You have likely heard the old saying that “time heals all wounds.” There might be truth to these words in many contexts, but traumatic experiences can be a notable exception. I hear often from clients who come to therapy to work on past trauma that their experiences still feel fresh, emotional, physically activating, easily triggered, or vivid though months or years have passed.

I find too that these observations can come with a side of self-judgment. I have seen people feel like there is something wrong with them that they haven’t “gotten over it” by now. But trauma is not something that we just “get over,” and there are reasons that traumatic memories sometimes do not fade with time like other memories do. Keep reading to learn more about why time passing often does not diminish the intensity of traumatic memories, and what you can do about it.

How Trauma Memories Get Stuck

Among our body and brain’s primary concerns are survival, safety, and self-protection. When something happens that threatens our safety or bodily integrity, we enter into a stress response (often referred to as our “fight, flight, or freeze” mode). As psychologist Maddi Genovese describes, during a stress response our bodies register aspects of what is happening and encodes them as signals of danger. These could include sights, sounds, smells, places, physical characteristics of other people, and more.

When we go about our lives after a traumatic experience, our bodies are highly reactive when they observe these cues they have remembered again, even if the environment is not threatening at that time. Our bodies hang onto the trauma and contextual elements that go along with it as a means to try to get us to take appropriate action to keep ourselves safe when they sense something in our surroundings that suggests we might be at risk again.

Trauma also affects how the brain creates and store memories. During situations of high stress the hippocampus, a brain area involved in memory formation and differentiating past from present, goes offline. The amygdala, a brain area associated with emotion and emotional memory, however, becomes overactivated.

This reality means that trauma memories get stored differently than regular memories, in what is called state-specific form. They stay, as described by EMDR Europe, frozen the way they were originally experienced in isolated neural networks where they are unable to link up with healthy memory networks that would be able to neutralize them. The way these memories are encoded also makes it challenging for our brains to discern reminders from the past from actual threats in the present, which can result in emotions and behaviors in the present that are mismatched to the situation at hand.

To summarize, trauma memories often don’t just fade or resolve on their own with time because of our innate survival drive and because of the way in which these memories are recorded and stored. If you have experienced trauma in the past, you likely understand on a cognitive level that the trauma is over and that you are safe. Your felt sense of safety, however, might still be lacking and your body can still react to the present based on its experiences in the past.

How to Truly Heal

EMDR therapy is designed to access maladaptively stored trauma memories and help them integrate with healthy information in our neural networks. In so doing, trauma memories are “reprocessed” and the unhelpful beliefs, emotions, or behaviors associated with them are alleviated. The memories are no longer stuck and therefore they lose their ability to continue to trigger a person in the present. The past is able to truly feel like the past.

 If this sounds interesting or potentially beneficial to you, contact me today to learn more.