Properties Of Trauma Memories

People who have experienced trauma report a wide range of distressing symptoms, many of which are related to the properties of their trauma memories. Helping survivors of trauma to understand these memory properties can help to normalize their experiences, reduce catastrophic appraisals of their memory symptoms (e.g. “I’m going mad”), and prepare them for the ‘memory processing’ elements of trauma-focused therapies. 

Important properties of trauma memories include:

• Involuntary recall. Although ordinary memories can be subject to involuntary recall, trauma memories are often deliberately avoided and so more likely to be re-experienced involuntarily. This is partly maintained by the way that trauma memories have been encoded and stored, which makes them prone to involuntary recall as a result of perceptual cues that resemble those present at the time of the trauma (Ehlers & Clark, 2000), and partly due to the individual’s attempts to suppress their memories which can lead

“Psychologists have found that memories of traumatic events often have some properties that make them different from normal memories, and that this is why trauma memories can be so distressing. As a first step in managing these memories it can be helpful to learn about these qualities. Would you be willing to look at some of these properties of trauma memories with me, and to think about whether any of them could apply to your memories?”

• Bedard-Gilligan, M., Zoellner, L. A., & Feeny, N. C. (2017). Is trauma memory special? Trauma narrative fragmentation in PTSD: Effects of treatment and response. Clinical Psychological Science, 5(2), 212-225.
• Birrer, E., Michael, T., & Munsch, S. (2007). Intrusive images in PTSD and in traumatised and non-traumatised depressed patients: A cross-sectional clinical study. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45(9), 2053-2065.
• Blix, I., Birkeland, M. S., & Thoresen, S. (2020). Vivid memories of distant trauma: Examining the characteristics of trauma memories and the relationship with the centrality of event and posttraumatic stress 26 years after trauma. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 34(3), 678-684.
• Brewin, C. R. (2015). Re-experiencing traumatic events in PTSD: New avenues in research on intrusive memories and flashbacks. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 6(1), 27180.
• Brewin, C. R. (2016). Coherence, disorganization, and fragmentation in traumatic memory reconsidered: A response to Rubin et al. (2016). Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 125(7), 1011–1017.
• Brewin, C.