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What You Remember and How You Act

By: Patrick Glancy You, like everyone, have memories that can affect how you feel. You can remember a happy memory and feel a bit of the happy emotion. Just as you can remember a sad memory and feel the sadness.

Our mind stores all of our memories and they're always active, just not in a way our conscious mind is aware of. Because of this, we can constantly be affected by the emotions in our memories. Even memories you don't think you 'remember'.

Memories with traumatic emotions can cause disorders like post-traumatic stress and depression. They can also cause other disruptions in your life like problems with anger, fears, and stress.

While medication is commonly used for these issues, it only attempts to dampen the symptoms rather than treat the cause. The issue rarely goes away with this type of treatment.

The key to long term help with these issues would appear to be the emotional association with the memory. What would happen if that association could be erased, reduced or even changed?

A process is being researched using the medication, propranolol, which works as an "amnesia drug". The theory is to directly disrupt the connection between our memories and the emotions associated with them.

Described in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, they talk about psychiatrists at McGill University and Harvard University using the drug to disrupt the memories of trauma victims. The drug reduces the emotional connection with the memory while leaving the conscious part of the memory.

With this process, people still have the memory, but the emotion is reduced or detached. The potential problems with this process, such as permanence or side effects, are not known.

There are also ways to reduce and change the emotions associated with memories. These processes are well established and have no side-effects.

Specifically hypnosis. Proper hypnosis seems more effective for this process since, when you are in hypnosis, you are using the emotional portion of your mind. This is especially true with memories containing strong emotion from childhood. When experiencing memories from childhood will generally 'feel' the age you were when you created the memory.

When using modern hypnosis to re-experience a traumatic memory, the hypnotist needs to be properly trained for the process to be quick and effective. When these conditions are met, the client can experience the memory with the perspective of adulthood. This alone will often reduce or negate the emotions involved.

Working with issues with these methods are about updating perceptions, and beliefs. Not just in a conscious way, but also in a subconscious, feeling way.