Disconnecting Explicit and Implicit Memories Creates Emotional Trauma

Since 2007, L. Jay Mitchell has guided the West Virginia-based therapeutic boarding school Greenbrier Academy for Girls as its founder and owner. Among L. Jay Mitchell’s areas of knowledge in this field is emotional trauma and its causal mechanisms, the processes that produce specific outcomes. His theories on this subject include how disturbances to the hippocampus and memory association can cause emotional trauma.

Although emotional trauma has connections to psychological conditions such as anxiety, depression, isolation, and addiction, its causations are distinctive. One mechanism that creates it involves disconnections between the two types of memories: explicit and implicit.

Explicit memories are tied to the workings of the hippocampus and encompass conscious memories that can be ordered chronologically, which provides narrative meaning and enables a person to see connections between life events. Aspects of these events can be recalled without also reliving sensations and emotions associated with it. Those sensations and feelings make up implicit memories, consisting of emotions, perceptions, bodily sensations, behaviors, mental models, and priming. Unlike explicit memories, they are not consciously retrievable and seem to arrive randomly, with triggers beyond a person’s understanding.

A healthy mind can make associations between explicit and implicit memories, allowing for context and rationale. However, people with emotional trauma might experience a severance of the memory types. Feelings of depression or anxiety might appear for no apparent reason. Separation of implicit and explicit memories is a product of intense stress levels that generate excessive stress hormones and disrupt the functions of the hippocampus. Emotional trauma is often a result.

The objective of therapeutic treatment is to reconnect the parts of the distinct memory systems that became disengaged. By restoring links between explicit and implicit memories, people who have experienced trauma can take the first steps toward becoming emotionally whole again.