Your identity and how you interact with the world are shaped by your memories. Many of the memories you’ve accumulated are beneficial or enjoyable, but some memories might be upsetting. War, disasters, abuse, and sexual assault memories can have a negative impact on the mind, resulting in serious emotional and psychological trauma. You can experience anxiety, stress, irritability, and depression because of the traumatic memories.

Your brain was built in a way that made it primed to learn rapidly from negative experiences, but not so much from positive ones. It explains why unpleasant memories seem to linger in your mind while pleasant ones seem to fade away. Even while the brain is exceptionally adept at storing unpleasant memories, they are not irrevocably stored there. Every time you consciously think about a memory, it changes and opens up to being altered. Therefore, you can overcome traumatic memories.

Wounds won’t heal the way you want them to; they heal the way they need to. ~ Dele Olanubi

How Negative Memories Form

Reliving the incident in a distressing and intrusive way is a defining symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Unwanted recollections of trauma, however, do not indicate disorder. During the first several weeks following a traumatic event, intrusive memories are frequent. Most trauma survivors experience intrusions less frequently and with less suffering with time. What keeps distressing intrusive re-experiencing in these people is a key question for understanding and assisting those who suffer. A person’s interpretation of their trauma experiences, their cognitive and behavioral reactions to those memories, and their memory mechanisms that make it easier to trigger intrusive memories all seem to play a role.

Over time, a memory becomes a little unstable when you recall it, and for a window of maybe two or three hours, you can change it before it settles down again, or “re-consolidates,” in the brain. So, paradoxically, remembering unpleasant memories can aid in your recovery from past injuries. Reliving traumatic events in a safe environment can assist someone in separating the memory from the distressing “alarm” processes that cause so much anguish. Through a process known as reconsolidation, emotional memories are enduringly flexible and susceptible to the influence of future experiences.

All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation. ~ Marilyn Van M. Derbur

Defining Traumatic Memories

You frequently stored traumatic memories in the subconscious until a particular stimulus causes them to surface. Locations, experiences, emotions, and people all serve as triggers. For instance, being surrounded by people could be a trigger if you had a painful experience at a concert. Triggers make the memory vivid, which may make the person feel as though they are reliving the incident.

This may cause psychological and physical symptoms, such difficulty controlling unpleasant emotions, elevated heart rate, anxiety, and perspiration. Some people attempt to suppress these emotions by ignoring distressing events. In the short term, this may help symptoms get better, but over time, it may make things worse.

The recollections of trauma can be extremely upsetting.  However, there are ways to deal with them, such as monitoring triggers, specific therapies, and in-the-moment coping mechanisms. You’re not defined by your trauma. With the right care, recovery from traumatic memories is achievable.

Self-monitoring can be a useful ability to have. Everyone is a creature of habit.  Many go about your days without stopping to consider much of what is going on around you. This could be helpful in some circumstances, but at other times, it might make you feel as though your thoughts and feelings are totally unpredictable and out of your control. Without first being aware of the circumstances that trigger these thoughts and feelings, you cannot really confront uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. A straightforward method for raising this awareness is self-monitoring.

Traumatized people feel chronically unsafe in their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort… ~ Bessel A. Van Der Koll

Ways To Self-Monitor Your Thoughts

Although painful memories may feel overwhelming, there are several coping mechanisms you can use.

1. Determine Potential Trauma Triggers

Even while it may seem like terrible memories are always there in your mind, you may ignore them for most of the time. The ability to recall such memories again depends on particular internal or external stimuli. The traumatic memory itself determines how specific these triggers are.  While more all-encompassing stimuli evoke certain memories, like loud noises or crowded places, more localized stimuli activated others, like a particular house or perfume.

Knowing your triggers may help you avoid them and, in turn, prevent unpleasant memories from coming to mind. This can be challenging, though, if the triggers are more all-encompassing. Identifying the trigger in this situation is still beneficial since it allows you to practice soothing tactics like grounding, breathing exercises, and flashback halting protocol. Flashback halting protocol is a method for preventing flashbacks from happening and returning you to the present. According to research, you can reconnect triggers to various memories. Relating such triggers to uplifting thoughts or emotions helps lessen the impact a traumatic experience has on your life.

Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated, the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. ~ Danielle Bernock

2. Recognizing and Dealing with Traumatic Memories

Your mood can be affected by how you assess and think about yourself, other people, and events. You are more prone to think things that are in line with your current state of fear and anxiety. Given this, it is crucial to be aware of your thoughts, how they can be affecting your mood, and how to deal with them before they affect your behavior.

We don’t heal in isolation, but in community. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

3. How to Train Yourself to Be More Mindful

It’s challenging to be attentive of thoughts, especially those that typically go along with trauma. Mindfulness can be a superb skill to practice in managing your symptoms. People who have trauma battle with disturbing ideas and recollections related to their terrible experience. These ideas have the power to rule a person’s life. By stepping back from your thoughts, mindfulness can help these intrusive thoughts have less of an impact in your daily life.

