Memory And Memory Of A Traumatic Occasion

A traumatic event occurs when a person is in a situation where there is a risk of harm or danger to themselves or other people. Situations like this are usually frightening or cause a lot of stress. In such situations, people feel helpless. We all cope with these traumas in different ways, in the protagonist’s case, he writes about it. Tim O’Brien expresses a candid tone in the passage corresponding to Lavender’s death from fictional novel, The Things They Carried using specific rhetorical strategies in order to create a relatable dilemma with how often times horrific stories are unintentionally skewed.

Another traumatic event

In Susan Farrell, the author of “Just Listen”: Witnessing Trauma in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, mentioned “...all theorists agree that the process of recovery from trauma must involve a narrativization of traumatic event--putting a sensory images into words in order to integrate trauma into a person 's life story” (186). However, without reading Cathy Caruth’s Trauma, readers will not understand that not only integrating trauma into a narrative will help them recover but it also allows the witness apprehend their flashbacks into meaning. Flashbacks, although are taunting, has the most vivid images compared to narrated memories. For one to remember a highlight or a significant moment, one must preserve it as a flashback. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien convert his flashbacks into narrative memories allowing himself and readers to comprehend his experiences, but O’Brien also added flashbacks into his memories create the most graphic images for the readers.

Post-traumatic amnesia is confusion or memory loss that occurs immediately following a traumatic brain injury. The person that was injured is usually disoriented and is unable to remember the events that occur after the injury like their name, where they are, and the time. They may experience retrograde amnesia (loss of memories that were formed before the injury) and retrograde amnesia (problems with creating new memories). They may regain their memory. When they experience anterograde amnesia they memories are never regained because they were not encoded completely. Memories from just before the trauma are often gone forever, due to repression, also because the memories may be incompletely encoded, if the injury interrupts the encoding

Anybody can experience trauma, whether it’s a man, a woman, or even a child. In fact, over half of the population is expected to experience trauma at least once in their lifetimes. However, everyone will respond to trauma in their own, unique, way, making it difficult to properly equip people with the tools needed to heal from trauma in the event they experience it. Whereas the responses a person and his or her body will have in the event of heart attack have been narrowed down to a small list, and can easily be conveyed to the public through general guidelines or PSAs, the responses a person will have to trauma can range anywhere from shrugging it off to suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is why the role of mental health professionals, such as therapists, is crucial in regards to helping sufferers of trauma. These professionals are specially trained to be capable of identifying and understanding the responses a person is having to a traumatic experience, as well as the optimal ways to go about the healing process. In Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, specifically the chapter titled “Immune to Reality,” he analyzes what he calls the psychological immune system, a defence mechanism of the psyche which plays a prominent role in how a person will respond in the event of trauma. While Gilbert outlines the mechanisms that cause people to respond to trauma in the way that they do, Dana Becker, author of One Nation Under Stress, looks at the actual

On the morning of September 11, 2001, exactly at 9:22 a.m., I woke up to start my day and turned my television on. Instantly, Fox News had reported that a commercial plane had smashed into the Twin Towers of New York City, just minutes earlier. While the story was certainly shocking, I wanted to know more and watched the horrific aftermath unfold, as it continued to happen. I remember an incredible feeling of sadness that I could do nothing to help the people in these buildings, as well as a great concern that more attempts could be made to create further tragedy elsewhere.

