A client put this question to me in our last session. It is a question that arises very naturally in the course of psychotherapy: as it goes on, we begin to understand more and more, to connect events, to explain patterns and to build meaning. And yet, at some point, many people arrive at a kind of inner impasse. “If I can see and understand all these things that affected and shaped me, why does nothing change?”
The answer lies in a seemingly simple but essentially deep truth: understanding and change are two different processes.
Understanding trauma relies mainly on what neuroscientists call declarative memory — a form of memory connected with language, logic and narrative. It is what allows us to say “my father was strict with me and did not value me”. Traumatic memories, however, are stored mainly in another kind of memory called implicit (or bodily) memory, a more primitive and pre-verbal form (preceding the acquisition of language) of recording our experiences. There, brain structures such as the amygdala record emotions and bodily reactions connected with our survival.
The fear and constant readiness I might have felt with a strict father are the experiential counterpart of that particular relational experience which I recall as a memory. This kind of memory begins as early as the prenatal period. We know, for example, that newborns recognise their mother’s voice and the smell of amniotic fluid, which means that foetal experience leaves a trace — without, of course, any conscious understanding. This is a primitive form of implicit, bodily memory.
At the same time, the brain structures that support the more conscious form of memory — the one that makes us able to narrate our experiences — mature much later (mainly between the ages of two and three) compared with the structures supporting implicit or bodily memory, which are functional from birth. This also explains what is called infantile amnesia. So we may not remember the first years of our lives well enough to narrate them in words, but we can perceive a bodily-emotional imprint of our early experiences in the way our body reacts, in how we perceive safety or threat.
In this way we can understand that there is a great emotional and experiential difference between knowing that I am safe and feeling safe. As infants we may not remember that someone always came when we cried, but as adults we carry an expectation of how available others will be when we need them, or how far they perceive or ignore our needs. This can be the relational imprint of early experiences — a form of implicit, bodily memory.
Contemporary research in the neuroscience of memory shows us something very important: in order for a traumatic memory to be modified, understanding it cognitively is not enough. The old feeling (of fear, shame or helplessness) needs to be activated and at the same time accompanied by a new and different experience. Every time a traumatic memory is recalled, it becomes temporarily malleable. At that point there is a window of change in which, if a new and different experience is introduced, the memory can be modified and stored again with different content (Lane et al., 2015). This does not mean erasing the past, but changing its emotional imprint. In simple terms, trauma does not change through information and analysis but through lived corrective experience. The brain rewrites what it knows about the world and about itself not when it hears an explanation, but when it lives an experience different from the past.
Many traumas have their roots in early relationships — where there was terror, helplessness or impasse. These relational experiences do not stay in the past: they tend to be reproduced in the present, especially in close relationships.
In a recent session we stayed with how a phone call from an authority figure was enough to activate, some fifteen years later, the same lump in the throat this person had felt as a child — when a corresponding authority figure shouted and was abusive, with no possibility of responding. The body was activated automatically, before any conscious retrieval from memory of what had been experienced as a child. The lump in the throat was not accidental. It was the bodily memory of a past traumatic experience that could not be expressed. It was the words that could not be said safely — the choking of an injustice and a pain that found no outlet. Very often, the place where the body chooses to create a symptom has a deep connection with its psychological meaning.
In the session we explored the elements that were different in the present compared with back then: the different way people in this person’s environment responded, the adult choices now available, and — above all — the ability for the pain to be expressed rather than remain internalised. This was the corrective experience: the same activation, but in a different context, where expression, recognition and response were possible.
It is no accident that lived corrective experience often happens within the therapeutic relationship. Therapy offers a safe field in which old relational patterns appear and can be met differently — not only analysed, but lived otherwise.
A therapist who responds differently from what the client expects — who does not criticise where criticism is expected, or who stays present where rejection and abandonment are expected — offers something essential: a new experience of relationship that does not confirm the old relational patterns. This is what relational psychotherapy calls the corrective relational experience; and according to the research of Lane and colleagues, it is precisely this combination — activation of the old memory together with a new lived experience — that creates a window of change in the brain.
This holds outside therapy too. Every time someone dares to trust where the past said “don’t trust”, every time they express a need where they learned to stay silent, every time they receive a response instead of rejection — the nervous system slowly revises what it believed it knew.
We know that the brain changes through experience, not through explanation. What seems to move us substantially is a combination of understanding, emotional experience, and a new choice in relation to ourselves and others.
What we live in the first years of our lives, before we even have words to describe it, is recorded in the body, in our relational templates, in what feels safe or dangerous to us. These are what become the object of exploration and working through in psychotherapy — moving from the position of the child who had no other choice, to the position of the adult who can protect themselves, express themselves and choose consciously.
So how far do we allow ourselves to live a new way — a way that once seemed impossible to bear?
References:
Lane, R. D., Ryan, L., Nadel, L., & Greenberg, L. (2015). Memory reconsolidation, emotional arousal, and the process of change in psychotherapy: New insights from brain science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e1. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000041