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

4. Self-Supportive Statements Can Help You Feel Better About Yourself

It’s crucial to understand how to increase your confidence because many people dealing with trauma may experience low self-esteem. It can be quite challenging to deal with these symptoms. In addition, many sufferers often struggle with other issues, including depression. Because of these challenges, many may harbor unfavorable views about themselves, which lowers their self-esteem and makes them feel unworthy. Therefore, it’s crucial to can recognize harmful thoughts and counter them with constructive ones. You’ll be able to provide for your own positive self-talk because of this.

In order to get past something terrible, sometimes you have to walk through the pain, not around it. It might be messy. It might make you sob. But if you let yourself cry long enough, you finally reach the bottom of your tears. ~ Michelle Knight

5. Coping With Flashbacks

Many people struggle in coping with flashbacks, one of the recurring symptoms of traumatic experiences. In a flashback, a person may feel or act as though a traumatic event is happening again. A flashback may be temporary and some connection with the present moment may be maintained, or a person may lose all awareness of what is going on around him, being taken completely back to a traumatic event. Flashbacks may occur because of encountering triggers, or a reminder of a traumatic event. If people are not aware of their triggers, flashbacks can be incredibly disruptive. You can, however, take steps to better manage and prevent flashbacks by becoming more mindful, understanding what your triggers are, and providing a reframing tool to help change your emotional state.

Love your soul and let go of the past. Past pain is keeping you in pain. You don’t have to deteriorate. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi

6. Managing Suicidal Thoughts

Every year, almost 31,000 people attempt suicide, and those who have gone through a traumatic event may be more prone to do so. Given this, it is crucial for traumatized individuals to be aware of suicidal thoughts and create coping mechanisms for them. Early identification and treatment of these thoughts can help you stop them from getting worse and eventually help you avoid making a suicide attempt. Try some of these coping mechanisms as soon as you discover you are having more of these ideas. If you haven’t already, these ideas may also be a sign that you should get professional help or work with your therapist to determine and manage your level of safety.

Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering. ~ Peter Levine

7. Seek Professional Help

Many of the aforementioned strategies may be suggested to you when you consult a mental health practitioner. However, counseling or my life coaching services also entails discussing painful experiences in a setting that is secure and encouraging. This can support many people in processing their experiences and developing their future actions.

Creating a network of trustworthy allies to support you during your painful times may also be a part of this process. Even while not everyone needs professional help for their painful memories, it’s still crucial to get assistance when you require it. It might be time to seek professional help if your traumatic memories are negatively affecting your daily life.

As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage. ~ Bessel A. van der Kolk

Overcoming Traumatic Memories

According to the most recent findings in neuroscience, it is possible to rewire the brain such that it no longer associates unpleasant feelings with trauma with positive emotions related to health, fitness, and vitality. They trigger a pleasant mental state in step 1, and you then implanted it in your brain in steps 2, 3, and 4.

Enjoy your experience.

In this step, you realize a good feeling that has been going on in the foreground or background of your awareness. Think of a time when you felt safe and supported, for instance, and recall that event in order to relive that sense of comfort.

Add to it.

Too frequently, you dwell on a terrible event for minutes, and maybe even hours or days, while ignoring the good. Here, you give the wonderful experience more time to sink in. You would accept the feelings of support you have for me. You would visualize your friends and the many supports you have, allowing at least 10 to 20 seconds of happy memories to fill your inner consciousness.

Take it in.

Here, you may see yourself savoring the moment. Imagine the experience being injected into every cell in your body. You can feel it absorbing into your body, assimilating into your brain, and affecting every aspect of who you are.

Join the good and bad.

You want to hold the negative in your mind while it is being infused with the positive rather than letting it overwhelm you. Consider the beauty of the flowers you are planting as an illustration. You become conscious of the weeds and carefully remove them to make way for growth. Anytime you wish, let go of everything that is bad and focus entirely on the good. Then, throughout the following hour, be conscious of only neutral or good items that may have been related to the bad to continue uprooting the negative material.

Emotional connection is crucial to healing. In fact, trauma experts overwhelmingly agree that the best predictor of the impact of any trauma is not the severity of the event, but whether we can seek and take comfort from others. ~ Sue Johnson

Moving Forward Overcoming Traumatic Memories

It is possible to erase the frightened memories from the past by concentrating on the negative and bringing up joyful events. Traumatic memories can still be harmful even if they don’t cause the same level of discomfort as PTSD. Unresolved trauma exacerbates inflammation, erodes the immune system, and strains the heart. Nobody has to endure painful flashbacks from the past. You can heal them.

Maintaining optimism and determination to be committed to your healing requires keeping track of progress and development.  If keeping journals isn’t your thing, confide in a friend, family member, or counselor who can help you remember your general movement and give you an anchor of confidence when the going gets tough.

Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed, but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative. ~ Peter A. Levine

Do you need help to deal with flashbacks? Are you looking for a way to create reframe the events in your life so they are less negative? Do you want to create a life of your dreams? If so, please reach out to me at TerriKozlowski.com and we can create a plan for you to have less stress and more happiness in your life.

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How To Overcome Traumatic Memories To Live A Happy Life

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You can overcome traumatic memories by using these techniques to monitor your thoughts through mindfulness, reframing, and new associations.

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Terri Kozlowski

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Kozmic Soul Solutions LLC

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