Understanding Learning and Memory III: Understanding Re-enactment

“Bees dance their memories ”

Bees dance their memories. And so do we.  We dance them. We grow up learning the dance steps of relationship and attachment that we experience. We learn the dance steps so fully we don’t recognize them as dance steps, it is just the way we are. It is just the way we understand and see the world. We dance our worldview. We dance how we expect things to go.

Yesterday I talked about how trauma is intertwined with memory. How trauma becomes procedural or process memory. We dance our memories. We do our dance steps and we expect that the others we meet will dance the same steps. When others don’t respond the way we expect we often do our dance steps more pronounced—we try it harder, to get them to follow our lead. We may not like our dance steps, we may even be trying to change our dance steps, but the pull of familiarity is a gravitational pull. The pull of familiarity is illusion of safety, even when it is the furthest thing from it.

The holidays are now behind us, but I had many friends ask, “Why is it that the same things happen every year?” “Why does my __________ (Fill in the blank: uncle, brother, sister, father, mother) stir up the same argument every year?” “Why do I say those things again? Do those things again?

Why do we continue to do the same dance steps and why is this particular form of memory so strong and powerful? Why does it have so much power to inform our decisions? Earlier this week I wrote that all information from our senses gets routed simultaneously through two memory centers in the brain: the amygdala (the fear/fight/flight center) and the hippocampus-cortex (the main memory storage area). The route through the amygdala is the faster route: it is essentially a security check—Is this dangerous? It is a quick and dirty scan. The brain has a high tolerance for false positives. Better to jump away from a stick on the ground than blithely walk over a poisonous snake. The amygdala is where our emotional memory is stored and it is also where our memories of our first two years of life are primarily stored. And it is stored not as a narrative of what happened, because the amygdala doesn't traffic so much in language. Our memories are stored more in the form of choreography. They are stored as dance steps.  So when information comes in, it gets routed through the amygdala, who holds the archives of our dance steps. It is seeking the dangerous, and for trauma survivors-- the familiar, it is readying us for any familiar danger.

When I was doing my training I spent some time creating a mindfulness group on an adolescent inpatient unit. In my first attempts (since I was new at mindfulness at the time) I brought in mindfulness meditation tapes that I had bought to teach myself. I was new at mindfulness and leading this group and thought perhaps the kids would respond better to a professional tape, and it would leave me available to help kids who were struggling. But that isn’t what happened at all. After listening to the tape, the teenagers were angry. They all talked about how the person on the tape wasn’t friendly, how they didn’t like the voice, how they were sure that the person on the tape was judging them or didn’t like them. They all took a benign (or even kind intentioned) voice and only heard what they had ever heard: anger and judgment. They brought their dance steps and could only imagine the dance steps they knew.

But sometimes, especially with trauma, we don’t just dance our dance steps because they are familiar. We dance so that we can change the outcome. We dance the old dance hoping desperately, if unconsciously, for a different ending. The psychological term for dancing the old dance in a new situation is re-enactment. I have worked with many teenagers who grew up terrified from an abusive childhood, and then spent most of their teen years putting themselves in terrifying situations. They wished so badly to be rescued from the terror when they were young, but it didn’t happen. And so now as a teenager they were trying again. They were dancing with terror hoping that maybe this time they could change the outcome. Maybe this time they would get the rescue and love they didn’t get.

The pull to re-enactment is primal. It is powerful, and in a backwards way I have always viewed it as a sign of hope. There is something in the human psyche that wants to grow. That wants to heal. That wants to be whole. And this desire to get it right this time is a sign of hope. Hope for what couldn’t happen, hope that it someday might.

The problem is that reenactment alone usually doesn’t heal. In fact, it often re-traumatizes. Partly because we are all pretty good at finding similar scenarios to re-create the triggers of the old trauma responses, and partly because you can’t actually fix the past by reworking the exact ending. It is a little like missing lunch last Thursday and trying to eat today for it. It’s over. All you can do is acknowledge the loss of the meal from last Thursday, but you can’t change it today.

What does heal is being able to see the reenactment for what it is. What does heal is having another dance partner—someone in the healing profession—who can help you with your old dance steps—who can translate the memories you are dancing—and who knows that this is what the work is. Someone who knows that you are telling your story through dance steps as much as through what you remember. Someone who has the ability to both join the dance enough to understand it, and yet be able to step away and not get caught in it-- so that you can see yourself dancing. Can see that the dance steps don't belong to the present.

