In Trauma and Memory, bestselling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of
the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and
controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our
memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and
not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make
sense of past experience. Building on his 45 years of successful
treatment of trauma and utilizing case studies from his own practice,
Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps.
While acknowledging that memory can be trusted, he argues that the only
truly useful memories are those that might initially seem to be the
least reliable: memories stored in the body and not necessarily
accessible by our conscious mind.
While much work has been done in the field of trauma studies to address
"explicit" traumatic memories in the brain (such as intrusive thoughts
or flashbacks), much less attention has been paid to how the body itself
stores "implicit" memory, and how much of what we think of as "memory"
actually comes to us through our (often unconsciously accessed) felt
sense. By learning how to better understand this complex interplay of
past and present, brain and body, we can adjust our relationship to past
trauma and move into a more balanced, relaxed state of being. Written
for trauma sufferers as well as mental health care practitioners,
Trauma and Memory is a groundbreaking look at how memory is
constructed and how influential memories are on our present state of
being.
