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Jan 31, 2009, 10:46 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by multipixie9
For reasons I've never heard mentioned the body retains the incidents somehow stored in the tissue, at a cellular level.
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Have you ever read The Body Keeps The Score? (van der Kolk) Prolonged, severe abuse and trauma can actually change the way we store the memories that we work so hard to forget. Clench your fist and hold it. That's sort of what our bodies do with the memory of trauma. The "fist" can only stay like that for so long without needing to "let go." If our minds aren't ready to look at it, the release (traumatic memory) has to come out somewhere.
Here's a better, more intellectual explanation.
Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response.
Intense emotions at the time of the trauma initiate the long-term conditional responses to reminders of the event, which are associated both with chronic alterations in the physiological stress response and with the amnesias and hypermnesias characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Continued physiological hyperarousal and altered stress hormone secretion affect the ongoing evaluation of sensory stimuli as well.
Although memory is ordinarily an active and constructive process, in PTSD failure of declarative memory may lead to organization of the trauma on a somatosensory level (as visual images or physical sensations) that is relatively impervious to change.
The inability of people with PTSD to integrate traumatic experiences and their tendency, instead, to continuously relieve the past are mirrored physiologically and hormonally in the misinterpretation of innocuous stimuli as potential threats.
Animal research suggests that intense emotional memories are processed outside of the hippocampally mediated memory system and are difficult to extinguish.
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