanding of implicit and explicit memory, or if you learn better through listening to someone talk and/or seeing images, hop over to the video series. It’s completely free.

Trauma, Memory, & Behaviors VIDEO series!

Check out that video series by CLICKING HERE and definitely let me know what you think! What was one take away? What is something new you learned? How will it help you?