Mervin Smucker. The Nature of Traumatic vs. Non-Traumatic Memory.

Mervin Smucker
The nature of traumatic memories has implications for how trauma-related material is accessed, confronted, and processed in psychotherapy.  Traumatic memories are generally encoded and accessed differently from non-traumatic or narrative memories.  In contrast to narrative memories, traumatic memories are more likely to:

  • lack in verbal narrative and context;
  • involve primary sensory stimuli (visual, kinesthetic, auditory)
  • be encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images that are not accessible by linguistic means alone;
  • be state dependent;
  • be difficult to integrate via assimilation or accommodation because they are stored differently
  • dissociated from conscious control,
  • “fixed” in their original form and remain unaltered by the passage of time.

Mervin Smucker