When the teens in my mindfulness groups were talking about their assumptions of the person on the tape they were telling me, with their dance steps, what their experience was in relationships. In order to learn new dance steps they had to be able to check their assumptions about the voice they heard. Become aware of their dance steps. This meant that I had to learn how to lead the meditation groups myself so that the voice they were listening to could be mistrusted at first (their old dance step) and then survive their mistrust so they could experience a different and new dance step. Yes, bees dance their memories, and so do we. And with a lot of hard work we can transform that dance. And dance our way into new memories. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

Learn more about the ways bees talk here.

Understanding Learning and Memory II: Trauma and memory are intertwined.

door.jpg

Repeated trauma and memory are intertwined. To understand the journey to healing from repeated trauma is to understand, appreciate the brain’s system of trying to sort it all out and survive. Yesterday I focused on the way memory is formed: either through urgency, repetition, or association. And today I want to talk about the type of memory—because there are different sorts which I alluded to yesterday and in a previous post about traumatic memory. There are essentially memories of content (which are also called declarative memories or explicit memories) and there are memories of process (which are also called procedural memories or implicit memories).

Content, declarative, explicit memories: these are what we all actually think of when we think of memory. When you ask someone: tell me what happened at the meeting last week—you are asking a question of the declarative sort—you want information, you want a narrative. When you reminisce about what you did on your honeymoon, or what you did in high school—you are pulling on memories that have a who-what-when-where. Information that can be categorized.

Process memory is a memory driven more by the senses—by feel (action/movement), emotion, spatial recognition, sequence, tone. When you learn to ride a bike—there is information that guides you (keep your hands on the handlebars, keep pedaling) but the motion of your feet and the feeling of balance is an implicit memory. Implicit memories are difficult to describe. When someone asks you ‘how do you do that?’ when you swing a golf club, or tie a knot in your shoe laces—you have to really think about the sequence. You ‘know’ how to do it—but you don’t know how you know.

If you have ever lived in an old house where there is a door that is too low you will recognize the learning that happens when you wack your head on the doorframe, and how you subsequently duck as you head to that door. You don’t need to think about it, you automatically do it, even in the dark when there is no visual cue for the door. You body just knows when it is near the door and ducks instinctively. And if there is more than one door in your house that is of an uneven height, you might begin to duck, even just slightly, at all doors—just to be efficient and be sure. This is procedural memory.

And trauma becomes part of our procedural memory. If we learned that being in relationships was dangerous, that we would, metaphorically speaking, wack our head on the doorframe, then we “duck” when we are near people who we associate with that feeling. We don’t think about it, we just duck. I think of procedural memories as blueprints or mental scaffolding. Our brains are so efficient. They experience the world and then make a plan of it so they can anticipate as much as possible. The key is that they make this blueprint or scaffolding from the memories that are the most well-worn. We work most off of over-learned memories—and as we saw yesterday- urgency and repetition make memories the strongest. And when you combine those two things with repeated trauma you get some seriously intense learning.

But the key to understanding repeated trauma is that the learning is not so much: this is exactly what happened when. It is more: I instinctively know when to duck. And I do it whenever I perceive myself to be in a similar situation. Procedural learning is often generalized learning. I don’t need to know how to ride each specific bike, or drive every specific car because I know the important things to look for and how to work them. And we do this with learning, with relationships, with how we approach things, or avoid things.

And with trauma we are even more likely to generalize the learning, the fear, because strong emotions and fear make us more likely to generalize and more likely to hold on to this learning. They recently did a study of mice where they trained them to fear one tone with something frightening, like a foot-shock and paired a different tone with a something neutral like a color. These tones were far away from each other on the auditory scale. And when the foot-shock wasn’t that stressful the mice distinguished between the two tones. But when they increased the stress and fear of the mice from the foot-shocks—in other words, increased their trauma, they stopped distinguishing between the two tones and basically jumped at any sound. They ducked at any door. This is what brains do when they get stressed repeatedly.

