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HEIf you’ve ever had a reaction to something that felt surprising or disproportionate, it’s not a character flaw, and it makes perfect sense when you understand how memory works in the nervous system.
A colleague of mine, @theanxietymd, once described triggers as emotional age regression, and here’s the science behind it.
Most people think of memory as explicit memory. This is the kind that is verbal, chronological, and story based. You can usually name when something happened, where it happened, and how it unfolded.
But trauma often lives in a different type of memory system entirely: through implicit memory, or body memory. Implicit memory is stored as sensation, emotion, impulse, tension, and learned response, similar to muscle memory.
Here is the part most people are never taught. Implicit memory does not carry a timestamp. There is no clear sense of past versus present. So when it is activated, it does not feel like remembering. It feels like now.
This is why a trigger can feel so immediate and overwhelming. Your adult mind may not recall a clear story, but your nervous system is responding as if the original experience is happening in real time.
This is not a failure or regression. It is your body doing exactly what it learned to do to survive. So instead of asking “what is wrong with me?”, a gentler and more accurate question becomes “what did my body learn to do to get through what it lived through?”
Comment PODCAST to learn all about how trauma memory works in the latest podcast episode, or PROGRAM to join me in the Body-First Healing program to move forward without looking back.
#traumahealing #nervoussystem #somatichealing #bodyfirsthealing healingjourney
@healwithbritt
