The Trauma of Everyday Life

mindfulness counters this tendency. It allows the experiences of trauma to come out of their frozen states and back into the warmth of time.
    This is why the research on the parent-infant relationship is so relevant. In a good-enough setting, a parent helps her child metabolize feelings over time. She prevents them from becoming traumatic. Through her attention, with her subtle combination of mirroring and irony, she provides comfort and soothing and in the process helps a child know feelings from a place where they can be symbolized. She helps her baby give shape or texture to her emotions, helps make them safe, so that eventually the child can hold them for herself in her mind. In trauma, this process does not occur. Developmental trauma results when the primary caregiver cannot fulfill this function for a child. Other traumas result when a person, or his or her meaningful others, cannot do something similar. Brain scientists, in their efforts to understand memory, have illuminated the probable explanation.
    There are at least two kinds of memory: implicit memory and explicit memory. Implicit memory is the kind we use when we learn to ride a bicycle or throw a ball. We do not have to consciously recall anything when we utilize it; it is just there in our bodies ready to be used. This kind of memory is handled in a deep part of the brain, away from the higher cortical centers that manage conceptual thought and conscious awareness. There is behavioral knowledge without conscious recall; the memory is called “procedural” or “sensorimotor.” It is as if it were lodged in the body, outside what we normally think of as the mind. Implicit memory develops naturally before verbally based memory comes into focus. It is the only memory available in the first eighteen months of life and is the foundation not just of motor skills but of learning how to do things with others. 4 Much of what we think of as “relational knowing”—joking around, expressing affection, and making friends 5 —is based in this kind of memory. We know how to do it without thinking about it. It does not require deliberate attention or verbal processing, yet it is intrinsic to who we are.
    Explicit memory, on the other hand, allows for conscious recollection. It is also called “narrative” or “declarative” memory, and is what we normally think of when we talk about remembering something. It is mediated by thought of one kind or another and has a quality of reorganization. Raw experience is sorted out and reformulated and given coherence by the mind. A process of symbolization, of which language is a tool, is employed. When a parent helps a child regulate her anxiety by reflecting back what is happening and making it more tolerable, she is setting the stage for this kind of second-order symbolization, for a flow between the implicit and the narrative. Explicit memory functions through reflective self-awareness—when we have this kind of memory, we know that we are aware. It is accessed through thought, not directly through the body.
    Traumatic experiences, it is now understood, are held only in implicit memory. Therapists who work with posttraumatic stress disorder see versions of this all the time. The emotional reactions of fight or flight associated with a specific trauma live on in the bodies of traumatized individuals as if in an eternal present. The traumatic reactions are locked into place, ready for a threat the individual has already seen but not explicitly known. The defense of dissociation cements the memories in place in the part of the brain that normally stores behavioral knowledge. The trauma is never processed by the higher centers of the brain. It leaks out when reminders surface or when one’s guard is down, and it is only accessible through the traces it leaves in the body or in unconscious memory. As Philip Bromberg has written, “What a patient is able to hold and symbolize cognitively versus what he must hold without symbolic processing and must thereby enact is the key issue. What is
there
is going to be registered in some form or other, and some unprocessed aspect of it will be enacted.” 6
    When I saw myself on the videotape twenty-five years after the fact, I could see that I was enacting some kind of unprocessed aspect of myself. Held in my implicit memory, it was being pulled out of me by something in that particular situation that was bypassing conscious thought. Seeing it all these years later, I could,