This is why when I teach graduate students about becoming a therapist I try to explain that lots of people coming in for help, especially with trauma histories,  aren’t going to experience therapy as helpful—not at first, and often not for a long time. Their blueprint for relationship has them imagining that they are going to hit their heads on the door—so they duck. And they don’t trust any other way of being for a long time. So repetition becomes a powerful instructor to revise the old patterns and old associations. As helpers we believe that our clients should know that we are different than any of the people who have hurt them in the past, but that’s not how brains work. They generalize. People hurt me. People are dangerous. You are a person. You are dangerous. And it takes both unlearning and new learning to shift this. Lots and lots of repetition of this. And as clients we can get frustrated too—we know logically that the person trying to help us is different, but we are stuck in our patterns—and no matter how hard we try to hold our head up through the door, we find ourselves ducking. For a while we only have our dance steps that we brought with us and have learned so well.

Tomorrow we will look at those dance steps and how to understand them better so that we can have more patience with the process of healing.

Resources for trauma and memory: Article: Memory from traumatic experiences in early childhood.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 201

Understanding Learning and Memory: The Neuroscience of Repetition

“Lather, rinse, repeat...”
— Instructions on every shampoo bottle

How do we learn things? How can we make change? If we have done it once, why do we find ourselves falling back on old habits? Maybe the first thing to understand is how our brain creates memory. It is important to understand the basics of memory in order to understand learning and change. It is also important to understand the basics of memory in order to better understand traumatic memory. And I want you to understand how the brain makes memories so you can understand why practice and repetition are so important.

In today’s blog I will simply start with the idea that information comes in through our senses—our ears, eyes, skin, nose, or tastebuds. And this information gets routed either through the low road —the amygdala (our emergency fight-flight/emotional memory storage center), or the high road—the hippocampus-cortex (our memory storage center.) And once information comes in, it needs to get encoded—and by that I mean, it needs to be ‘written’ in a language the brain understands so it can be stored and remembered.

Here we make a distinction between short term memory and long term memory. Short term or what is also called ‘working’ memory is the holding area where information stays when it first comes in: someone tells us their phone number and we repeat it back keeping it in working memory- it’s like a whiteboard you scribble on in your brain for your incoming information. Short term memory lasts minutes. When short-term memory makes the shift to long term memory-- long term memory can lasts day, weeks, years or forever. How does information move from short term memory to long term memory?

There are only three ways that information can move from short-term memory to long term memory: urgency, repetition, or association. Urgency, with the release of stress hormones, creates a powerful wash of chemicals that strengthens the connection between neurons or synapses. And, urgency also determines how and where the brain encodes the information into long term memory. Urgency can create a very long lasting memory—after a single exposure to a threat, the amygdala can retain that memory for an entire lifespan. However, the encoding or labeling of the event—the ability to recall or retrieve the memory can be more troublesome, and not under conscious control—so that the information gets stored with an emotional, rather than a narrative marker. I can pass by where I had my car accident and get anxious, even if I don’t have a conscious memory of the event.

Repetition is the most familiar learning tool --everyone has memorized facts or vocabulary words by repeating them, and some have improved basketball free-throw shooting or playing piano scales through practice. Repetition creates long term memory by eliciting or enacting strong chemical interactions at the synapse of your neuron (where neurons connect to other neurons). Repetition creates the strongest learning—and most learning—both implicit (like tying your shoes) and explicit (multiplication tables) relies on repetition. It is also why it is so hard to make behavior change, because the new behavior must be repeated for so long—and the old behavior must be held in check.

Association is the ability for a piece of information to tap into a neural connection that already exists. It’s the equivalent of already having a file folder for the new learning to go in to. For example, if I read a list of ten numbers out loud and asked you to remember them and say them back to me--- typically you would find this a difficult task. But if the ten numbers also happened to be your phone number then the task would be easy, and if I asked you a year later what the numbers were, you would still be able to give them to me because they were already part of a previous neural connection.

All three of these methods affect the neuron or synapse level in similar ways for long term memory. The stimulation from urgency, repetition or association will actually create new proteins inside your neuron-- at the level of the synapse a self-perpetuating protein is created which keeps the connection going between neurons. This is a long lasting self-perpetuating protein, and it gets strengthened with repetition. In addition to this self-perpetuating cycle, the neuron, through the protein process also creates a new synaptic terminal growth—to increase the connection—it adds another branch on its tree to strengthen and increase the network.  So repetition actually grows the brain’s neural network.

