Healing Trauma: To Forget or to Remember?

The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth. — Alice Miller

There are two main approaches to healing psychological and emotional trauma.

Forgetting

The first approach to trauma is “forgetting” it. Fundamentally, this means denying and ignoring the cause of your inner pain and the root of your fundamental problems. This is something that is frequently advocated by most people, including many professional helpers like psychotherapists, coaches, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, counselors, and so on.

Since trauma and its consequences are complex and complicated, most people don’t want to examine it. It’s understandable because it can be incredibly painful. So, in order to deal with their inner pain, people look for quick and easy solutions. Solutions that don’t really exist.

Moreover, many professionals are neither trauma-informed nor resolved themselves, so they are unwilling or unable to actually help their clients resolve their deeply rooted psychological and emotional problems. However, the pain is still there because the initial trauma is still unaddressed. So, to cope with it, people try to forget it or convince themselves—and others—that it’s not really there, that it didn’t happen, that it wasn’t’ so bad, and that they should just forget it. Forgetting, however, is not really possible.

It’s as possible to ignore deep psychoemotional trauma as it is possible to ignore that you’re bleeding after being stabbed. You can pretend that everything is okay, but you can’t make the pain, damage, and the consequences go away.

Furthermore, the unresolved trauma that we carry around is transferred to the next generation, which is sometimes referred to intergenerational trauma or the cycle of abuse. It means that, even if we are unaware of our trauma, we act it out regardless, especially in our relationship with our own children.

Remembering

The second approach to trauma is remembering it and trying to resolve it.

As Alice Miller puts it:

The sole explanation I can advance for this fact is that information on the cruelty suffered in childhood remains stored in the brain in the form of unconscious memories. For a child, conscious experience of such treatment is impossible. If children are not to break down completely under the pain and the fear, they must repress that knowledge. But the unconscious memories drive them to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over again in the vain attempt to liberate themselves from the fears that cruelty and abuse have left with them. Some victims create situations in which they can assume the active role in order to master the feeling of helplessness and escape the unconscious anxieties.

Since we can’t escape or truly forget our trauma, the only way to deal with it is to face it. By acknowledging it, we can make it visible. By making it visible, we can make it understandable, which provides clarity to us. By making it understandable, we can make it bearable, which empowers us. By making it bearable, we can feel more safety and security, which makes us feel less emotionally overwhelmed. By learning to deal with our painful and overwhelming emotions better, we act out less, have more awareness, and make better decisions.

Bottom Line

Trauma leaves us with complex inner wounds that haunt us long into adulthood and manifest themselves in various psychological, emotional, social, and behavioral problems. Many people, including mental health professionals, encourage and prescribe “solutions” that lead to more denial and dissociation, which leaves the person with poor or even harmful options for dealing with their inner pain that stems from their unresolved trauma.

There are no quick or easy solutions to complex psychoemotional issues. The only way to actually resolve it is to eventually face it and work on it. It takes a lot of time, effort, and other resources, but the result is invaluable.

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