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 to an unintended

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• Brewin, C.