As Ehlers and Clark the authors of the article point out, one of the PTSD syndromes the patients share is the constant pessimistic and inferior attitude and the predicament of appreciation for positivity, yet they provide no method to solve sadness, fear, guilt and shame resulted from that attitude. However, one case provided in the article, that a bus driver recovered from PTSD after being noticed that the death of an old man was not predominately caused by him but by the old man’s suicidal attempt presents an idea that by adjusting the patient’s memory, the patient could be less sensitive to the trauma. Providing the patients with reasonable alternative memories which have the ability to relieve the patient’s stress and desensitize the incident

Some personally experienced traumatic events are physical or sexual assault, natural or manmade disasters, physical or mental torture, or being diagnosed with a life threatening disease. With children it involves physical or sexual abuse. In addition, some traumatic events personally viewed are the serious physical injury or violent death of another person, whether caused by war, disaster, accident, or physical assault; or the unexpected sight of a body part or a deceased person. Further, some of the traumatic events a person hears or reads about are a sudden or violent death, a severe injury, or the physical attack of a relative or someone close (APA, 2000, pp.463-464).

For a very long time, it has been recognized that stressful life can have an emotional as well as a behavioral effect in a human being. Studies show that 60% of men, 50% of females as well as 90% of the population go through a stressful event in their lives that is life changing or they tend never to forget ever (Marsh, 2014). It is however true to say that not all of the people in this percentage will eventually fall into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When an individual is involved or encounters an event that is considered as traumatic, it is very common to experience distressing, upsetting, as well as confusing feelings in the near future after the event. The worst part is that these feelings may not emerge or surface immediately, the first thing that you actually go through is emotional numbness where nothing gets to you emotionally, thus the shift in your behavior will follow. After a while, a drastic shift in physical and emotional reactions is experienced in cases such as one being easily upset or simply not being able to get any sleep at all.

Individuals can develop emotional, psychological and physical distress and injuries that result from experiencing a traumatic event. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can afflict individuals that have undergone severe traumatic stressors. PTSD is a disorder in which the memory of the traumatic event comes to dominate the victims’ consciousness, diminishing their lives of true meaning and pleasure (Van der Kolk, 2000). Trauma not only impacts an individual’s mind, but it can also significantly modify the way the brain processes future information (Swenson, 2012). For those with PTSD do not have a clear memory of the traumatic event they experienced. The traumatic memories lack the ability to recall the traumatic memory verbally. These memoirs can be displayed in flash back, bodily sensations, feelings, behaviors, and physiological reactions. PTSD symptoms include instructive recollections, avoidance of reminders or triggers, and a higher level of being in an aroused state.

Alhough individuals respond differently to traumatic incidents, going through a traumatic event where a death or mutiple deaths occur, can result in guilt and symptoms that are detrimental to the individual. Though many individuals experiences to traumatic incidents

A traumatic experience influences the entire person – how they think, how they learn, how they remember things, the way they feel about themselves, the way they feel about other people, and the way they perceive the world, are all profoundly altered by the traumatic experience (Bloom, 1999). Constructivist Self Development Theory (Pearlman & Saakvitne, 2000) can explain both the negative changes that occur in the aftermath of a traumatic event, as well as the positive changes which occur as a result of adaptation and meaning making. It is difficult to measure the complexities of an individual's response to a traumatic event. How an individual responds to trauma is sadly often embedded in socio-cultural contexts, often with political and moral

However, unlike these conventional PTSD treatments, based on current psychological understanding of PTSD and how memory functions, new researches have shown that it may be viable and a more effective way to treat PTSD through erasing traumatic memory – the memory that causes an individual to develop PTSD. Therefore, this paper will explore the question: “To what extent can new researches in erasing traumatic memory be applied to more effectively treat PTSD?” by utilizing various experiments, studies,

If we had an option to wipe out our memory, would we choose to forget about the events that involved actual or threatened death, serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of ourselves or others? For soldiers, it may be losing a close comrade in a war. For me or any other ordinary individuals, they may be natural or human-made disasters, violent personal attack, torture or even sexually abuse(Parekh). The truth is, we don’t want to be reminded of any of these terrible events that took away a small portion of our lives.

Van der Kolk (1987) notes that human responses to trauma are relatively constant across various types of traumatic stimuli, where individuals have poor tolerance to arousal stimuli and may experience social and emotional withdrawal. These changes in the body’s arousal and perception prevent the continuance of “normal” life, and require help.