What You Remember and How You Act

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.

There is obviously a close connection between our emotions and memories. Almost as if the emotion is part of the memory. Our memories are always in our minds so it makes sense that the emotions in our memories can constantly have an effect on how we feel.

The strong emotion associated with memories can cause disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The emotions can also cause more normal life problems, such as anger, stress, sadness, or fear.

The most popular way to deal with these sorts of problems is prescription medication. But, medication only tries to help the ’symptoms’ instead of treating the ’cause’. Long term results are usually just long term symptom management.

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?

There is research using a medication called propranolol that can be used as an “amnesia drug”. The purpose is to directly disrupt the connection between our memories and the emotions they are associated with.

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.

This resulted in people that can remember the memory, but have a sense of detachment or dissociation from the event. The permanence of this process and potential side effects are not yet known.

It all seems a little too sci-fi to me, when there are more reliable, established, and safer methods available.

In particular, hypnosis. Hypnosis seems better suited for this process since, when in hypnosis, you are using the emotional part of your mind. This is very evident when working with traumatic memories from childhood. When re-experiencing memories from childhood a person often ‘feels’ younger than their current age. You tend to experience memories with the same age of mind that you originally experienced the situation.

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.

This process is essentially about gaining perspective on the experience and the client’s part in the experience. This process will often create a sense of distance and separation from the memory. A memory, minus the negative emotions.