By Aliza Panjwani, M.A.
I saw a captivating interview on YouTube with Lady Gaga and Stephen Colbert. A somewhat unlikely duo, eh? I appreciated the exchange, particularly when Lady Gaga talked briefly about what trauma (e.g., sexual and physical abuse, sudden loss of a child) can do to our mind. Watching the interview sparked the writing of a blog post on a personal interest of mine, the relationship between trauma and memory. When I was in college many a moon ago, I had a disturbing event happen to me. While I did not have full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder, I certainly experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress. At the time, I told few people and those that did know asked many questions (who, what, when, where, how, iterations of everything in between). While I can visualize parts that felt scary or threatening with almost blinding clarity, ‘peripheral’ details like specifics about my surroundings are hazy, at best.
Back then, I often thought to myself (irrationally, of course) that I SHOULD be able to remember all the details given the serious nature of what transpired. I wondered what was wrong with me that I had such gaps in my memory of the event. As a result, I felt shame. I was young back then and knew little about what was happening with me, so I had trouble speaking back to my irrational beliefs. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the link between trauma and memory has been studied by the scientific community. Quite a bit, in fact. And the thing is, that survivors of trauma often report memory gaps. Usually, those gaps are about details in the periphery. For example, you can ask trauma survivors questions like “Was your door open when [the event] happened? Was the light outside the room turned on or off? What was [the perpetrator] wearing?” Seemingly simple questions — but they just might not remember those details. Why?
When we are very stressed or frightened, our brain goes into fight-flight-or-freeze mode. This translates into many things, one of which is that our brain starts furiously working to encode parts of the event, usually the bits that directly relate to heightened emotional distress. Those bits often seem SEARED into memory. That zoomed-in focus, however, can come at a cost. Think about it this way…ahem, well-intentioned analogy alert: Say you saw a butterfly on the leaf of a potted fern plant in your fenced backyard and you wanted to capture a close-up of it. What do you do? Obviously, you pull out your Samsung or iPhone and you zoom in. Lo-and-behold, thanks to today’s smartphone technology, you have a vivid picture of this butterfly. But when you zoom in, you lose the details in the periphery, right? You’ve got a vivid, clear picture of the butterfly. But it came at the cost of clarity on some other details like the fenced backyard, the pot in which the fern was, the fern itself, and maybe even the leaf on which the butterfly was perched.
The hypervigilant, zoomed in-focus of your brain when it is encoding information about an ongoing traumatic event into long-term memory can also come at the expense of peripheral details. This piece of information is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we know about how trauma affects our brain and its functions. One positive thing about living in an information age is that rather than making assumptions, we can work towards better educating ourselves. That’s what Lady Gaga was doing on the Stephen Colbert Show when the topic of trauma came up, which in turn, inspired to me to write this blog post. If you know someone who has experienced a traumatic event and is “should-ing” themselves about the gaps in their memory, pass this information along. Maybe it will help them come up with a rational belief to address the irrational one such as, “While I wish I had less gaps in my memory about this serious event, there is no reason that I must. In fact, research on trauma shows that it is “normal” to have some memory gaps; and, most importantly, there is nothing wrong with me.”