Unconscious Memory
Understanding how traumatic memories are stored can shed some light on what happens to our words when we’re overwhelmed. Long-term memory is often divided into two main categories: declarative and nondeclarative. Declarative memory, also called explicit or narrative memory, is the ability to consciously recall facts or events. This type of memory depends on language to organize, categorize, and store information and experiences that will later become retrievable memories. It’s like a book we can pull off the shelf when we need to refer to a story from the past. When we can put events into words, we can recall them as a part of our history.
Non declarative memory, also called implicit, sensorimotor, or procedural memory, operates without conscious recall. It allows us to automatically retrieve what we’ve already learned without having to relearn the steps. When we ride a bicycle, for example, we don’t think about the sequence of events required to make it move forward. The memory of riding a bicycle is so ingrained in us that we just hop on and pedal without breaking the process down into steps. These kinds of memories are not always easy to describe in words.
Traumatic experiences are often stored as nondeclarative memory. When an event becomes so overwhelming that we lose our words, we cannot accurately record or “declare” the memory in story form, which requires language to do so.
It’s as though a flash flood is streaming through all our doors and windows at once. In the danger, we don’t stop long enough to put our experience into words.
We just leave the house. Without words, we no longer have full access to our memory of the event. Fragments of the experience go unnamed and submerge out of sight. Lost and undeclared, they become part of our unconscious.
The vast reservoir of our unconscious appears to hold not only our traumatic memories, but also the unresolved traumatic experiences of our ancestors. In this shared unconscious, we seem to reexperience fragments of an ancestor’s memory and declare them as our own.
Although the mice studies described earlier provide some evidence of how traumas pass down from one generation to the next, the exact mechanism for how this transfer takes place in human beings has yet to be fully understood.
Still, even though we’re not exactly certain how an ancestor’s unfinished business takes root inside us, it appears to bring relief when such a link is made conscious.
Undeclared Language: When Words Go Missing
There are two important times when we’re unable to use words to describe our experience. The first is before the age of two or three, when the language centers of our brain have not yet reached full maturity. The second occurs during a traumatic episode, when our memory functions become suppressed and we can’t accurately process information.
When memory function is inhibited, emotionally significant information bypasses the frontal lobes and cannot be named or ordered through words or language, as Bessel van der Kolk describes. Without language, our experiences often go “undeclared,” and are more likely to be stored as fragments of memory, bodily sensations, images, and emotions. Language allows us to corral our experiences into story form. Once we have the story, we’re more able to revisit an experience — even a trauma — without reliving all the turmoil attached to it.
Even though language may be one of the first things to go when we’re overwhelmed, this language is never lost. It sifts back in our unconscious and surfaces unexpectedly, refusing to be ignored. As psychologist Annie Rogers says, “The unconscious insists, repeats, and practically breaks down the door, to be heard. The only way to hear it, to invite it into the room, is to stop imposing something over it — mostly in the form of your own ideas — and listen instead for the unsayable, which is everywhere, in speech, in enactments, in dreams, and in the body.”
Core Language and Memory Recovery
The unspoken experiences that live in our unconscious are all around us. They appear in our quirky language. They express in our chronic symptoms and unexplainable behaviors. They resurface in the repetitive struggles we face in our day-to-day lives. These unspoken experiences form the basis of our core language. When our unconscious breaks down our door to be heard, core language is what we hear. The emotionally charged words of our core language are keys to the nondeclarative memories that live both in our bodies and in the “body” of our family system. They are like gems in our unconscious waiting to be excavated. If we fail to recognize them as messengers, we miss important clues that can help us unravel the mystery behind our struggles. Once we dig them out, we take an essential step toward healing trauma.
Core language helps us “declare” the memories that have gone “undeclared,” enabling us to piece together the events and experiences that could not be integrated or even remembered. When enough of these pieces are gathered in our consciousness, we begin to form a story that deepens our understanding of what might have happened to us or to our family members. We begin to make sense of memories, emotions, and sensations that may have been haunting us our entire lives. Once we locate their origin in the past, in our trauma or in a family trauma, we can stop living them as though they belong in the present. And though not every fear, anxiety, or repetitive thought can be explained by a traumatic event in the family, certain experiences can be more fully understood when we decipher our core language.
