TRAUMA AND PROGRAMMED SHAME

I have looked in several posts at some typical trauma behavioural and physiological responses, such as a weak lungs, risk-taking behaviours, reoccurring flash-backs or difficulty sleeping, or survival profiles such as those of the fight, flight, or freeze response, but below I want to extend our attention to something core to trauma: memory. This is particularly important because at the core of shame is memory workings, and shame is a foundational experience of trauma, and very much a source of disregulation and PTSD. 

The illustration here below shows how trauma affects four types of memories broadly organised into explicit and implicit memories. We are going to look at this because a broken memory system has various health ramifications we are better to understand even superficially.

So Explicit memories are what we normally refer to when we think of memory, like being able to recall that we have an appointment with so and so guy or girl, or a shopping list we need to execute next time we go to the local bio-store. These are Explicit Declarative memories, they are completely conscious and have no emotional content, and are illustrated in the graphic above by the Semantic memory system on the left. 

Then there are other Explicit memories that are a bit deeper than the Declarative ones, and they are called Episodic memories because they retain a thicker layer of facts, facts about the atmosphere, the light, the mood you were in. They are your typical vignette like memories of your past, your childhood, your adolescence, your first romantic relationship. When overwhelmed by an event these systems fail to produce coherent imagery, leaving in us a blank or void, or a dream like memory of the event. While this may sound, and is, temporarily useful to the brain, not being able to recall the actual event is problematic in the long term, the primary reason being that a memory blank is a piece of the puzzle we cannot find, an important page of a book we cannot read, a character of the story we cannot identify, and it breaks the narrative and leaves us in a state of incoherence, an ungrounded sense of self. 

And it would be great if this was all, but it is not, trauma carries its signature at even deeper layers of the brain.

Below these Episodic memories are Procedural memories. Procedural memories are like reflexes, so they are implicit, because they are automatic physical responses that you get to different situations without the involvement of your thinking brain, like when you see someone coming towards you in an aggressive manner and your shoulders tense up instinctively, or when you tie up your laces, or walk to school, or drive without really thinking anymore about what you are doing with your hands and feet. You can think of them like a computer program that executes itself when you press the icon on your screen. These memories carry an emotional signature component, like fear and anger for signs of aggression for instance, or excitement for driving, or contentment for being able to tie up your shoe laces without getting your fingers tangled up. So implicit procedural memories have triggering emotions attached to them and when we push those emotional buttons a whole procedural program gets activated.

As adults we carry forward the programs we received in our critical stages of development for dealing with basic emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, joy, or disgust. Of course these so called programs were not built in one day, they are, in reality, the summary of quite an array of experiences. Shame and guilt are examples of these procedural memories. With both shame and guilt we are instructed to internalise responsibility for the wrong doing we witness or experience, so a whole set of behaviours, body postures and verbal cues accompany the shame or guilt program response that gets activated whenever certain environmental conditions are met.

And one of the reason why this is important is that shame is a basic response found in all traumas, almost always unconscious. As difficult to believe as it may sound, as receivers of abuse for instance, we are instructed to feel guilty or shameful for feeling the healthy physiological response of fear or anger towards the abuser. Displays of fear or anger, which would often lead to the abuser being exposed to others, are often kept at bay by explicit menaces on behalf of the abuser. We therefore become afraid of feeling afraid, and disgusted by our own healthy anger. 

It is not social conditioning alone though, as our systems are primed, as we have seen, to feel responsible for environmental failures. If my experience of abuse is worth anything, I'd conclude without a shadow of a doubt that the abuser is exploiting, consciously or not, this natural inclination of the child.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko