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Haute Amnesia: Sprung from Suffering

Years of my life are lost, stolen by the shadows of trauma. Flashbacks feel like reading a tragic novel - your psyche quietly registers it, your heart aches for the character, then the realisation hits: the character is you.



But it’s not just the devastating, heartbreaking, catastrophic moments you block out, it’s your life that surrounds them. The peaceful, wistful, playful memories are drowned out by the darkness of evil. You’ll be sitting around the kitchen island and your mum will say “remember that time..”. No, I don’t remember - the horrors of that period were so all consuming they drowned out every ounce of joy I experienced along with them.


But, why? Why do one, two, maybe 3 bad events make me lose years of my life? I still have the memories, I just can’t access them. When dissociation causes memory loss it is referred to as Dissociative Amnesia. It is a defence mechanism our brain uses to protect us from the devastating and traumatic events of the past.


Your hippocampus and amygdala work together to associate memories with feelings that trigger emotional reactions. PTSD can damage the hippocampus and in turn can affect the way you process information, create memories, and remember past experiences.



Trauma is a funny thing, it makes us act in ways that you wouldn’t expect. It can cause us to react in a way that people who haven’t experienced what you went through would not be able to even begin to understand.


Often after traumatic events we are stuck in survival mode. Trauma alters our brain function and hijacks the brain's threat-detection system. Our ‘fight, flight, freeze, and fawn’ responses often become exaggerated and overactive because we now have an hyperactive amygdala. Our hippocampus can also be impaired which can lead to intrusive, distorted, or fragmented memories of the traumatic event.


Trauma physically changes the brain, it also makes us age quicker than our calendar age. I recently listened to Paul Conti on The Diary of a CEO Podcast and he shared a statistic that I found very interesting. He said “Adults who experience sexual abuse before the age of 16 have 2.6 times the chance of dying in middle age than those who haven’t”. That’s a two-and-a-half–fold increase in the risk of death.


You may look back on your life and think “nothing major happened to me, I didn’t go through an elaborate, dramatic traumatic event…why do I feel traumatised and like I'm missing memories?”. Brain changes can be the result of three types of trauma.


  1. Acute Trauma: Major events unfolding in an instant

  2. Chronic Trauma: Persistent traumatic circumstances, like abuse or racism

  3. Vicarious Trauma: Absorbing the impact of someone else’s trauma through closeness or shared living



Another point Conti made in the podcast that made my ears prick up was him challenging the old saying, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Paul said, what doesn’t kill us actually makes us weaker and after reflecting I completely agree. I believe what actually makes us stronger is the work we put in to heal, and recover.


Experiencing trauma at a younger age will have a bigger impact on you as the brain does not go back in and unlearn the lessons we’ve learnt. Our brains are incredibly complex and those lessons are solidified at an early age and as you get older, there is actually a danger in unsolidifying them because you are exposing your brain to the trauma it has since repressed.


I’ll forever mourn the person I could have been if I hadn’t gone through what I did at such a young age. But, I also know I wouldn’t be the same person, with the same heart, the same compassion, the same understanding, and the same drive and motivation if I hadn’t.




References


‘Hippocampus’ Cleveland Clinic | https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/hippocampus

‘Traumatic stress: effects on the brain’ PMC | https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3181836/

‘Study: Experiencing Childhood Trauma Makes Body and Brain Age Faster’ APA | https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/08/experiencing-childhood-trauma

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