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Well, that's not exactly what she said. But it felt as if she had said that.
Explicit Memory
By: Dr. Suzanne LaCombe, February 19, 2007.
Also known as declarative memory, explicit memory is what we use for recalling facts, personal events, history notes etc.
Much of our work in counseling is about making the implicit explicit. In other words, counseling is about making us more conscious about our behaviour, our emotions and our sense of ourselves. (See procedural memory for an explanation of how our patterned behaviours are organized.)
What's important to understand for counseling is that this kind of memory is subject to decay. Simply put, we are frightfully prone to forgetting over time...some of us more than others.
In times of traumatic stress our tendency to forget is even more probable. The reason this is so is related to our neurobiology.
During times of stress, the body is flooded by cortisol, a hormone that helps us to take action. Cortisol is--unfortunately--toxic to the hippocampus where our explicit or declarative memories are organized.
However, we often still retain the body sense memory of the traumatic event. This somatic memory is believed to reside in the amygdala where it is not subject to decay by cortisol. This enables the body to remember a bad situation as a preventative measure should the same circumstances arise again.
So for instance, you may not explicitly remember being in the car accident but everytime you drive near the same area where it occurred, you get shivers up your back!
Your body sense memory remembers.
This is one reason why I believe somatic therapies have been so successful. Body psychotherapy gets at memories that are unaccessible through talk therapy alone.
Related Topic
References
Grigsby, Jim & Stevens, David (2000). Neurodynamics of Personality. New York: Guilford Press.
Ledoux, Joseph (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Touchstone Books.
Look for more information on this topic in future updates.
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