My heart is still raining

Why are traumatic memories controversial?
There are differing schools of thought, grounded in solid research and clinical experience, about the reliability of memory. The details of this scientific debate are often obscure, and the subtleties can be confusing to the public.

Some researchers have proven in the laboratory that ordinary or slightly stressful memories are easily distorted. These scientists are concerned that therapists may be unintentionally distorting the memories of people who report histories of traumatic abuse. This is of particular concern to scientists studying the effects of hypnosis on eyewitness testimony because there is laboratory evidence that setting and expectation can "contaminate" a person's memories.

However, this laboratory research on ordinary memory may be irrelevant in regard to memories of traumatic experiences. Scientists argue that traumatic memories are different from ordinary clinical memories in the way they are encoded on the brain. There is evidence that trauma is stored in the part of the brain called the limbic system, which processes emotions and sensations, but not language or speech. For this reason, people who have been traumatized may live with implicit memories of the terror, anger, and sadness generated by the trauma, but with few or no explicit memories to explain the feelings. Trauma clinicians believe that implicit memories are not easily distorted. It would, of course be unethical to create in a laboratory setting the traumatic experiences necessary to study traumatic memories and their ease of contamination or distortion. For this reason, our knowledge of traumatic memories must come from clinical experience. Clinical data since 1919 has shown a direct correlation between trauma and amnesia or other memory disturbance (Van der Kolk, 1994).

What about memory retrieval long after the trauma?
Sometimes a current event or experience may trigger long-forgotten memories of earlier trauma. Often when this happens, the person may be "flooded" with implicit sensorimotor memory: he or she may have just the picture, the feeling, the physiological panic aroused by the memory of the traumatic event without the facts that would explain the meaning of the sensations. Initially, the person may not even be aware of what has triggered the memory, or how the pictures and feelings relate to his or her life.

There is often intense psychological distress when a person is exposed to events which in some way resemble or symbolize the past trauma. These "triggers" may be any sound, smell, or other stimulus such as hot, humid weather which may remind a veteran of his service in southeast Asia, or the smell of a particular cologne which was worn by an abuser.

Can I believe my memories?
At this time, there is no completely accurate way of determining the validity of abuse reports without external corroboration, and that kind of corroboration is often impossible. Many things—questioning (especially of young children), suggestion by a trusted person, even the recounting of a traumatic experience in therapy—may influence the accuracy of abuse memories. Even people who have documented corroboration about their abuse may have inconsistent elements in their stories.

Nevertheless, trauma specialists such as Harvard's Dr. Bessel van der Kolk believe that "the body cannot lie." If a person spontaneously sees a flashback and feels terrified, the feeling can be trusted, especially before an implicit memory has been discussed and possibly contaminated. If the person has the symptoms of PTSD, or a dissociative disorder that is known to be associated with a traumatic history, then it is likely that there are real traumatic experiences in the person's background. Unless one is preparing for a criminal investigation, the exact authenticity of a specific memory may not be important.

It is the job of the individual to figure out his or her own life history. Many people with post-traumatic stress or dissociative disorders have found it helpful to gather information from siblings or other family members to help them understand their memories.