People who suffer from trauma develop a permanent neurotic condition, which disturbs their ways of handling memory. For example, John still remembers his loving wife laughing and coming towards him as he stands there on the opposite side of the road waiting for her. He sees a speedy car coming towards her. He tries to run and intervene to avoid a horrible tragedy. This entire scenario runs and reruns all the time and he is pushed in a depressive mood. Life does not matter to him because of this terrible event, which he cannot change.
The memory when John’s wife died is locked in his brain area associated with stress and emotion, so a consolidated memory is created, as per the psychologists. He cannot avoid them and every time they get accessed John is burdened with stressful emotions.
Memory reconciliation is a totally new process designed to unlock, recode, and reorganize the not helpful information. This will allow your mind to form memories with healthier version. Rather than trying to avoid memories or control depression, John can take help from therapists and undergo memory reconsolidation therapy to get relieved from emotional dominance altogether.
What is memory reconsolidation theory?
Memory is initially stored in the cerebral cortex, which is a network covering brain surface. Nerve cells are interconnected and have chemicals that are responsible for passing of information. When an incident is emotionally charged then it is coded in your memory at different levels.
Intensity of this experience creates vivid lifetime memory, which cannot be altered. Emotions that was encoded by stress in the memory are a part of you. Therefore, when you remember those memories, you even experience the related emotions. This effect is very crippling.
How the memory reconsolidation process works?
Emotional trauma usually is experienced at subconscious level, so memory consolidation intends to move those experiences in your conscious thoughts, where it is recognized and worked with.
- Activate memories through verbalizing the feelings and bring them in your conscious mind, so you can see its bad impact clearly and work to fix it.
- Get acquainted with a different emotional model, which contradicts the original picture. Mind starts to realize and tries to sort process consciously thus making a decision of not to store the concealed emotional codes.
- As you start to embrace an effective memory model the emotional effect associated with old memory pattern starts to vanish and you get released from the past burden.
In writing, it seems simple but with a good therapist, you can free from emotional entanglements from the past memory!
