When to Encourage Memories to Connect: Complex Trauma and the Problem of Too Much Memory Content

Understanding the Difference Between A Complexly Traumatized Nervous System and a Non-Pervasively Traumatized Nervous System Via the AIP Lens

In the AIP model, the difficult stuff has to connect with right-now existing adaptive information. One of the key things that we appreciate about complex trauma is the large size of the trauma and the typically small amount of adaptive information that the difficult stuff must connect with and metabolize into. Again, back to the boat metaphor. If client’s have adaptive information the size of a canoe, we really need to be careful about what they hook. You can’t land a fish bigger than your boat. Clients that are really healthy, but who have had some trauma have adaptive information the size of a cruise ship (the privilege in

The Field and the Municipal Dump Metaphor

There is another metaphor that I like here related to following memory content or maybe taking a restricted approach to memory content. Imagine a space about the size of large sports stadium. The field of this sports stadium is the entire lifespan of the client up until this point. Almost all of it is clear and open. But even as we survey the field, there are some piles of things. If this is the client’s system that we are working with, we want the client to just walk around the field and pick up things, sort them a little, and put them in a knapsack. We don’t want to micromanage that. The client can walk around, form connections, knapsack the needed things, and everything in that knapsack can be resolved. If we over intervene, we are interfering with the client’s work.

Imagine another stadium and this is the stadium of the complexly traumatized. Except instead of piles of things, it has been used for 46 years as a municipal dump. In fact, old garbage bags, mattresses, food disposal, packaging, are piled so high that the whole inside of the stadium is filled to the highest seats at the very top of the stadium. Now, we’re going to drop the client into the 37th yard line and put them 25 feet down, with a knapsack. Do you see the problem? Everything connects to everything else there. There is the impuse to try to knapsack it all, but there isn’t the means. And this is one of the things that is really unfair about being on the receiving end of other people’s stuff for decades. The mistake we make is that we consistently underestimate how much there is and the client can only carry what the client can carry.

What’s the Problem with Too Much Memory Content Coming In?

They very quickly get outside of their window of tolerance. If you want to have a big window of tolerance, start with having a really good life. Absent that, it’s a lot work. Other podcast episodes cover how the ways that we help clients develop a bigger window of tolerance often ask the client to sit with things that go (or feel like they go) directly against their survival strategies.

Deciding:

First, Time

Two, How are You Doing, Distress-Wise, With the Current Content

Is the Memory Adjacent or Feeder?

Conclusion

Regardless, when you do initial reprocessing, you are going to have information even if that information is clarifying about the narrowness of the client’s window of tolerance.

We can’t move it all at once. We can’t move everything that needs moved right here right now. Clients need to know this. One of the things that really sucks about being someone who is carrying all this stuff that was done to you is that we have to be both the jail to this stuff and the jailer. Memories don’t get paroled when a riot is happening. We have to work intentionally. And we start by starting. One piece, one purposeful and careful step, at a time.