How the Body-Mind Stores Memories

Did you know your body remembers everything that has ever happened to you? And more than that, that it stores memories from your ancestral line and even your past lives?

In a 2008 Review: The Effects of Trauma, with or without PTSD, on the Transgenerational DNA Methylation Alterations in Human Offsprings, they found evidence that trauma can be passed between generations epigenetically, which means that trauma experienced by an ancestor might be affecting the way your genes are expressing today.

Humans are incredibly resilient beings, able to withstand the most overwhelming of circumstances, but it’s important to know that these experiences leave imprints on both our minds and our cellular memory.

You don’t have to be a combat veteran or from an abusive family to have experienced trauma. In the documentary, The Wisdom of Trauma, Gabor Mate defines trauma as (essentially) responding to a present moment as if it were the past.

How often do you stop yourself from saying or doing something because you remember a similar past moment that resulted in pain?

Right… and those are only the memories you’re conscious of. Imagine just how many more of these moments are happening outside of that conscious awareness.

Trauma Alters the Brain
Bessel Van Der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, elaborates: “... Trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain.”

Post-trauma, the world is experienced with a different nervous system, one that has an altered perception of risk and safety.

The emotionally overwhelming experience that started outside of the body is now replayed over and over again from within.

Trauma isn’t even remembered as a linear story but as isolated sensory imprints of images, sounds, and physical sensations, along with intense emotions like terror and helplessness (H.S. Duggal, “New-Onset PTSD After Thalamic Infarct,” American Journal of Psychiatry 2002).

Because of this, remembering feels the same as the actual experience, which means that when we’re triggered, our brain and body don’t know the difference between the past and the present.

Over time, if stress levels get no reprieve (through lack of awareness and/or the inability to re-regulate the nervous system), the result can be depression, rage, and even physical diseases like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune disorders.

Trauma is also heavily associated with the development of The Shadow Self.

Reactive v Responsive
I have shared the history of becoming aware of how my past traumas were controlling everything I thought, said, and did in my early life.

This is what it means to be reactive.

Without conscious awareness of what was happening internally, I was essentially a slave to the echoes of that past because I was allowing myself to be swept along by the current of that reactivity.

At some point, I decided I wanted to have conscious control over my thoughts, feelings, and choices so that I was no longer reacting to the world, but responding to (or even creating) it.

A Note On Medications
Psychiatric meds can deflect attention from dealing with the actual trauma in the cells (but can be important for acute relief and giving the nervous system some rest from being on constant alert).

TRAUMA DOES NOT MEAN BROKEN
People with trauma often fear they are damaged beyond repair.

With my background of childhood sexual trauma, emotional/verbal abuse and neglect, and date rape, I used to believe this.

But I am the dancing, laughing, ecstatic proof that healing, ease, and inner joy is available to every one of us.

From The Body Keeps the Score: “For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.”

In my lived experience of processing my own trauma, and in my soul work as a healer and waysharer, the way to the other side is to learn how to release the memories that have become stuck in the body (that path can be different for different people), and to retrain the body-mind to respond to and soothe itself.

This restores a sense of wholeness and confidence from within, where the echoes of the past - even if they come up - no longer hold power over your present. And the more you build inner trust with yourself, the more it will feel safe to trust others and the world around you..

In the coming months in The Woo Underground Membership, I’ll be unlocking the secrets of exactly how to accomplish this.

If you want to know more about The Woo Underground Membership, CLICK HERE..

In wholeness,
Sharon

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