So with rare exception repetition is the only real option for learning, unlearning, and re-learning—and yet as adults we so often believe that we can and must learn everything fast. Everything is supposed to be 3 easy steps, or maybe 5, but not 100. We are designed to learn through practice. Can you imagine how hokey it would sound to say, “Play the cello just like Yo-Yo Ma in 3 easy steps!” It would be absurd. Elite musicians spend 15-15 years of practice to become the artists that they are. And depending upon what you are trying to learn, trying to heal, trying to unlearn or re-learn it can take a long time too. It’s okay. It’s the way we were designed to learn. And our own internal symphonies are worth the practice and time and care. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

 

 

We are.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr, Letters from Birmingham Jail

We are Charlie. We are the NAACP. We are Newtown. We are Trayvon. We are Boston. We are Virginia Tech. We remember. We can’t breathe. It feels like we barely get a break from one heartbreak in the world and the next arrives. How do we hold it? How do we hold each other? How do we remember that we are a we?

This past week there was an internet, and mostly Facebook phenomenon of Photo Doggies for Anthony where over 900,000 people (myself included, it was impossible to resist) sent in pictures of their dog to a 16 year old boy who was getting chemotherapy treatment. It just went viral. Everyone so easily, and immediately sent a picture of their dog to this page with the most lovely notes of well wishes. It was a mighty storm of kindness. And I wish we could figure out how to do that more. And by that I don’t necessarily mean doggy Facebook pages, but how can we create mighty waves of kindness? How can we create these storms of love so we could use them for healing and for change? How can we rally around the hurt parts of our world the way we rallied around Anthony? There wasn’t a worry that other people from different political parties or religions or countries were sending in dog pictures. We could be a we. And we need so much more of that.

History is full of heartbreak. We are Auchschwitz. We are the Killing Fields. We are the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. We are Wounded Knee. We are Montgomery. Violence, terrorism, evil—they have a playbook that has been used for a long time. And it is so hard to know how to stop it.  It seems that increased attacks, or violence is the only way. Yet, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said,

“Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn’t murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate. It is always a descending spiral leading nowhere. This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multiplies evil and violence in the universe. It doesn’t solve any problems.”

But what does solve the problems? It feels like the violent and the cruel have a playbook handed down over centuries. Where is the playbook for peace? Where is the playbook for change in the face of heartbreak and evil?

In reading Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch, I felt like I finally came across a playbook for change. The actions of the civil rights leaders in the 50’s and 60’s came as close as we may ever get in some very fundamental structures that they used to create a mighty wave of kindness for each other to hold each other as they sought change. They knew something about the we that we have all forgotten. Martin Luther King’s premise was that we were all a we, even as it was not yet a lived experience, even as there were forces working against that, powerful forces. He started with that premise as an aspiration and he worked toward it. He never let go of the we.

The movement would not have been what it was without the churches and the mass meetings that were held nearly nightly during the most difficult parts of the struggle. That was a structure of we. And the civil rights leaders worked really hard to collaborate and listen and flex with the work as it grew. They struggled and they were imperfect, but they were open to making sure the we could expand.

In a study of why young people join terrorism groups, it wasn’t because they already had strong beliefs about something or their religious fervor. It was actually because they were seeking something to believe in, they were seeking meaning, they were seeking a stronger identity. The same was true when they researched suicide bombers. It wasn’t religious fervor; it was a range of motivations more connected to finding meaning in dire situations. And there has been similar research about why young people join gangs.

Finding meaning isn’t easy. Finding meaning in something means being able to see outside yourself, see the bigger picture, believe in something bigger than yourself. Finding meaning means hard work. But finding meaning rarely happens by yourself. When people are seeking meaning they are also seeking connection and so the question is, ‘how can we all work to create better moments of connection?’ How can we strengthen a ‘we’ that is bigger—how can we see the ‘we’ when tragedy isn’t currently befalling us?

I heard a wonderful story of elders in an Alaskan village who helped combat suicide within their youth. They did it by saying that their youth were their responsibility, that they were a ‘we.’ They decided that no youth should walk to and from school alone. They decided that they would look out of their windows and if they saw a youth alone, they would walk with them to school or walk them home. The suicide rate in the village plummeted. When they were a we, the elders and youth had meaning. And meaning meant life, meaning meant health.

Every act of violence has different roots and different motivations. There is no one answer to these tragedies. But we do know that individual acts of courage, and collective acts of courage have been what has changed the world—whether walking a child home, collectively praying for change, or peacefully protesting injustice. We need to work on our we, because, We are, and we need we.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015